Jesús Monterde presents MAQUIS, his second photography book, published in 2022 by POLVORA. In it, the photographer from Benassal, Alt Maestrat, transports us to one of the most tragic moments in our recent history: the 1940s. A time marked by repression, economic autarchy, hunger and the existence in our country of a group of anti-Franco guerrillas who from their hideouts in rural and mountainous areas fought the dictatorship until they literally shed their last drop of blood. We are talking about the maquis, who over the last few years have become the object of study for Monterde, who has investigated their movements and traveled with camera in hand to countless places, paths or farmhouses near their territory in search of the heavy silence of the night that put him in contact with the spirit and memory of the maquis.

Double presentation of the new publications by Juan de Dios Morenilla and LUCE. The artists will talk about their own work processes and methodologies, central axis under which the publications are structured.

Fredy, Asgar, Benito and Agustín are part of a gang of builders who are fans of Atleti futbol club. One day they receive a call to carry out an assignment that will shake their union and tranquility: someone wants to hire them to tear down the Vicente Calderón stadium. This unleashes an internal debate between “colchoneros” in which friendship, work and honor are at stake. Finally, the need weighs more than anything else and accept the assignment. Although they know very well how to properly farewell Calderón… with a clandestine party.

¿Y a esta rata quién la mata? is the second title in the series “¿Es usted quien creo que es?” by Manuela Lorente in which she builds a story in homage to the workers of the city of Madrid and the emblematic Vicente Calderón stadium, once again weaving images of the daily life of her city with a new cast of characters from fiction, literature and film dialogues.

From the Latin mater (mother), the word matter refers to the first substance with which things are made. The English term matter broadens its meanings and includes problem, matter, and also, something that matters, even something that worries. The Matter project analyzes one of the oldest questions of our existence: the origin.

Matter is composed of tiny indivisible particles, themselves inert, immobile, incapable of reproducing. However, their combination gives rise to life. With the revolutionary impulse of the Big Bang, its own explosion of matter gives rise to the universe. During its life cycle, an organism reproduces, evolves, generates and uses energy, and then dies. The matter involved in said cycle, on the other hand, remains participating in new cycles. It is the only certain thing from the beginning to the end.

In one of the closest evolutionary compositions of space and time, the human being arises. Striving to master the transformation capacity of matter, he multiplies it into impossible compounds, generating artificial structures in the laboratory or in the everyday environment itself, interpreting it through increasingly abstract mechanisms. Complexity presides over evolution, to the point of forgetting that evolution itself has been possible thanks to the precise imitation of the original processes.

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The Athens Art Book Fair was founded in 2019 and has held three editions since then. Margarita Athanasiou will speak to the audience about the evolution of the fair in the last four years; From the practical difficulties she faced in the early days of the AABF to the useful lessons learned from doing things wrong, this talk will focus on what it means to create and run a fair as an artist without institutional support in Southern Europe.

Looking beyond the East/West and North/South divides, Art and Solidarity Reader asks: what were and are the alternative circuits of survival and solidarity between artists and activists from non-aligned nations and politically challenging contexts? What do these trajectories of solidarity lead to, inside and outside the worlds of art? How can itinerant exhibitions, museological displays, the idea of ​​”exile museum”, artistic actions and performative groups become tools of political struggle against oppression and social fragmentation?

Art and Solidarity Reader brings together micro-stories from the 1970s to today, rethinking our collective responses to multiple crises related to migration, colonialism, growing radicalization, religious conflict, class divisions, new technologies, heteronormativity and environmental emergencies.

Industria/Matrices, Tramas y Sonidos is situated between the creation of an archive and an artistic project. Its objective is to propose a necessarily partial reading of the Valencian industrial heritage based on the sound, the immaterial and the social movements.

The project is developed through the compilation of sounds, processes, images, videos, music, pieces of art and documents linked to the factories in their original context of use, as well as to their abandonment and conversion into heritage spaces. The exhibition focuses particularly on the proactive uses of industrial heritage promoted by citizens, from squatted social centers, participatory heritage activation, and the organization of raves and cultural events.

The authors will tell us about the process of creating a publication that, from its tabloid format, recreates the spirit and aesthetics of old American newspapers. In its pages, the author traces the appearances in the cinema of peculiar characters throughout the decades and examines how masculinity has been represented in the film noir genre. Álex Tarazón contributes to the book with more than a hundred illustrations, the aesthetic impact that such an original and little explored subject asked for. The Valencian designer Alba Monleón will talk about how it was to shape this entire universe and transfer it to paper. “Gansters Maricas” will be on sale at the end of November.

On December 31, 2015, the Valdeska bookstore in Valencia closed its doors after 40 years of activity. It started, developed and ended without concessions. On its business card it was described as a “non-bookstore,” and Sergio, its owner, was the most secretive bookkeeper in town. During a visit to the Stockholm library, Sergio felt any accumulation strange. So many books, so many authors, drained his energy. He decided that he would continue among books, but not selling them. Leaving. Me voy is not the story of the closing of a bookstore, nor the portrait of an unusual bookseller, it is a will to fix things in the filmed images, to make something lasting by showing the moment of its disappearance.

Paula Giménez Monar’s cinema is a cinema of search. It is from this idea, that of the constant exploration of the different expressive possibilities of images and sounds, from which we can understand the heterogeneity of her filmography.

Working within the porous limits of non-fiction, she challenges, the traditional notion that defines authorship based on the constancy of a style and the repetition, throughout a filmography, of the same themes and forms. It is precisely this heterogeneity, this stylistic variety, that ends up constituting the fundamental characteristic – authorial, after all – of a filmmaker-explorer whose works, many of which are in the form of a work in progress, transmit a firm will to continue searching, not to settle. As Manny Farber would say, “thermite-cinema” that advances “always devouring its own borders”.

«A powerful film-essay that reflects on the creative will, on the subversive capacity –for “useless”, for unproductive– of the artistic gesture and on the last act of resistance of Valdeska, who, as if it were a Valencian Bartleby, one day he decided to say: “I’m leaving”.» — Maria Adell

Mirades Docs Valencia Award 2021

Directed by: Paula Giménez Monar
Sound design: Martí Albert
Piano: Andrea Giménez and Estela Sanchís
Editing: Lluís Zayas and Paula Giménez Monar
Color grading: Lluís Velamazán
Credits design: Martínez Siesta
Production: Temporary Culture