Santander,
In 1993, the Botín Foundation began granting its art scholarships, a call with some rare bird among those of this type offered in Spain: it does not establish age, nationality or subject requirements, so its beneficiaries, year after year, have ample flexibility when developing projects that are usually marked by their roots in communities and specific geographical contexts and, sometimes also, to allude to knowledge that is more elusive than theoretical, that related to tradition or mystery.
The winners of the scholarships awarded in 2022 will present, starting this weekend, the work they have developed thanks to them at the Botín Center in Santander; These are Patricia Domínguez, Laura Fernández Antolín, Antonio Menchen, Alice dos Reis, Belén Rodríguez and the duo composed of María Salgado and Clarisa Navas. The jury that selected them was made up of Aimar Arriola and Soledad Gutiérrez, curators and researchers, and the artists Joâo Onofre and Eva Fàbregas, previous recipients of these grants.
The projects of the Chilean Patricia Domínguez, which we have already been able to see in our country, in rooms such as Twin Gallery, allude to myths, rites, symbols and healing practices both from the perspective of science and from the imagination. In various locations, including the Atacama Desert, the ALMA (Atacama Large Milimiter Array) and the CERN scientific and technological center in Geneva, he has created an hour-long fictional video, titled Three moons downand several watercolors; Both of them make up a proposal between ancestral and futuristic that links the spaces of the spiritual and those of the quantum.
The video presents us with a woman and a robot bird who make a pilgrimage together to the aforementioned ALMA Radio Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider and Neutrino Detector at CERN; Your goal is to reconnect with a particle by fulfilling the theory of entanglement, a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics according to which particles are correlated so that their properties are instantly connected, regardless of the distance that separates them.
The young woman from Valladolid Fernández Antolín exhibits Drive Your Dreamsthe fruit of his research on sleep rituals, which he began thanks to another scholarship at the Rupert Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. For this artist, our sleep is time for rest, resilience and production not subject to commodification, and in Santander she will show us the second iteration of an immersive installation that she devised in the semi-abandoned Lelija textile factory. This proposal is made with materials discarded from automobiles that were once part of vehicles with which to move and travel, devices that in our Western culture we have turned into a symbol of encounters, rest and pleasure.
The author invited an open public to rethink the mechanisms of their daily routine in different workshops, and to establish dialogues with their unconscious, their memories and imagination, through drawing, movement and automatic writing, and at the Botín Center we will find materials of drawing, a soundscape, rest spaces and a meditative audio piece narrated by the artist herself.
Menchen, for his part, proposes that we move with him from two dimensions to three: a collection of (flat) images, compiled over fifteen years, is his starting point to delve into sculpture and walk from the eye to the hand and from looking to doing. For the exhibition, this Toledo author has devised, inspired by that archive, a staging between the architectural and the cinematic in which different objects (clothes, a glass with remains) will challenge the viewer from a bodily dimension and perhaps make him remember known moments.
Alice dos Reis from Lisbon is interested in the visions or understandings of the supernatural that are part of the collective imagination; His case study has been the archetype of the Serra da Gardunha UFO, a mountain in the neighboring country where paranormal events (sightings of lights) and others of a religious nature (appearances of saints) are said to occur. Show the short video in Santander Our Lady who burnsa film that reviews the experiences in this place, close to the biography of Dos Reis, of people from different generations. Her project is complemented by four needlepoint tapestries in which we will see those same UFOs captured in the short.
Belén Rodríguez, who in recent years has carried out intense exhibition activity, arrives at the Botín Center with Farmer jacket. She has usually defended the benefits of a simple life, using sustainable textile materials that she herself weaves, composes or inks in her studio for her installations or sculptures, and on this occasion she wanted to analyze more in-depth Japanese fabrics, linked to nature as preach per se the culture of the country; He has looked at those made with banana or nettle fiber and colored with pigments extracted from local vegetation.
From it we will see a wooden structure in the shape of a cross, which contains elements that allude to Bethlehem’s intention to make this oriental philosophy of work and life its own; a work coverall woven by the artist reusing materials from previous pieces and tinted with vegetation from a local forest; a woodcut that displays the utensils and materials used to create this garment; and a video that condenses his collaboration with the musician Tatematsu Masahiro, who has created twenty musical pieces for xylophone arising from his interpretation of the Ikat technique. Furthermore, the installation that covers the walls and floor is made up of fabrics with defects that were discarded by the industry.
Finally, the Argentine Clarisa Navas and the Madrid-born María Salgado exhibit the audiovisual at the Botín Center Via Versusfilmed in the northeast of Argentina and in the Ourense towns of Verín and Pousada. Taking these specific scenarios as a basis, they wanted to tell what was invisible and silenced about them; This is alluded to in two poems that are read in the background of the filming and that also appear as room texts.
More or less directly, many of these creators have worked with the occult without exactly trying to reveal it.
XXIX Itineraries
LOOT CENTER
Albareda Dock, s/n
Pereda Gardens
Santander
From November 23, 2024 to April 27, 2025
