ORIOL OCAÑA MARINÉ: FAR LANDS TRAIL

Oriol Ocaña Mariné will be opening his residency at Bulegoa z/b with a presentation. His proposal Camino a Far Lands was chosen, together with The Im/possible Avant-garde: Can We Talk About MAVO?  by Yen Noh, for residency in 2019; members of the jury were Iñaki Garmendia (artist), Julia Morandeira (researcher and independent curator) and the members of Bulegoa z/b.

Oriol Ocaña Mariné: Camino a Far Lands
Early versions of the Minecraft video game featured a terrain known as the Far Lands, where the algorithms in the game that generate the world collapsed and formed impossible structures that would not respect the game’s own logic of creation. To reach that place, where the rules of the system were thrown into suspense, you had to have played the game for more than seven hundred days.

Walking has been considered an artistic, a political and even an architectural form of practice. This project incorporates walking into curatorial work, transforming the relationship between the curator and his or her context.

Camino a Far Lands is a project on movement seen in three different ways: bodily movement as transposition; a form of thinking; and the displacement of concepts.

The project stems from an interest in the workings of a scene, in particular of the various agents who intervene in the fact that a group of people in a specific place might produce culture; a group might enjoy their production; and the scene might influence the formulation of new scenes in other places at other times.

Social networks, Instagram in particular, are currently the main tool used by young artists for showcasing their work and looking at the work of others. They are also the main means of research by many curators as they seek out new artists to work with. The format of these media conditions not only the content but also the relationship between artists and curators; their brevity tends to favour explicitness, and complexity may often be forsaken. Along with this trend is the rising importance of open calls and residencies. Artists present their projects in order to be able to work and survive financially. The generalisation of these processes of selection and funding has changed the way artists, curators and institutions relate, and thus also changed artworks themselves, exhibitions, and art programmes.

Both of these instances and the shifts they have created imply a certain passivity in the body and its activity and role in the art scene. The transformation of the curator’s work and the artist’s production may thus relate to a lack of movement, or to the way they move.

Camino a Far Lands is crystallised as an open, continuously expanding exhibition made up of all the material gathered in walks through Bilbao. This includes the work of all the artists and designers that Oriol Ocaña Mariné came into contact with, or visited or accompanied; found objects and texts by him and others. The exhibition will be a living reflection of a curatorial process focused on discovery and research through walking, on the displacement of bodies and concepts.

Oriol Ocaña Mariné (Montcada i Reixac, 1987). Independent curator; works on exhibitions, projects and art and design texts normally on practices relating to the object. He is currently researching the practice of walking, and the space of the garden.