Editorial Tenov S.L. – förlag

The culmination of over a decade of collaborative research exploring the global impact of extractivism, tied to the Traces of Nitrate project. Earth Matter delves into the history of extractivism in Chile, beginning with the nitrate mines in the Atacama Desert in the nineteenth century and extending to the ongoing extraction of copper, lithium, and water. Through photography, video, archival research, and personal interviews, artist-researchers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta, and activist-writer Louise Purbrick examine the interconnected forces that bind Chile’s natural resources to global capital, particularly in the financial district of London.This publication offers a critical analysis of how extractivist practices have shaped both historical and contemporary life, while anticipating future forms of exploitation. An index of terms explores past and present facts, documents, sites, projects, politicians, activists, NGOs, and critical writings, forming a Benjaminian constellation that readers can connect and decipher at their own pace.The book includes essays by scientist Cristina Dorador on life in extreme climates, politician and environmentalist Sara Larraín on the legal protection of glaciers, political theory professor Robert Nichols on the history of land expropriation related to extractivism, and art curator Carles Guerra. Earth Matter provides a comprehensive map of the forces driving the increasingly hegemonic system of resource extraction. It reflects not only on past struggles but also on the ongoing fight for justice in the face of an unrelenting global economy.Traces of Nitrate is an arts research collective led by Ignacio Acosta, Louise Purbrick, and Xavier Ribas, committed to documenting the extraction of minerals from Chile and their transformation in global capitalist systems. Through writing, photography, video, and sound, they seek to reveal the ecological and colonial legacies of mining and advocate for environmental justice.

A vivid portrait of Picasso’s early life and the city he called home.  Part biography of the young artist, part guide to Barcelona, Picasso Barcelona tells the story of the relationship between Picasso and the city that saw him evolve into a modern painter. Rafart takes his reader on a journey through Picasso’s early world, following in the artist’s footsteps and discovering its sites through his eyes. On the way, he pauses to reflect on Picasso’s many friends, his early works, and the places he sketched, painted, and lived. In this portrait of Barcelona at the turn of the century, Rafart conjures up haunting images of a city that no longer exists, but which served as the formative inspiration for an artist set to take the world by storm.Published in cooperation with the Museu Picasso, Picasso Barcelona marks the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973 and the 60th anniversary of the creation of his museum in Barcelona.

Published in 1922 in Russian, Aleksei Gan's Constructivism was the first theoretical treatise of postrevolutionary Russia's emergent Constructivist movement. Fired with revolutionary zeal, it was unquestionably a declaration of war on traditional bourgeois art. Constructivism recasts artists and architects as Constructors, turning away from aesthetic or speculative problems in art and instead focusing on the fusion of art with everyday life in order to create a functional system of design, one in keeping with the great task of building the new communist society. This edition replicates Gan's original layout, which was one of the first experiments in Constructivist typography and graphic design, and it also presents a substantial introductory essay by art historian Christina Lodder that examines Gan's own odd, mercurial character and the tracks he left across avant-garde Russian graphics, architecture, film, and theater. Nearly a century later, Constructivism remains a powerful manifesto, and this new translation will help scholars trace its enduring influence on twentieth-century art and design.

Published in 1922 in Russian, Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism was the first theoretical treatise of postrevolutionary Russia’s emergent Constructivist movement. Fired with revolutionary zeal, it was unquestionably a declaration of war on traditional bourgeois art.Constructivism recasts artists and architects as Constructors, turning away from aesthetic or speculative problems in art and instead focusing on the fusion of art with everyday life in order to create a functional system of design, one in keeping with the great task of building the new communist society. This edition replicates Gan’s original layout, which was one of the first experiments in Constructivist typography and graphic design, and it also presents a substantial introductory essay by art historian Christina Lodder that examines Gan’s own odd, mercurial character and the tracks he left across avant-garde Russian graphics, architecture, film, and theater.Nearly a century later, Constructivism remains a powerful manifesto, and this new translation will help scholars trace its enduring influence on twentieth-century art and design.

