Caravana newspaper (.3)

Madrid, February 2023

There are caravans that travel a well-known road year after year, and there are others that set out with nothing but the clothes on their backs and with no fixed direction. hablarenarte turns 20 and, looking back, we can glimpse just that: a road of desire traced by the movement of dozens of comrades through the cultural field. Those of us who write this editorial today are not those recent Art History graduates who founded the association... but we are the ones who celebrate its tremulous itinerary and the luck of being here.

We are back with the third trip of CARAVANA, the newspaper of Planta Alta. A common space that brings together, proposes and moves forward but also stops and wonders about the journey. In this case, taking advantage of the fact that hablarenarte has turned 20 years old, we are thinking about the political implications of the concept of celebration. By asking ourselves what we are celebrating, we want to contribute to unleash affective currents connected to the festive.

With all this in mind, in the Critical Resistance section we have the valuable contributions of Maral Kekejian, iki yos piña narváez and the Queen of the Anthropocene (Fran Quiroga).

In the section dedicated to our residency programmes we present three stories that delve into the importance of pleasurable and critical forms of encounter. Los Dragones de Lavapiés chant a gooooooooooaaaaal to anti-racism, police violence and speculation in our neighborhoods; Silvia Teixeira brings the partying knowledge of the communal people of the Leonese mountain; Taller Placer brings us a reading of the night that is not the expected one, a kind of dark knowledge on which the party does not have a monopoly.

As an untenable counterpoint, we have included a presentation of the TEJA program in this CARAVANA. TEJA is an initiative of Planta Alta that, together with other residency spaces, institutions, artists and allies, seeks to provide shelter and support to artists in emergency situations or affected by armed conflicts, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We include in this issue a visual map of this ecosystem woven by many hands and that we want to celebrate.

As a gift and sparkle, La Más Bella offers us a confetti / hat / pennant / song that runs through cut-outs and fold-outs of the period between 2002 and 2041. An invitation to the manual, performative and jovial gesture dedicated to hablarenarte and to all things that mutate.

We conclude this issue with a visual report by Diego del Pozo, who was invited to share a dinner with many of the colleagues who have worked at the association over the years. Reminiscing, savoring, remembering, recalling together minimal stories of the hablarenarte that was and projecting the one that is to come.

You can download your copy of CARAVANA here.

Curatorial edition: hablarenarte

Graphic design: Amalia Ruiz-Larrea

Printing: Grupo Nuevas Formas Gráficas

This newspaper is made with the support of the grant to independent spaces of contemporary creation of the Madrid City Council in the call 2022-2023

Caravana and Planta Alta are also possible thanks to the support of the Culture Department from the Regional Government of Madrid.