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Student Showcase Archive

Amanda Masha Caminals

MA work

MA work

  • Black Spring

    Black Spring, Awami Art Collective 2015/2016
    Installation
    Photographer: Awami Art Collective

  • A project for people I don't know

    A project for people I don't know, Paula Nishijima 2015/2016
    Happening
    Photographer: Paula Nishijima

  • Chora

    Chora, Emma Smith 2016
    Happening
    Photographer: Emma Smith

PROJECT_16

PROJECT_16 began at the beginning of 2015 with a simple question: ‘How would you like art to engage with your city in 2016?’. Comprised of three site-specific projects in the streets of Lahore, São Paulo and London, PROJECT_16 collaborated with artists engaged with participatory practices to reflect on questions of public space and its audiences.

Emerging artist Paula Nishijima (São Paulo), Emma Smith (London) and the recently created Awami Art Collective (Lahore) propose A project for people I don’t know, Chora and Black Spring respectively, in which they directly engage audiences of their cities to discuss art, their locality and the state of the world. 

Black Spring is an installation of a 2000m long web of lights across the rooftops of the Walled City of the historic centre of Lahore, Pakistan. The film shown here documents the relationship created by members of the Awami Art Collective with the local residents who actively participated in the making of the work. The installation can be understood as a running commentary on the urban development projects affecting the city and its inhabitants.

A project for people I don’t know is a two-day happening in São Paulo, Brazil, and an 18 mins film. 13 people queuing to get into an exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake were selected to talk to thirteen people leaving the exhibition. Taking the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition phenomenon as a starting point, Nishijima reflects on questions of the use of public space and the role of art in creating it.

Chora is a thought experiment to investigate the notion of global citizenry. Initiated through a happening in Trafalgar Square, the work invites the public to take a moment to reflect on our shared humanity. To spread the notion of Chora, participants are invited to post their silent pictures on social media. Chora’s existence is consolidated and circulated online.

Conceived as curatorial research to challenge the principle of the ‘contemporary’ exemplified by biennales, PROJECT_16 is the first initiative of translocalia.com: a network of artists, designers, curators, audiences and professionals from different domains to discuss, share and plan for the future through art. Developed by Barcelona based designers Eva Domènech, Laura Quintana and Claudia Oliveira, the website acts as a public domain where to address the query ‘what do we want to add to the world and why?’ (Maria Lind, Art Forum, October 2009).

Info

Info

  • MA Degree

    School

    School of Humanities

    Programme

    MA Curating Contemporary Art, 2016

  • I see the curatorial as all those practices, agents and institutions that somehow foster human cognisance of art to influence socio-political change. The traditional paradigm for a curator to do that has been the exhibition format which unites artworks from different contexts under the umbrella of ‘contemporary art’ to commentate on current urgencies —with the Biennial as the format par excellence at a global level. However, this curatorial strategy two often creates knowledge structures in which artists and curators act as commentators of a plural world in motion and the audience as a consumer of an end product. I believe it is time to talk about and put in practice a new paradigm of curatorial practice that I identify with the notions of cultural ignition and networked culture.

    As described in my dissertation, the first one refers to all of these non-display-based practices that take the public into account as a priority and put collectivity at the centre in order to modify the appropriation of discourse through situated encounters with art. Based on the definition of ‘culture’ that refers to ‘the whole complex of human activities’ and the term ‘ignition’ that refers to the ‘process, spark or switch that starts the combustion process to create power’, cultural ignition refers to an act of inception in which the appropriation of discourse becomes challenged through cultural endeavours of exchange. The process of cultural ignition is, therefore, a collective one as those involved have something at stake on the common project. Through this collaborative and exchange-oriented endeavours, a cultural ignitor aims to bring art outside of its traditional producer-consumer confinements by formulating projects that can affect change rather than commenting upon it.

    On the other hand, drawing from Bruno Latour’s concept of network and his work We Have Never Been Modern, the notion of a ‘networked culture’ responds to the idea of establishing translocal and interdisciplinary connections between people through art, acknowledging the non human elements involved in such exchange. In this sense, the World Wide Web offers the opportunity to create meeting points where to host communities that bring together people from different backgrounds and social stratums to unifying rituals, building relationships and making restrictions visible.

  • Degrees

  • Foundations in Business and Law, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 2005–2006 ; BA Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 2006–2010 ; BA History of Art, University of Barcelona, Barcelona/London, 2008–2012; MA (Hons) Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London, 2014–2016
  • Experience

  • Rivington Place, Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), London, 2011–2013; Sotheby’s, Barcelona, 2013; Galería Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2013–2014; Galería de las Missiones, Uruguai – Rio de Janeiro, 2014
  • Exhibitions

  • INTERSTITIAL ZONE, The Showroom y Matt’s Gallery, London, UK, 2014–2015; PROJECT_16, Lahore, São Paulo y Londres, 2015–2016; translocalia.com, 2016–ongoing
  • Conferences

  • Museology and Cultural Management, University of Barcelona, 2013
  • Publications

  • Casa Triângulo 2013/1988; Tetralogy, CCA16