The workshop, led by Roni Horn in collaboration with Isabel de Naverán, will be held at Fundación Botín from March 20 to 24, 2023, under the title Being Where You are When You’re There. There will be an initial online session to take place early March.
Each participant will produce a ‘log‘, which is defined in the dictionary as ‘A record of performance, events, or day-to-day activities‘. In this workshop the log will focus on the daily connections the author discovers in local circumstances. For example, a collection of notes, observations, facts, quotations, original texts, events of weather, private life, news, lists, collages, drawings, photographs, videos, recordings and, anything notable that comes to mind or hand each day.
In the words of Horn: ‘A Log is composed of daily singular or multiple entries of observation and recognition, each one borne of and locked into its own historic moment in time and place. This iterative accumulation of attention paid is palimpsest to a sensibility, the participants’ unique point of view, a voice, a way through. This approach places emphasis on being where you are when you’re there. Attention, focus, connection are the essential acts, the essential tools. The actual form a log may take is entirely in the hands of the participant‘.
A log— not descriptive, not illustrative, not telling.
A log— a collection, an assembly, a synthesis, an accumulation.
The sources:
The circumstance you are in.
The circumstance around you.
The circumstance that is the ether of relation.
The mundane scroll of life, your life.
The materials: Yours to choose.
The techniques: Yours to invent.
The form: Yours to define.
This workshop is in conjunction with the exhibition that Roni Horn will be presenting at Centro Botín in Santander from 1 April to 10 September 2023, entitled I am paralyzed with hope (Me paraliza la esperanza). The exhibition has carefully conceived by Horn in dialogue with the exhibition rooms, architecture, light and visitors flow.
Roni Horn (New York, 1955)
Roni Horn’s heterogeneous practice focuses on conceptually oriented photography, sculpture, drawing and books that defy any fixed classifications. Her intellectually rigorous and emotionally profound work reflects on process of becoming in relation to identity and location.
Roni Horn’s solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Basel (1995), Centre Pompidou (2003), Tate Modern (2009), Whitney Museum of American Art (2009), Kunsthalle Bregenz (2010), Kunsthalle Hamburg (2011), Fundació Joan Miró Barcelona (2014), De Pont Foundation, Tilburg (1994, 1998, 2016), Fondation Beyeler (2016, 2020), Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD (2017), Pinakothek der Moderne Munich (2018), The Drawing Institute at The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2018-2019), and the Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan (2021-2022).
Artist’s books include: To Place, an ongoing series of publications that is central to Horn’s practice. Initiated in 1989 and continuing through to the present, the series is currently comprised of ten volumes. Each volume is a unique dialogue addressing the relationship between identity and place. The books take as their starting point – Iceland and the evolving experiences of the author in this country. Further artist’s books by Roni Horn include Another Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1st edition 2000, 2nd editon 2011), This is Me, This is You (2001), Wonderwater (Alice Offshore) (2004), Index Cixous (Cix Pax) (2005), Weather Reports You / Veðrið vitnar um Þig (2007), Herðubreið at Home (2007), Roni Horn aka Roni Horn: Catalog & Subject Index (2009), 82 Postcards (2017) and Remembered Words—A Specimen Concordance (2019).
Horn has received numerous awards. Among them 3 NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, the Alpert Award in 1998 and the Joan Miro prize in 2013.
Isabel de Naverán (Getxo, 1976)
Isabel de Naverán investigates the intersection between art, contemporary choreography and performance in curatorship, editing and writing projects. The concern for the passage and use of time underlies her research, focused on bodily transmission and the revision of the concept of historical time from ephemeral and fugitive practices.
In 2010 she founded, together with Beatriz Cavia, Miren Jaio and Leire Vergara, Bulegoa Zenbaki Barik – Art and Knowledge Office in Bilbao, a project to which she remains linked until 2018.
She received a doctorate cum laude in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country. Since 2017, she has been working as a curator of dance and performance in the Department of Public Activities of the Reina Sofía Museum, in Madrid, work that she combines with her period as an associate researcher at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, where she develops La ola en la mente (2021-2023), a proposal focused on somatic writing as a form of curatorship.
In 2022 she published her first books: Envoltura, historia y síncope (Caniche editorial) and Ritual de duelo (Consonni editorial) in what represents a strong commitment to writing.