Columns of Smoke is a two-volume collection. The first volume includes "Photography or Life" and "Popular Mies," which illuminate overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced-and plausible-conception of the modern world. In "Photography or Life," Juan Jose Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent-it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school.Using the same method in "Popular Mies," Lahuerts looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies' work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era. This first volume of Columns of Smoke is a brilliant treatment of modern visual culture that will redefine our concept of modernity.

Juan José Lahuerta’s Columns of Smoke series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siècle bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading approaches of the day.With the rise of Le Corbusier’s modern style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudí, were relegated to the sidelines. Lahuerta draws on first-hand documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudí, far from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and cleverly used industrial processes to produce ornamental details that appear today to be almost handmade. Equally impressive was Gaudí’s ability to capitalize on his fame once in the public eye, as both the architect and his buildings appeared in illustrations in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Salvador Dalí, who admired the edible appearance of Gaudí’s Casa Milà in Barcelona, and Pablo Picasso, who was fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batlló, attests to the architect’s impact far beyond his field.Richly illustrated with rare images from a variety of sources, this highly visual take on Gaudí is also a spirited commentary on the roots of modernism more generally. Entertaining and perceptive, Antoni Gaudí challenges us to reconsider what we thought we knew about this pioneering architect and his distinctive work.

Taking us back to the earliest days of cities-and the earliest days of human civilization-in Mesopotamia, Pedro Azara in Cornerstone offers a contemporary view on the rise and growth of early cities and urban culture. Investigating ruins and exploring archaeological sites, Azara helps us understand how the earliest cities looked and felt, what the first architects and their buildings were like, and what nascent aesthetic ideals they upheld. Azara's scholarship is rigorous and far-reaching, but his writing is agile, direct, and entertaining as he not only brings the far-distant past to life, but teases out its relevance for our understanding of contemporary culture as well. The result is a fascinating glimpse into our history and a fresh new take on the origins of the civilization of some of our most ancient ancestors.

Legible-Visible explores the relationship between print publications and audiovisual documents, two of the most important media in the social and cultural landscape of our time--and two forms that also define the evolution of contemporary art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mela Davila and Maite Munoz here show how the arrival of inexpensive home video technologies in the 1970s and then of digital media at the turn of the millennium sparked revolutions in the creation and diffusion of both video artworks and artists' publications. Davila proposes a theoretical and historical framework for works long dismissed by the market because of their serial nature, while Munoz shows how artists have taken advantage of the permeability between publications and audiovisual elements. The first book-length work to study artists' publications and video in relation to each other, Legible-Visible will enable new ways of thinking about a number of contemporary artists and their work.

For their 2019 Venice Biennale pavilion, Catalonia presented an exhibition exploring the life of public statues and reflecting on the capacity of artworks to possess agency. The project considers the often-intense relationship that forms between humans and statues, focusing on fifteen such works from around Catalonia. At times celebrated, vandalized, protected, or destroyed, figurative sculptures have a strange capacity to inspire intense emotions, to make one “lose their head.”The collective artist book, To Lose Your Head (Idols), includes written and artistic reflections on the exhibition’s theme, exploring the idea of artistic agency as it analyses the passions that are sparked when dealing with figurative sculpture. Pedro Azara, an architect, archaeologist, and professor of aesthetics, explores the perception of images as living entities. Looking at the deep reverence and radical iconoclastic urges inspired by works of public art, he considers how the Western artistic tradition might still be deeply animist. Six contemporary Catalan artists—David Bestué, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt, Daniela Ortiz, Perejaume, and Francesc Torres—take on this question from the perspective of artistic practice, creating works and essays in response to Azara. The publication includes documentation of the exhibition and provides information on accompanying works by playwright Marcel Borràs, architect Tiziano Schürch, and filmmaker Albert García-Alzórriz, in collaboration with poet Gabriel Ventura.

