Concha Jerez + José Iges + Fernando Castro
Concha Jerez: Recovered memory.
One of our most international artists talks with two collaborators and experts on her work about the meaning of artistic work in the digital society and its function in reclaiming and vindicating the role of creation in the face of the massive erasure of memory, a constant in this environment.
Concha Jerez, multidisciplinary artist.
José Iges, composer and artist.
Fernando Castro, philosopher, art-lover and critic of Spanish art.
Concha Jerez
Concha Jerez is a multidisciplinary artist. She studied Piano at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid as well as Political Sciences at the University of Madrid. In 2010, she received Spain’s Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts. In 2015, she was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts. In 2017, she was awarded the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts. In 2018, she received a Gold Medal for Fine Arts from the Government of the Canary Islands.
From 1973 to the present day, she has produced a variety of multidisciplinary works, focusing her work on the development of the concept of installation, as an in situ work, in specific large-scale spaces. Of particular note are her works for museums and art centres such as the Vostell Museum in Malpartida, Museum Wiesbaden, Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Frauen Museum in Bonn, DA2 in Salamanca, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, La Regenta Art Centre (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), MUSAC (León), Tabacalera (Madrid), ZKM (Karlsruhe), CAAM (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and MNCARS (Reina Sofía Art Museum) in Madrid.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, she has extended her activity to performance art, which she has carried out in museums such as the Landesmuseum in Mainz, MNCARS (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona), IVAM (Valencia), TEA (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), MACA (Alicante), Museu D’Art (Girona), Tabacalera (Madrid), MUSAC and CAAM. Starting in 1989, she has combined individual works with others created in co-authorship with the musician and multidisciplinary artist José Iges, including sound and radio artworks for broadcasters such as RAI, ORF, Radio France, YLE, ABC of Australia, WDR of Cologne and RNE, Sound and Visual Installations, Performances and InterMedia Concerts.
Concha Jerez has permanent works in museums such as the Vostell Museum in Malpartida, Norrköping Kunst Museum, Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Museum Wiesbaden, ARTIUM, MNCARS, ZKM (Karlsruhe), CAAM and in collections such as those of the Fundació Caixa de Pensions (Comunidad de Madrid), Caja Burgos, National Library of Spain, Brigitte March in Stuttgart, Schüppenhauer in Cologne, ARCHIVO LAFUENTE Complesso Museale Palazzo in Mantova and in the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
José Iges
As well as being a composer and artist, he is also an Industrial Engineer and has a PhD in Information Sciences. Between 1979 and 1982, he was a member of the Art and Computer Science Seminar (SAGAF-M) of the Centre for Calculation of the University of Madrid. Meanwhile, between 1979 and 1984, he was a member of the ELENFANTE Collective. As a composer and player of live electronic music, he has collaborated with various groups and soloists. Between 1984 and 2000, he collaborated with the singer Esperanza Abad.
In 1989, he began his collaboration with artist Concha Jerez, jointly creating sound and visual spaces, performances, radio works, intermediate concerts, videos and photomontages. The fundamental cores of his artistic and compositional work are the interaction of conventional instruments with recorded sounds and/or live electronics, as well as his personal use of the stage and radio language in areas such as performance, installation and video. All this implies a transversality of approaches and practices that in many cases are framed within the so-called sound art.
From 1985 to 2008, he directed the “Ars Sonora” space on the current Radio Clásica (RNE), which focused on sound art, particularly radio art. He has produced more than 80 works in these genres, having received, among others, the “Prix Italia de Radio” in 1991 with Luc Ferrari’s L’Escalier des Aveugles. He has also been the producer of the CDs Broaden/in/Gates (1992) and Ríos Invisibles (1994), and director of events and meetings such as Ciudades Invisibles (Madrid, 1992) and Radio Horizontal (Madrid, 1995). He was a member of the EBU’s (European Broadcasting Union) Ars Acústica Forum, which he was coordinator of between 1999 and 2005. He was also president of the AMEE (Spanish Association of Electroacoustic Music).
Fernando Castro
Fernando Castro Flórez (Plasencia, 1964) is the Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also Art critic for ABC Cultural, member of the MNCARS Advisory Committee and curator of exhibitions by such artists as Tony Cragg, David Nash, Nacho Criado, Fernando Sinaga, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Antón Patiño, Imi Knoebel, Julian Opie, Manuel Vilariño, Anselm Kiefer and Bernardí Roig. He has written books like Elogio de la pereza. Notas para una estética del cansancio (1992), El texto íntimo. Kafka, Rilke, Pessoa (1993), Nostalgias del trapero y otros textos contra la cultura del espectáctulo (2002), Escaramuzas. El arte en el tiempo de la demolición (2003), Fasten Seat Belt. Cuaderno de campo de un crítico de arte (2004), Fight Club. Consideraciones en torno al arte contemporáneo (2004), Sainetes. Y otros desafueros del arte contemporáneo (2007), Una “verdad” pública. Consideraciones sobre el arte contemporáneo (2010), Contra el bienalismo. Crónicas fragmentarias del extraño mapa artístico actual (2012), Mierda y catástrofe. Síndromes culturales del arte contemporáneo (2014), Arte y política en el tiempo de la estafa global (2014), En el instante del peligro. Postales y souvenirs del viaje hiper-estético contemporáneo (2015), Estética a golpe de like (2016), Estética de la crueldad (2019), And so on and so on. Tres días en las redes con Zizek (2019), Derroteros y naufragios del arte contemporáneo (2019), Filosofía tuitera y estética columnista (2019).
