Globality and Geography

For the last few months, we’ve been publishing articles each week related to a proposal articulated monthly. We try in this way to generate rhythms of publishing around a subject that we consider topical and of the moment, but is also historically relevant. In this sense, to talk critically about ‘globality’ is nothing new. But it is necessary to deal with the idea of “globality” from a broader perspective, one that avoids ethnocentrism and permits distinct voices and alternative subjects.

We’ve dedicated this May to considering the Global (yes, the legacy of another term that affects us, “globalization”). To take a look at this shared and yet distinct reality, from a geographical perspective, tied to territory, but not just to that. Also to what is established by frontiers and the tacit or not agreements that enable us this time, yes, to deal with next month the subject of geography and its conditions but focussing on the global subject (or to put it better, the subject in a global world).

We begin May with Xavier Acarín and “He mirat aquesta Terra”, a text with a brilliant and eccentric background that passes through the parks and gardens of New York, along the lines of colonial heritage, up to the fossils found in Lleida.

Glòria Guso wrote from Paris a review of Carambolages curated by Jean-Hubert Martin (the one of Magiciens de la Terre) at the Grand Palais. Where she noted that although the claim of reuniting objects from all eras, cultures, and geographical provenance, of types of materials and values could have generated a distinct order of the History of Art, in reality it became a sort of cabinet of curiosities where difference could become anecdotal.

Next, Amaia Fernández de Gorostiza strolled with Antoni Castel, a founding member of the Centre d’Estudis Africans in Barcelona through Making Africa, the celebrated exhibition of the Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB). Commenting on pieces and critical perspectives of a show that has really hit the mark by generating an alternative vision of the neighbouring continent.

Per la seva banda, Juan Canela Juan Canela signed off an excellent interview with Eva Barois de Caevel, assistant curator of Raw Material (Dakar) and assistant to Koyo Kouoh, as well as the art biennial Limerick Eva International. To discuss ways of doing, contra-hegemonic discourses and realities of the global world in a very particular but at the same time broad context.

We end on an optimistic note, with the video of Parag Khanna on TED Talks where he talks about the megacities of the future and how these will generate an emergent global network based on connectivity and communication.