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Bjørn Nørgaard.This book presents never-before-seen materials from the performance, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, alongside contributions from scholars and critics that offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s imprint on Beuys’s work while elucidating its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys’s spiritual geography, explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it and also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys’s work. Klaus-D. Pohl addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys’s mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys’s collaborator Bjørn Nørgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.

This book brings together for the first time all the material related to Joseph Beuys performance, the Action MANRESA, as well as a selection of critical texts that situate the action within its European context.Joseph Beuys performed one of his most radical pieces, the Action MANRESA, on 15 December 1966, at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. He was accompanied by Henning Christiansen and Bjørn Nørgaard. In 1994 these two Danish artists gave continuity to the original piece with the performance Manresa Hauptbahnhof (Manresa, Central Station), which was done in the very city that had given name to the earlier Beuys action. That same city was where in 1522 Saint Ignatius of Loyola had the revelations that led him to write the Spiritual Exercises, a text that wielded a powerful influence on the German artist.This book brings together for the first time all the material related to that second performance (including images, scripts and preparatory drawings), as well as a selection of critical texts that situate the action within its European context. Friedhelm Mennekes, an expert in contemporary art and a Jesuit priest, analyses the action by delving into its spiritual meaning, exploring the symbolism of the objects employed. The metaphor of the central station enables art critic Pilar Parcerisas to discover the city of reference and redraw the map of Europe, with unexpected connections between Manresa and Copenhagen. In the final essay, academic Peter van der Meijden, a specialist in the actions of these Danish artists, contextualises the two performances, which represented a meeting place for very different artistic personalities working on the cutting edge in creating a completely new kind of art.

Santiago Cirugeda is an atypical architect placed on the verge of political activism and art. Far from a theorist, Cirugeda tests and implements his ideas directly on the ground. Over the past fifteen years, he has developed his work through meticulous observation and analysis of the city, identifying its needs and filling in the gaps wherever he finds them. Cirugeda's instant and portable architecture is a display of creativity that proposes new models for a new society. Seeing architecture as a discipline that should improve the social condition, his projects envisage a self-managed city where citizens can decide on their immediate environment.This book presents fourteen specific situations where Cirugeda explains and analyses how he has been able to challenge the status quo of the modern metropolis by inventing proposals for a more liveable city. His strategies have allowed him to not only reinvent housing, but also museums, universities, community centres and public spaces, all detailed as in a recipe book, open to anyone who wants to implement them.

A thoroughly unconventional monograph on the work of contemporary architect Enric Miralles, this book by acclaimed artist David Bestue combines the forms of essay, diary, notebook, and more to create a book that is simultaneously an analysis of artistic work and a work of art itself. Asking what "spending time" in and around the works of Miralles means, Bestue coaxes unlikely meanings and emotions from them, capturing the buildings and spaces in a series of photographs that illustrate a living architecture, removed from the preciousness to which architecture can so frequently succumb. Applying the mind of an artist to the work of another creator, Bestue tries to unravel Miralles's creative process, to understand how his ideas were formed, refined, and made into physical objects that survive and thrive in a seemingly unsympathetic world.

This beautifully illustrated book, the catalog for an exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona and coorganized with the Picasso Museum in Paris, explores important affinities between Picasso and Romanesque art. Using two key moments as starting points, Juan Jose Lahuerta and Emilia Philippot first discuss the summer of 1906, when Picasso stayed in the village of Gosol in the Catalan Pyrenees, and then turn to 1934, as he visited the Romanesque art collections of what is today the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. Picasso's discovery of the Romanesque nurtured his interest in other "primitive" or ethnographic art, later echoed in such decisive works as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Importantly, while Lahuerta and Philippot avoid any attempt to trace direct Romanesque influences on Picasso as they note, his work consistently escapes such linear accounts they do demonstrate that Picasso's interest in the twelfth-century sculpture Virgin from Gosol, his lifelong fascination with the theme of the crucifixion, and his study of the skull all reflect elements that were also of major importance in Romanesque art and architecture.What these shared features allow, Lahuerta and Philippot ultimately argue, is not only a richer understanding of Picasso's work, but also a rediscovering and reinvention of Romanesque art in our contemporary moment, causing the medieval to become refreshingly and paradoxically modern.

