Mateo López
27 November - 7 January
After several approaches to the work of Aurèlia Muñoz by artists and artisans from the local context since spring 2023, the presentation of a selection of artworks by Mateo López highlights concepts that structure both his practice and the Catalan artist’s: portability of the work of art, use of the prototype both as an extension of creative imagination and as a speculative object, bodies as tools for measuring reality. López’s sculptures also stand against the backdrop of Western Modernism and its two-directional yet asymmetrical exchanges with art practices in the Global South, particularly in America; an exchange in which we can frame Aurèlia Muñoz's research. Emerging from an interest in the potential of construction, scale projection and mutation, the exhibited pieces evoke organic phenomena (plant growth, animal movements) and ideas of spatial organisation linked to knowledge such as informal architecture, preparatory drawing, and cartography. The exhibition presents a dialogue between knots, folds and hinges; tensions, balances and delicate modulations. The geometric practice of the Colombian artist searches for objects to conversate with such as tobacco leaves, bricks, cats, books, plants and flowers which join the birds, anemones, kites, entities and helicoids that make up Muñoz’s universe. The exhibition thus creates a world of relationships between the two artists’ cosmologies, while underlining their simultaneously conceptual and manual dimensions, which fold and unfold. The distance between sculptural work and prototype is addressed bidirectionally. This tension was, in fact, already present in Muñoz's historical pieces—Homage to Leonardo, to be exhibited in the same room during the month of January 2024, offers a closure to the aerial atelier.
The presentation of Mateo López's practice goes hand in hand with an installation/experimentation process, which took the form of an open workshop during the days prior to the opening. Throughout three working sessions, the artist started a conversation with other artists and designers, with whom he explored the possibilities of arrangement, extension and variation of his works and defined the final display of the objects. This process was carried out in collaboration with Toni Busquets, Berta Colomer, Solange Dalannais, Zoe Matalon, Catalina Morgado, José Nerín, Julià Panadès, Ignasi Parrilla, Diana Pelegrín, as well as einaidea’s team (Manuel Cirauqui, Mireia Molina Costa and Alex Viladrich). Together, the group made use of an imaginary measurement system, which led to then think collectively through drawing and spatial setup.
The workshop took place between 27 to 29 November, from 15:30-19:30pm, with a public presentation on Thursday, 30 November, 6pm at Centre Grau-Garriga d’Art Tèxtil Contemporani, Sant Cugat.
Tornen les Esquelles (Ana Vivero and Martina Manyà)
19 September - 12 November 2023
The concepts of fiber, circularity, rituality and interspecies collaboration—expanding the relationship intrinsic to herd-shepherd-ecosystem—ignite einaidea's invitation to Tornen les Esquelles (Ana Vivero and Martina Manyà) to participate in the project Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial atelier. Their process begins with a residency at Casa Aymat. Espai de Creació throughout the spring, which is developed as a collaborative work, both intimate and open, and takes the evocative title of Placenta. Involving co-creators Daniela Duarte, Florencia Toro, Mire Garcia and Esther Clusas, and the contributions of Solange Dalannais, Ina Olabarria, Pan Wei Ju, Monica Kopatschek, Ana López Serrano, Remei Areny-Joval, Marta Collell, Mar Saiz, Marta Balaguer, Marcos Martinez, Eva Sarmiento, Monica Moreno and Enric Gaspar, the process emanates into a series of felt objects and tapestries, as well as a shepherd's smock made of recovered wool from local sheep based in Collserola. This allows a new exploration which gives continuity to work carried out in 2022, together with eina obra, in this ecological context. Placenta is presented on 19 September as part of the public programme of Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial atelier, opening the project to a public exploration and debate.
The intervention of Tornen les Esquelles brings the primitive process of of wool felting—and its movements of pressing, pressure, but also dressing, protection and transformation— into dialogue with Aurèlia Muñoz's interest in the ancestral arts of the Upper Paleolithic. Coexisting procedurally and physically with the artist's work, the project allows to address the material dimension of fabric—collaboratively produced and coloured with plant-based dyes—as an alive, interspecies one, as well as a vehicle for collective, ritual and ecofeminist processes. This symbolically dialogues with the also-interspecies cosmology present in the work of Aurèlia Muñoz, and highlights the materiality, not only textile, that forms it: from the manual dyeing of its vegetable, animal and synthetic fibers, to the pressing and artisanal production of paper, and the use of stones and other found materials. It also highlights the social dimension of wool, giving visibility to the work of shepherds and generating public felting activities, which allow us to address performatively the recovery and recycling of local wool.
