LABoral presents the catalogue for 'En barbecho', by Alicia Jiménez, on Thursday 10th
The publication was conceived as a continuation of the exhibition proposals
The catalogue was visualized by Alicia Jiménez as an artist’s notebook
This Thursday 10th March, LABoral will present the catalogue of the exhibition En barbecho [Left Fallow], the artwork with which the Asturian artist Alicia Jiménez won the LABjoven_Experimenta Award in its 2009 edition. It is awarded conjointly by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Principality of Asturias, through the Instituto Asturiano de la Juventud [the Asturian Youth Institute], and the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón. The installation by Alicia Jiménez was exhibited in the room Plataforma 1 [Gallery Platform 1] at LABoral from 22nd of January to 15th of March last year.
The presentation will take place in the Chill-out space at LABoral at 7 pm, entrance free of charge, with the participation of the artist, Alicia Jiménez, the Director of El Instituto Asturiano de la Juventud, Guillermo Martínez Suárez, and the Director of LABoral, Rosina Gómez-Baeza.
En barbecho brought a field sowed with seed to the Art Centre. In her installation, the artist included technological, interactive and recreational components with which visitors could interact, and as a result become part of the natural rhythms of growth, development and creation originating from this furrowed field. Alicia Jimenez’s work aimed to invert the imagery inherent in industrial production systems in order to exalt leisure time and rest as essential parts of another kind of growth: personal and human development.
Through its texts, drawings and pictures, the publication illustrates and documents the evolution of the piece during the course of the two months in which it was shown to the public. With this aim in mind, articles have been included by the Councillor for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Principality of Asturias, Mercedes Álvarez González, and by members of the Jury that selected the project: art critic and writer Juan Carlos Gea; Director of El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MACBA) in Barcelona, Bartomeu Marí; Director of Centre d'Art la Panera in Lleida, Glòria Picazo; and Chief Curator of LABoral in Gijón, Benjamin Weil.
The catalogue itself, designed by José Luis González Macías, was also conceived as a continuation of the exhibition proposals. At the end of the exhibition, the artist suggested that the visitors took home some of the fertile soil so that they could continue, on an individual basis, the contact with the biological rhythms of growth they had experienced inside the gallery at LABoral. Following on from this, the printing jacket of the publication was made of seed paper and, according to the artist, “having the soil, now we are giving something to plant in it, something which can be used contemplatively, actively and on a daily basis to respect our own time to lie fallow”.
The second part of the catalogue has been put together like an artist’s notebook, intermingling images of the developments in the exhibition room with pictures of the creative and conceptual processes along with annotations that are repeated throughout the whole of the open development of the piece, which still lives on with the visitors who took part in the project.
Alicia Jiménez (Gijón, 1977) is a plastic and visual artist working in the field of installation and interventions, didactics and strategies which foster creativity and dialogue. A graduate in Fine Arts from UPV [University of the Basque Country] in Bilbao, she is completing her doctoral thesis on the Creative Process at the Universidad de Granada. She is also specialised in video and digital art at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF, in Barcelona. She has completed studies on the social integration of art practices and specialised courses on the image and new artistic language, audiovisual production, new technologies and creation in real time. She has also studied art criticism and the construction of the look.
Since 1998 she has had several solo and group exhibitions at different exhibition centres and museums. During this time her work has been contextualised in public spaces as well as in independent art circuits and she has also taken part in various editorial projects. At the same time, she has organised freelance curatorial projects such as Micasa’05 in Barcelona, C21 (2002) and Radiografías (2009) in Gijón - in the latter project as a member of the collective 2clavos. She is currently co-ordinating the programme for “El Hervidero”, a cultural association in Gijón, with events such as Zig-bee (Encuentro de Espacios Artísticos Autogestionados) [Meetings of self-run spaces by artists].