Co-opting the discredited format of the history textbook with its didactic tone, well-defined stages, and linear development, David Bestué subverts the clichés of historiography, creating an unorthodox path whilst recovering forgotten ideas and breathing new life into familiar tropes.It is a work that seeks to understand how the landscape is drawn around us. A fresh and very personal reading of our recent history, illuminated by photographs, collages, and gadgets created to explain the reasons of form. Formalismo Puro is an art project in its own right, created by a conceptual artist with a background in sculpture, enthralled by the notion of architecture as form.

In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan Jose Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on how they have been treated in print. While the first volume of Columns of Smoke considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos's relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical strand in Loos's architecture and to his written work-and specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory. Lahuerta pays particular attention to Loos's seminal "Ornament and Crime," the essay that established disornamentation as the signal feature of twentieth-century architecture. Through close analysis of that essay he unearths the racially charged, pseudoscientific ideas from early anthropology that underpin Loos's thinking. Sure to be controversial, this new reading of Loos's landmark writings calls the whole disornamentation project into question, and in the process, it reveals a radically new perspective on a major turn in modern design and culture.

In 1927, while a student of architecture at the Moscow Vhutemas, Georgii Krutikov presented a vision for a flying city. More than just a flight of architectural fancy, Krutikov's flying city was a utopian dream, a plan to solve the seemingly intractable problems of overcrowding and resource depletion by moving humanity's living quarters to space. Inspired in equal parts by sci-fi dreams of space travel and the revolutionary idealism that still percolated in the Soviet Union at that time, Krutikov created an incredible amount of detailed information about his city: sketches, drawings, plans, and more. Krutikov's flying city has been cited as a major influence on Russian modernism for decades, yet little has been written about the design, its creator, or his subsequent architectural career. This beautifully illustrated book fills that gap, presenting a detailed study of Krutikov's scheme and its underlying ethos, then tracing Krutikov's later work as an architect. It will interest-and amaze-all fans of the avant-garde, architecture, and Russian history.

In Albino, photojournalist Ana Palacios takes us inside a shelter for people with albinism and reveals what daily life is like for those living with the genetic condition in Tanzania. As Palacios documents, widespread ignorance of the causes of albinism has fed stigmatization, marginalization, persecution, and prejudice within the country. In addition to the social and physical threats that those with albinism face from other Tanzanians, they must also confront the strong possibility of skin cancer a disease for which effective treatment options can be found in the West, but which in Africa tends to reduce life expectancy for those with albinism to under thirty years. Bearing witness to the efforts of a group of Spanish aid workers to promote health and education in Tanzania, Albino highlights their work on programs to improve patient treatment and training for local doctors. In these subtle, complex, and ultimately optimistic images, Palacios shows the moments of struggle, but also joy, that mark the lives of the residents of the shelter.

The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume, devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the Pavilion's genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract, unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building--a precursor of Mies's American period--the Pavilion is revealed here as a thoroughly European work, perhaps less pristine but more authentic. Mies and Lilly Reich were commissioned to design not only the Pavilion but also more than one hundred thousand square feet of German stands spread throughout the Exposition. By examining that work in addition to the Pavilion itself, the contributors present a farreaching reinterpretation of the whole. They also explore connections with the mass media, highlight the work's antecedents and meaning in the history of architecture, and analyze the current pavilion, a reconstruction of the original built in 1986. No other critical study offers a comparable overview of Mies's work in Barcelona.