Francesca Piñol
23 May - 10 September
Francesca Piñol, artist of reference in the production, research and teaching of fibre art in Catalonia, developed her work in close conceptual and material contact with Aurèlia Muñoz. The aerial atelier hosts a collection of her works, which integrate etnographic, material and spiritual aproximations to textile practices shared with Muñoz, while exemplifying a critical and rigorous observation of the use of the traditional loom and the digital loom. Muñoz’s macramé and Piñol’s loop enter into a dialogue placed within a weft of languages, supports and systems: from the knot to the pixel, frop the quipu to the warp, computation and data coding. The textile realm appears as a collective teaching ecosystem where a diversity of techniques, learnings, material influences and their transference and recycling coexist.
Francesca Piñol’s intervention also includes a guided meditation workshop and a collective weaving of works made of shared materials, including original threads, strings and ropes gifted to the artist by Aurèlia Muñoz. The areial atelier intensifies the contact with Muñoz’s work through a spiritual aproximation to manual manufacturing. It also accesses the shared territory of both artists and their common practices, prolonguing their collaboration while involving the audience into the creation of new material and pedagogical patterns, as well as the multiciplicity of hands, and ecologies, that make them possible.
Collective production
13 April - 17 May 2023
Acquiring an architectural and monumental dimension, the aerial atelier hosts a processual and knotted sculpture which, in a constantly growing and unfinished state, and invites various audiences, students, artists and citizen groups to get involved in its (self-)making. The totem—or that which nears the totemic—remains present throughout the career of Aurèlia Muñoz: first, through pictorial symbology, and progressively through a diversity of textile processes. The entities, hybrids of animal and human, vegetable and inanimate, masculine and feminine; the divinities, existing or invented; the "characters" and the bird-kites; as well as the large garments, the capes and the sails endowed with a presence or life of their own, materialize the intimate cosmology—which is also growing and unfinished—of Aurèlia Muñoz. This macramé-totem acts as a symbolic and performative vehicle which allows to think chorally through textile processes—in this case, through macramé and its diversity of shapes and patterns—and constitutes the first ritualized materialization of the aerial atelier.
Stemming from the works of Aurèlia Muñoz in the collection of tapestry and textile art of the Sant Cugat City Council, as well as a selection of elements from the artist's personal archive, Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial atelier is conceived, rather than an exhibition understood in its usual meaning, as a space in constant activation and redefinition.
Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial atelier presents a selection of works—large embroideries and knotted macrame sculptures; drawings, models and prototypes; cloth suspended in the air—which will serve as vectors of a practice which transcends the textile realm in many a direction. Providing alternate readings to the decades-old canonical interpretation of the artist, the exhibition connects her practice’s sometimes explicit, sometimes latent themes. From animist ontology and the ecological crisis to new materialisms coinciding with the resurfacing of crafts in the post-digital era, Muñoz’s work seems to have intuitively sensed, or even foreshadowed, many of the urgencies that define our present. The practice of Aurèlia Muñoz is not presented as "textile art": rather, it takes textile fibres as a possible vehicle, yet not unique, for a reflection whose themes are mobile, aerial, delicate and intense.
Throughout the months of the exhibition, the project will be tracing a path closely with other contemporary artists, collaborators and accomplices such as Francesca Piñol, Martina Manyà and Ana Vivero, Sara Ramo and Ana Ramo, among others. All of them will be invited to elaborate on and overflow key concepts going from entity to knot, from kite to totem, from anemone to quipu and from plastic arts to plastic. Aerial atelier will keep one of the rooms of the exhibition space in constant change and will be, in this sense, a location for permanent confluence and experimenting. Likewise, it will be a device that will progressively write its scripts and agendas, in collaboration with a diversity of audiences, students and citizen collectives. The idea will be to chorally elaborate a new conceptual map and, with it, a new fabric of relations around Aurèlia Muñoz's practice, and the vast amount of practices that converge in it. The exhibition works on the artist’s analogic archive in all its plasticity, favouring the transferral from one weft to another and emphasising the aerial flow, sometimes spectral, of memory.
Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial atelier is a project directed by eina idea and realised in collaboration with the Centre Grau-Garriga d’Art Tèxtil Contemporani, with the key support from the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive. At the closing, a publication will be presented within the framework of the exhibition itself, concluding its cycle of workshops. The book–aerial and winged object, with a great migratory capacity–will become the recipient upon which the activation powers of the aerial atelier are handed over.
Aurèlia Muñoz, Inner space (project). 1978 (left) Aurèlia Muñoz, Tension of an element I, II, III. 1976 (right) © Aurèlia Muñoz Archive.