The María José Jove Foundation has announced its inaugural Art Therapy Applications Research and Essay Award, an initiative which aims to contribute to the study, awareness, and use of art as a therapeutic tool while also hoping to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to current thinking on the matter.
The collection’s director, Susana González, is the one who set this huge challenge, entering the fray to tackle this complex subject – one which concerns many sensitive issues, not only in the fields of therapy and art, but also human emotion itself.
Getting down to writing about Mª José Arceo’s latest artistic project ‘Future Dust’ is as difficult as trying to sum it up in just a few lines. If it’s an origin story you’re after, you could say that it all started with 2014’s eXXpedition Crew, which set sail for Martinique from Lanzarote, crossing the Atlantic as part of UNESCO’s Atlantic Odyssey. 14 women embarked on the journey: scientists, designers, film-makers, biologists, ecologists, and an artist, María. With the help of her expedition partners, she was able to explore the impact of microplastics on our environment and our lives. To achieve this, she started to gather up all the microplastics that she came across in order to create little crystal installations that would be shown in her future exhibits. Anyone who sees one of these artistic interventions finds themselves faced with a poignant story about microplastics that begins and ends with us.
The contemporary art fair JustMAD9 is taking place in Madrid between 20-25 February. They have a new venue, at Nuñez de Balboa 32, which will be called JUST SPACE, is a 1,500 square metre space and is situated in one of Madrid’s most dynamic and central districts.
We sat down with the curation team, Daniel Silvo and Semíramis González, to find out a little more about them and what they’ve got in store for us in their ninth annual fair.
There is an excellent production, well worth seeing, unmissable and unforgettable… like all good dreams.
Ninety minutes with Pepe Mujica… delivered at his own pace. Ninety minutes, at life’s natural rhythm; that time passing as a plant grows, those minutes spent waiting for the maté to be ready, those hours rolling by as you cruise in that old-fashioned VW Beetle. Never going over eighty km/h… what’s the rush?
At the end of 2013, ¡AHLAN!, Nuria Carrasco’s fake Hello! magazine project, was selected as one of the best photographic reports of the year by Martin Parr and the British Journal of Photography. Her work uses satire and irony to depict the reality of a situation largely ignored by the international community: life in the Saharan Tindouf camps. Nuria spoke to us about her artistic process and her views on how art can have a subtle influence on public opinion by ‘problematising’ and putting an image to situations and concepts that we find uncomfortable, or tend to forget.