LABoral opens 'Usos y formas', an exhibition investigating Asturian idiosyncracy, on Friday 11th
The show draws together photographic and video installations by Noé Baranda and Juan José Pulgar, produced during a research residency at the Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies. “Usos y Formas” will be on display at the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón until 26th August
'Ciudad Residencial', work of Juan José Pulgar in the exhibition 'Uses and Forms'. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
An investigation into regional idiosyncrasy and new archiving strategies for Asturian culture are the main focal points of Usos y formas [Uses and Forms], an exhibition which draws together works by Asturian artists Noé Baranda and Juan José Pulgar, produced during a research residency at the Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies [Gijón’s Museum of the Asturian People]. The show will be opened on Friday 11th May at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial where it will remain on display until 26th August.
During this year 2012 LABoral is paying extra special attention to local creators, focussing in particular on the production and projection of their work. For this purpose the Archive of Asturian Artists, a project which was started in 2008 with close to 100 members, acts as a strategic tool for conceiving exhibitions or calls open to various collectives and associations. It is a work project conceived as a collaborative network between different institutions and agents in the local context.
The starting point of Usos y formas is this Archive of Asturian Artists, which invited the creators Noé Baranda and Juan José Pulgar to explore the identity of Asturias using techniques such as photography and video.
After carrying out research in the Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies, both artists have created the specific project now shown at LABoral which straddles ethnography and artistic representation. Both of them coincide in their desire to unravel the features characteristic of the uniqueness of Asturias, what is particular to it, and cast a gaze over the material traces of its culture.
Noé Baranda presents two works, 1912-2012 La mirada inacabada [1912-2012 Unfinished look], a photographic installation based on diptychs in which his own photographs taken today are contrasted with other old ones collected in the picture library, comparing the socioeconomic development and cultural changes in the region; and Nuevos pobladores del medio rural [New settlers in rural areas], a video-installation which investigates man’s relationship with the land through a series of video-portraits of present-day characters that were filmed with the aesthetics learned from the earlier photographs.
For his part, Juan José Pulgar has created two photographic installations, En construcción [Under construction] and Ciudad residencial [Residential town], with images that adopt the geological form of strata accumulation located in the old Universidad Laboral [Laboral University] and in the residential town of Perlora; and two video-installations, Situaciones [Situations], which draws upon a series of family films reflecting private, recreational and relaxed moments of a society which, while being removed technologically from ours, it is not entirely so in the human sense; and Temporales [Temporary], with sequences filmed in different outdoor locations by amateurs in the 1920s, which contrast with the repetition of these shots taken nowadays in the same places.
