einaidea BOOKS

The first of Eina Idea’s Propagations is Grey Literature, a trilingual manifesto available both as a pdf document and a printed booklet, and circulated for free. Launched at the Iron Bar space on March 6, 2020, as a kickoff to Eina Idea’s inaugural Spring Summer program on the very eve of the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain, Grey Literature encapsulates the project’s narrative while unfolding its iconographic history in the form of a visual essay parallel to the text. The free digital version of Grey Literature is available here. If you would like a custom-sealed version of the printed booklet, contact us. 

Editor: Manuel Cirauqui
Design: Alex Viladrich

Variantzsxn (2023) is a retroactive trilingual manifesto that collects the activity and research of einaidea in its first four years. If you wish a stamped version of the book, contact us.

Direction: Manuel Cirauqui
Edition: Manuel Cirauqui i Mireia Molina Costa
Design: Alex Viladrich

View the publication

Aurèlia Muñoz. Taller aeri (2024) gathers the processes, talks, research, relations and intuitions brought about by the exhibition Aurèlia Muñoz. Aerial Atelier on the artist's work, with the key support from the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive. The book contains processual material, images, written text and yet-to-be-published elements and documents. The publication was presented within the framework of the exhibition itself, concluding its cycle of workshops. The book–aerial and winged object, with a great migratory capacity–becomes the recipient upon which the activation powers of the aerial atelier are handed over. 

Edited by einaidea and published with Sant Cugat City Council, the book includes essays by Manuel Cirauqui, Mireia Molina Costa, Alex Viladrich, Ana Ramo, Sílvia Ventosa Muñoz, Catalina Morgado, Daniela Duarte. It also includes documentation of the interventions by artists Francesca Piñol, Tornen les Esquelles and Mateo López. Its publication has gone hand in hand with a limited edition of silk-screened posters based on archival photographic works. The screens used were also original elements of the exhibition.

You will find a copy at Centre Grau-Garriga d'Art Tèxtil Contemporani, Sant Cugat. Alternatively, you can also contact us.

Direction: Manuel Cirauqui
Edition: Manuel Cirauqui i Mireia Molina Costa
Design: Alex Viladrich

The design of the MANUAL series of publications emerges after an intensive week in the 3D area of ​​the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, resulting from the collaboration with einaidea in the workshop Explain that Gesture! Handbooks and Handwork.

The first volume includes an essay by Josefine Wilkström and a biography of the Bacci Mortiser machine.

Direction: Manuel Cirauqui, Johanna Gustafsson and Asier Mendizabal
Design: Ana Habash and Alex Viladrich

Explain that Gesture! Handbooks and Handwork.

The correspondence between the capacity to perform technical gestures and the cognitive development that concludes in abstract thought is a founding myth of modernity. Even the cranial capacity evolved, according to André Leroy-Gourhan, in a direct proportion to the centimetres of sharp blade the hands were able to get from a flintstone. If we could strip off the teleological, evolutionary veneer of that myth, could we still make use of this link between technical hand gestures and symbolic thought? One claim of this seminar – which evolves from the long discussions and research in the 3D Area at Royal Institute of Art in conversation with EINA IDEA, Barcelona, which we categorized under the generic term of Manual– is that art is the realm in which this link is always renewed, as a tool to locate ourselves in the world, in each present moment. Art inhabits the gap created in the mistranslations between material and technical operations and the concepts they enable.

Manuals, handbooks, were not originally created to teach the trade of artisans and pass it on to their apprentices. No one would have believed that the intricate interrelation between the pressure of the hand in moving the gouge, to make it flow in the different hardnesses of different woods, could ever be described in words. The first manuals were printed for collectors and amateurs who were curious about these crafts and saw a certain mystique in the precision by which they seemed to perform gestures more fitting than words. The gestures themselves became symbolic renderings of how a sublimated idea of work as virtuous formgiving gave privileged access to a way of reading the world. When art education insists on the hands-on teaching of the workshops and tools, when the art discourses of the present insist on reevaluating craft and material processes, we might need to assess those urgencies against the backdrop of that fertile mistranslation manuals were based upon.

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Emboscades #1-9 documents the first cycle of einaidea’s Ambushes program, which took place between April 2021 and November 2023 in collaboration with artists Sergi Aguilar, Marc Vives, Julia Spínola, Sociedad 0, Pep Vidal, MAIO, Rosa Tharrats, Francesc Ruiz and Jorge Satorre. This series of interventions—collaborative and in situ—emerges from an architectonic and topographic space whose history echoes the colonial and patriarchal principles of the Spanish correctional and disciplinary system; space where the design and art workshops of Eina Bosc are now located.

This volume features process documents, reflection dialogues and artist texts; it also contains essays by Manuel Cirauqui and Jordi Colomer, curators of the program, and by architect and artist Caterina Miralles, coordinator of a large part of the cycle. Thus, Emboscades #1-9 wants to compile, in a comprehensive way, a material whose nuances and complexity exceed the visible results of the project, while also documenting the presentation events that took place in relation to each of the Ambushes, carried out in collaboration with Eina students and participants from Barcelona’s creative community. The book also marks the beginning of the next phase of a constant program, with which to consolidate a sustained dynamic of situated and collective research.

Emboscades #1-9 is presented at Llibreria Finestres in Barcelona on 13 January 2025, at 7 pm. The event features the voices of Manuel Cirauqui and Jordi Colomer, curators of the program, as well as various invited co-creators and agents who took part in its development.

einaidea, Líbrica, Seminari Internacional ArtsLibris, 2023   |   Aurèlia Muñoz. Taller aeri, 2024

Is there a better definition of a dragon than a “mutant creature that makes books”?

On the occasion of Sant Jordi's Day, we published a revised and expanded version of the conversation originally published in English and German that the co-founder of consonni, Maria Mur Dean, had with Manuel Cirauqui, director of eina idea, in the framework of HOW(EVER) RADICAL OBJECTS, the symposium organized by Portikus in collaboration with einaidea from October 20 to 23, 2022, coinciding with the Frankfurter Buchmesse. That event opened with a multilingual reading and dance by Jone San Martin of lumbung stories, a book published by Consonni as part of documenta fifteen.

View the Spanish publication