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21/2/2008

Carme Nogueira

MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Vigo

Curator Iñaki Martínez Antelo

PRÓSPERA, by Galician artist Carme Nogueira, was commissioned to form part of the artistic and cultural activities organised by the Instituto Cervantes to mark the celebration of the Spain Year in China. Thus in September 2007, the MARCO of Vigo presented at the Instituto Cervantes in Beijing Carme Nogueira’s proposal, which sought to bring the Chinese and Spanish cultures into dialogue while paying particular attention to the subject of economic and urban expansion.

The name of the project alludes to both the Spanish próspero, which originates from the Latin prospĕrus, meaning favourable, propitious or successful, and to the name of a Chinese bazaar in Vigo, the artist’s city of residence.

Carme Nogueira’s Beijing proposal consisted of several interrelated elements, including street actions, a site-specific intervention on the façade, and an installation mounted inside the exhibition room. The project is now enjoying continuity in the MARCO’s Espazo Anexo, where the artist’s understanding of the public space, the urban context, its uses and alterations, already present in earlier proposals, is further played out.

The intervention on the façade of the Instituto Cervantes building in Beijing is paralleled in Vigo through an action realised on the back wall of the MARCO in collaboration with the artist Azucena Vieites. The street action executed in China, which included a sales and distribution point of T-shirts with the word ‘Próspera’ printed on them, acquires new meaning because of the difference in the urban, social, cultural and commercial contexts. And both actions are further mirrored inside the Espazo Anexo, where videos documenting the actions are projected onto one of the inside walls and the boxes that form that installation of the series entitled Refugios.

Azucena Vieites’s intervention —a piece of graffiti art inspired on the front cover of the book New Feminism (Eds. Marina Gržinić, Rosa Reitsamer. Löcker Verlag, Vienna, 2007) designed by the same artist— was executed on the back wall of the MARCO in a quiet backstreet, just prior to the inauguration, at a late hour, and in almost total darkness, thus emphasizing the idea of acting on the margins of the established. Inside the gallery, the audiovisuals documenting the actions of Beijing and Vigo stand opposite one another to enhance the contrast between day and night, communal space and conflictive space, like a dialogue between partners. There is also a photographic installation above the boxes making up Refugios, the structure of which is based on a hutong, a traditional neighbourhood of small, shared houses that evinces the importance of the communal life in Chinese society.

Carme Nogueira’s Refugios, made of cardboard boxes to human scale, suggest a form of spatial occupation associated not only with an architectural and urbanised context but also with the notion of in-corporation, of making a space part of the body: these are emotional and almost physical shelters that render us aware of the precariousness of our position.

“How we behave, reveal or restrain ourselves, creates spaces which, though invisible, inhabit the context. Such spaces in-corporate attitudes to form new spaces, new ways of life, and constitute, in a sense, forms of ‘shelter’ inside the social space. These ‘personal spaces’ function in a similar fashion to those other forms of habitability which we refer to as popular architecture”.

“These new personal spaces, when acting as either physical shelters or abstractions of emotional responses, ultimately influence the surrounding space in such a way as to alter its meaning. They deconstruct its signification. Just as physical shelters defy spatial planning, the conventions intended to give structure and meaning to an organised space ‒ or the emotional walls we erect when defending a personal stance, maintaining a critical distance, or defining our own terrain ‒ also transform the social context in which they are applied”.

Carme Nogueira

Organized by:
CO-PRODUCTION MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo/ Instituto Cervantes

Annex Space
Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo MARCO
Rúa Príncipe, 54 36202 Vigo
Opening Times:
Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11.00 to 14.00 and 17.00 to 21.00
Sundays, 11.00 to 14.00

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