This exhibition aims to present a broad and diverse series of approaches that deal with ‘how’ art can transform reality, rather than ‘what’ art can deliver to specific audiences. The exhibition explores how artists can expand the nature of the visual arts from being purely representational to becoming more participatory, where the work of art becomes not an object but an action that affects reality.
This project explores the ways in which bureaucratic practices affect small farmers and have an impact on their everyday activity. For some time now, filling in the many administrative forms required by various different public bodies has become an integral part of a farmer’s chores, as necessary as ploughing, sowing and harvesting.
“Contestador” (Answering Machine) is inspired by forms of dialogue commonly employed by officialdom to communicate with agriculturalists. Very often when a small farmer needs information, his only way of contacting the organisation in question is via an automated phone service in which he has to follow instructions and choose from the available options given, which generally limit the farmer to responding “yes” “no” or “next”.
But what would happen if it were the other way around and it was the farmer who ran the phone service and the public bodies, consultants, insurance companies, banks and the agrochemical and machinery suppliers who had to contact him?
This is where “Contestador” comes in: an audio piece operated using a phone number, as if it were a real answering service.
Here, a fictitious grape and crop grower called Baudelino Merino uses an automated phone service to answer calls made by a purported public servant, insurance broker, seeds salesperson …and it is he who decides the menu of options and the waiting times.
Through a series of disparate menus and options, we are led through the maze of painstaking “paperwork” that he and his family are forced to deal with.
One can ring “Contestador” from any location simply by calling the number below. Calls are toll free from any landline in Spain. It works like an ordinary answering service; you just have to listen to the automated voice and push the buttons of the options you are interested in.
This piece is indebted to Spanish domestic drama, popular comedy and vaudeville, with this last-named genre understood literally from the original French “voix de ville” as “voice of the people”.
This “voice of the people” will give us a better insight into how modern agricultural policies have brought about a sea-change in the economic and cultural role of the ordinary farmer.
Asunción Molinos will further develop her work through a residency conducting research specific to Glasgow and the Scottish context. By meeting and interviewing regional small-scale farmers, farmers’ unions, consumers’ platforms, and others, she will attempt to understand how current bureaucratic practices affect small farmers and mediate their relationships to the soil. The final outcomes of this research will be incorporated into the above-mentioned “Contestador” piece that will be displayed as part of the Forms of Action exhibition in January 2017.
This project explores the ways in which bureaucratic practices affect small farmers and have an impact on their everyday activity. For some time now, filling in the many administrative forms required by various different public bodies has become an integral part of a farmer’s chores, as necessary as ploughing, sowing and harvesting.
“Contestador” (Answering Machine) is inspired by forms of dialogue commonly employed by officialdom to communicate with agriculturalists. Very often when a small farmer needs information, his only way of contacting the organisation in question is via an automated phone service in which he has to follow instructions and choose from the available options given, which generally limit the farmer to responding “yes” “no” or “next”.
But what would happen if it were the other way around and it was the farmer who ran the phone service and the public bodies, consultants, insurance companies, banks and the agrochemical and machinery suppliers who had to contact him?
This is where “Contestador” comes in: an audio piece operated using a phone number, as if it were a real answering service.
Here, a fictitious grape and crop grower called Baudelino Merino uses an automated phone service to answer calls made by a purported public servant, insurance broker, seeds salesperson …and it is he who decides the menu of options and the waiting times.
Through a series of disparate menus and options, we are led through the maze of painstaking “paperwork” that he and his family are forced to deal with.
One can ring “Contestador” from any location simply by calling the number below. Calls are toll free from any landline in Spain. It works like an ordinary answering service; you just have to listen to the automated voice and push the buttons of the options you are interested in.
This piece is indebted to Spanish domestic drama, popular comedy and vaudeville, with this last-named genre understood literally from the original French “voix de ville” as “voice of the people”.
This “voice of the people” will give us a better insight into how modern agricultural policies have brought about a sea-change in the economic and cultural role of the ordinary farmer.
Asunción Molinos will further develop her work through a residency conducting research specific to Glasgow and the Scottish context. By meeting and interviewing regional small-scale farmers, farmers’ unions, consumers’ platforms, and others, she will attempt to understand how current bureaucratic practices affect small farmers and mediate their relationships to the soil. The final outcomes of this research will be incorporated into the above-mentioned “Contestador” piece that will be displayed as part of the Forms of Action exhibition in January 2017.