MAGAZINE 08

Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Javier Marroquí and David Arlandis are Spanish curators working this summer at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop on the venue’s annual show, MAGAZINE 08. Here, they discuss why they have brought together work by artists from Spain, Croatia, Austria, Denmark and France.

"We studied together at the University of Valencia, where we began to work as curators. I think the fact that we have known each other for so long has meant we’ve formed a really good working relationship. Our confidence in collaboration enables us to go one step further. We always try to break down relationships between curator/artist/institution to form a creative team.

We’ll be in Edinburgh for a week in order to finalise the details of the MAGAZINE show. We’ll be back on 18 August to lead a workshop in which we’ll discuss our curatorial investigation, and specifically to talk about the concept ‘Positive Critical Potentials’, a subject we have been studying for some years. Sociologist Elske Rosenfeld, an ex-member of the art group Big Hope, is joining us.

‘Positive Critical Imagination’ is part of a wider curatorial project through which we investigate, study and publish new social and cultural agents that are able to change the world nowadays. In this project you can see and participate in several works that go beyond negative criticism, denunciation criticism, and examine the global order with a view to finding alternative ways to existing organisational structures.

We try to involve visitors in the process of knowledge production that artist’s in the exhibition are developing individually or collectively. Many of their proposals invite us, not only to reflect upon, but to act, to take part in different activities or areas. Our aim is to inspire new ways of questioning the norm. Visitors might then leave thinking, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way, there are alternative routes, systems, ways of thinking or living.”

MAGAZINE 08, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 3-24 August