The Bòlit Mentor poses a reflection on roles and audiovisual impact

2023-05-06 19:30:05

Fully immersed, as a society, in the both uncertain and promising era of artificial intelligence, the Bôlit Mentor bet to reflect on what is the role of the image in the present and the future of humanity through an open dialogue with open eyes. The Bòlit Pou Rodó de Girona welcomes from this Saturday morning, and until June 4, Where are the images supported?an exhibition that, despite its interrogative title, seeks to generate more debate than answers. It is the result of the 2022/2023 academic year of the educational project promoted by the Girona Contemporary Art Center in co-production with the Casa de la Paraula de Santa Coloma de Farners and which this year has been curated by Martha Daho.

Erik Estany Tigerström, Roc Herms, Núria Nia and Bárbara Sánchez Barroso they were the artists who worked with the high school students Josep Brugulat from Banyoles, Santiago Sobrequés from Girona, Carles Rahola from Girona and Castell d’Estela from Amerrespectively, in the configuration of four different visions born from the dynamics of interdisciplinary work, which have allowed them to explore the material dimension of the images and address reflection processes in relation to automatisms that mark their production.

“For this course I proposed to work around images and the role they have in today’s society starting from two premises: On the one hand, that in this world in which we have an overabundance of visual products we tend to forget about the environmental impact that they have and on the other hand, that what comes out of a screen is not just an image» explains Marta Dahó about this year’s educational and creative project. According to the commissioner, one of the objectives was “to help perceive the image not so much as an object but also as a process which serves to understand things, which generates certain ways of relating to us, which can give us the ability to imagine or immerse us in much more automated temperaments».

Through the sharing of experiences and situations, the students have opened spaces for questioning and research within the project. A project whose main purpose is to respond to a double need: to know the trade-offs involved in the growing use, production and dissemination of images and, at the same time, to be able to calibrate the effects of this mediation on the ecosystem that allows us to live .

From the popular memes to the forests of Amer

Where is the image supported? propose a route articulated through the four areas worked by the artists. This way, the sample starts with a selection of memes. Through this popular resource, Roc Herms and the students of Santiago Sobrequés de Girona have addressed the life of the institute, the uncertainties of the future and the uncertainty of the working world.

Artificial intelligence has been the tool on which the students of Josep Brugulat de Banyoles have focused their research with Erik Estany Tigerström, focusing on the image generation models from texts and how they are conditioning the ability to imagine.

Collection of images created with artificial intelligence ANIOL CLOSED

For her part, Núria Nia suggested to the students of Carles Rahola in Girona to select what they would save from the Internet before un imminent col·lapse digitalforcing the students to question the supports on which the fragile digital memory is supported.

Finally, the project of the artist Bárbara Sánchez Barroso starts from the excursions with the students of Castell d’Estela d’Amer through the forests of the municipality of Selva, discovering all that can happen when cellphones are turned off and the only recording tool is an old 16mm camera. With this idea, the students were forced to flee from the immediacy that social networks grant us to reconnect with nature that surrounds us

To complement this project, which has resulted a film and a series of photographs captured with analog cameras, the artist from Lleida suggested several readings with texts by writers such as Ursula K. Le Guinwhich talks about the fact that «we have become accustomed to seeing the past with this male rhetoric of the spear and the hunt, often ignoring fruit gathering or quiet conversations, which would be the more feminine side.’