An Intellectual History of the Clock

creation and direction Alexandra Laudo

##general.period##:: 12/17/21
##general.room##:: Montjuïc. Espai Lliure

Timetable

Fri. 18:30

Running time

1 h

Place

Montjüic. Espai Lliure

Language

In Catalan

Price

€15 / Subscribers €7,5

Accessibility

Hearing assistance via mobile phone

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Many years ago, people would look up at the sky to figure out approximately what time it was, and they used vague time references when they were going to meet with someone. They suggested meeting at ‘noon’ or ‘when it gets dark’, and sometimes they would wait a few hours for the person they were meeting to arrive. Centuries ago, when clocks used water or sand, someone had to stay awake all night long to keep them working. Many moons ago, before civil registries were systematised, many people weren’t sure of their exact age or what day their birthday was on. Some years ago, the scientific community created such a precise atomic clock that it doesn’t get either one second ahead or behind in 15 billion years.

An Intellectual History of the Clock is a performative lecture that talks about time and how we measure it. It examines how over the course of history, through conventions and instruments, we have turned such an abstract, subjective thing as the experience of temporality into a shared fact and an instrument of social organisation and standardisation. It talks about time zones, night shifts, metronomes, John Cage, alarm clocks, train stations, the moon and the winter, and about many works of art. Because An Intellectual History of the Clock is also a contemporary art exhibition where the works unfold not in space but in time, through narration; it is an act of storytelling with moments of action that inquire into the possibilities of curating an art exhibition without any works of art, only by means of reference, of images, of story and of performativity.

Alexandra Laudo [Heroínas de la Cultura] (Barcelona, 1978) is an independent curator and art critic. During the 2017/18 season, she curated the series La possibilitat d’una illa in Espai 13 at the Joan Miró Foundation, and the exhibition Una certa foscor at CaixaForum. Laudo is a member of the external team of the BCN Producció programme La Capella, and during the 2015/16 season she was one of the participants in the CuratorLab, the curatorial research programme at Konstfack University (Stockholm), where she developed the performative lecture An Intellectual History of the Clock, which she has presented in different European cities. She has engaged in numerous independent curating projects both nationally and internationally, and she has been a mentor [BMC1] and/or assistant curator of different art spaces and platforms. She regularly writes on contemporary culture for B-guided and for the critical platform A-Desk. She has published several texts in exhibition catalogues and art books, and she has also edited several artistic publications. Last season, she was part of the Katharsis programming with another performative lecture, Com observar un cel nocturn.

Performative lectures are a subgenre of the performance which was a feature of the programme of Katharsis 20/21. This year, we return to this genre, which is being presented in the Espai Lliure, in order to continue our investigation of how we can convey knowledge through an artistic experience. With local and international artists and theorists, we will be seeking how to combine our intellect and sensitivity to bring to the spectator a wisdom that needs to be conveyed through the aesthetic enjoyment that the theatrical experience gives us. We seek to answer the questions by experience.

Schedule

PERFORMER

Alexanda Laudo

CLASSICAL DANCER

Lia Suárez Navarro

ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE

Neus Masdéu and Pedro Torres

LIGHTING AND ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE

Ventura Kalász and Àlex Serrano

CULINARY COLLABORATION

Marina Monsonís

PRODUCTION

Alexandra Laudo and Neus Masdéu

SUPPORTED BY

CuratorLab - Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya; Malongen - Nordiska Konstförbundet; Spanska Ambassaden, and Cooperación Española