2015 - 2021
Encura is a curatorial research residency programme resulted from the collaboration among Hangar, hablarenarte:, Curators’ Network and La casa encendida.
Encura is a research residency program for curators that aims to encourage, expand and complexify the curatorial research process, intertwining the artistic contexts of Madrid and Barcelona, providing the ideal material conditions to avoid a curatorial approach understood as a pure production of exhibitions. Encura is a program that for four editions was led by Hangar in collaboration with hablarenarte and Curators Network, and that in its fifth edition reinvents itself in a new joint modality with La Casa Encendida to promote the mobility, professionalization and internationalization of Spanish or foreign curatorial researchers based in Spain.
Since its first edition, Encura is been intended as a proposal not necessarily resultant, that puts in value the processes of research and exchange that do not attend exclusively to the exhibition format as a horizon for the materialization of curatorial research. One of its objectives is to support curatorial researches and promote territorial cooperation in the generation and transfer of knowledge, and art’s ways of doing.
Encura infers curatorial research as a political-affective space that summons its own values, questions, languages and possibilities. Its porosity and capacity to entangle with other agents and practices, imagining polyphonic narratives and actions, from the theoretical and the sensitive, always in a being-with and doing-with-others, also implies an ethical-political methodology in itself, which in turn, allows to question ways of doing and producing. As a specific and situated curatorial research device, Encura is based on the coexistence, collaboration, dialogue and interdependence between the Madrid and Barcelona contexts, which aims to work on research methodologies that challenge the hierarchies and logics of production of proprietary and individualized knowledge. Encura promotes the overflow of disciplines, and slowed down and non-productivist times of exchange and research, enabling the adequate material conditions for an investigative process to have the solidity and degree of experimentation necessary to develop curatorial projects relevant to their contexts, and that respond to the questions and urgencies of the moment in which we live and work.
Projects by Program
Throughout the months of January-March 2021, Núria Gómez Gabriel has carried out her curatorial research project Iban oscuro por entre las sombras within the framework of the Encura V grant, organized by Hangar, La Casa Encendida and hablarenarte. A collective exploration device that has been deployed through three days of nightly coexistence with artists Ángela Millano and Blanca G. Terán (aka dj_Sônia), Raquel G.
Itinerant Actions is a research project investigating both the critical dialogue between art and geography through fieldwork and the geographies of artistic practice in the landscape, to develop new research models in peripatetic practice, itinerant working, outposts and databases. Fieldwork in artistic practice is an interesting new research strand, as preliminary thinking and making often goes undocumented or is edited-out from final work.
Project which recovers one of the art strategies conceived by Lucy Lippard at the end of the 1960s, called “Suitcase shows” which consisted in the act of carrying artworks in her suitcase from one country to another. This project, though, adds to Lippard’ strategy the concept of smuggling and connects it with the idea of threatening borders and their control devices.
Conspiracy theories are the new legends. In recent years this phenomenon has replaced the traditional concept of popular storytelling, reinforced by scientific pretensions in the search for truth (which is out there). Chemtrails is a curatorial project that investigates the narrative potential of contemporary art, especially in relation with popular culture.
