POLAR + TROPIC

The tropics are imaginary lines drawn across the Earth: invisible thresholds where the sun, at its highest point, seems to pause before reversing its course. Our present seems to inhabit such a threshold: the natural, social, and institutional structures that have sustained a dominant way of producing and relating to one another are now showing their limits, while others begin to emerge and organise from the margins.

The crisis inherent to this transitional state puts the paradigm under strain and intensifies polarisation. In the social realm, the polar implies an inability to inhabit common spaces; in nature, by contrast, it represents a principle of attraction: the tension between poles enables movement, exchange, and the flow of energy.

Within this context, the new edition of Polar and Tropic brings together independent collectives and spaces from the local, Nordic, and Southeast Asian regions that, despite their geographical and sociopolitical distance, articulate networks of collaboration and solidarity.

The programme questions the mechanisms of value that sustain the hegemonic model of contemporary art, in which the object/artwork and the supposed autonomy of the artist operate as forms of accumulation and concentration. The proposals presented shift the emphasis towards the processes and relationships that sustain communities and territories, both within and beyond the circuits of art.

The programme observes how these practices behave when entering an art fair, transforming the system of exchange and the definition of what is considered an object of art. As the market becomes an abstraction for emerging practices and the established system appears to be crumbling, the present moment demands that we imagine and put into practice alternative infrastructures and other ways of producing and relating to one another.

Program supported by: Gobierno de España- Ministry of Culture & Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA

La Fundició

La Fundició (L'Hospitalet de Llobregat)

LaFundició fosters situated processes to collectively institute material and symbolic practices, forms of relationship and knowledges, understood as common-pool resources.

Founded in 2006, LaFundició has rooted its practices in the city of L'Hospitalet, promoting spaces from which to build networks of mutual support, and from which to question how culture—as a sphere of meaning production—can intertwine with the fabric of life and forms of material production: spaces from which to experiment with communal and controversial cultural practices grounded in the interdependence of individuals and their socio-ecosystems. An everyday, ordinary culture.