Wiels | EN

Patricia Esquivias has been scanning and photographing the decorative stucco facades of her hometown since 2013. In her frequent encounters with the manmade surfaces of a city, Esquivias pays particular attention to modest architecture and mines its local qualities to arrive at an understanding of the time and place in which it was created. In her lecture-performance Pongamos que hablo de Madrid (Let’s Say I’m Talking about Madrid, titled after a 1980 song by Joaquín Sabina and Antonio Sánchez), she tells the story of her initial and eventual impressions of these decorations.

Patricia Esquivias (Venezuela, 1979) grew up in Madrid, where she now lives and works. Since 2005 she mainly works with video. She turns to handcrafts and applied arts as tools to focus on the architectural features close to us in our day-to-day surroundings. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Centro Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2016); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); White Columns, New York (2008). She was a resident at WIELS in 2010.

Preceded by a presentation of Grégory Castéra (Council, Paris), guest curator of the exhibition Foreign Places. Castera presents The Manufacturing of Rights, a research on the interpretation of Nature in laws and the representation of sexual diversity. Initiated in 2013, this research is curated by Council (Gregory Castera and Sandra Terdjman) in collaboration with Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and the NGO Legal Agenda.

More information:http://www.formsofcouncil.org/fr/inquiries/29_the_manufacturing_of_rights

With the support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)