FUERA DE FOCO, BAPHOTO’S EXPERIMENTAL SECTION
Perhaps one of the most interesting sections at BAphoto 2019, Fuera de Foco (Out of Focus) - sponsored by OMINT - creates a space where photography goes beyond canons, merging with other expressive forms and their formalities.
From William Shakespeare quote, "The whole world will fall in love with the night and stop worshiping the raucous sun", Alfredo Aracil, curator of the section, proposes to make a journey through photography, cinema and literature history focusing on the axis of a common fascination between them: the night as an enigmatic place full of dangers, as a longed and pleasant place, although full of pain and violence.
From there, arranging a sort of plot between the five galleries that compose it - Pasto, 488, El Mirador, Lateral and Acefala -, Aracil explores this theme from the first plaques and exhibitions from the 19th century (perhaps of an amateur composition technique), to Weege or Brassai enigmatic photographs, and then to the photography of the mid-twentieth century (and onwards): where the medium adopts a more personal and intimate tinge.
Alfredo Aracil (Coruña, Spain 1984).
Formed in the Centre of Studies of the Reina Sofia Museum, from 2013 to 2016 he was Project Manager of LABoral Art Centre, Gijón. He has participated in the tenth edition of the Artists and Curators Program of the Torcuato Di Tella University, Buenos Aires, in 2017.
He has curated projects for different spaces and institutions. Among others, it is worth mentioning Hiperobjetos (2014), at the Architects Association of Madrid; What is known and what is intuited (2015), at the Centro Conde Duque in Madrid; Meeting of events (2015), in the Slowtrack Gallery, Madrid, within the framework of the Madrid a3bandas festival; Must feel (2016), with the Los Bragales Collection, in the Old Culture Center Jovellanos Institute of Gijón; Tender buttons (2017), in Salón, Madrid; A therapy that does not cure (2017), in La Verdi, Buenos Aires; or The Bride Naked by Their Bachelors (2018), in Pasto Gallery, Buenos Aires and Ni noble, neither good, nor sacred (2018), in The Goma, Madrid.
In 2017, he presented the winning project of the contest "Se busca comisario": Notes for a destructive psychiatry in the Young Art Room of the Community of Madrid.
In it, the field of mental illness is problematized from aesthetic and political positions that go beyond the clinical space. Currently, he coordinates a working group at the Reina Sofía Museum on policies of discomfort, A possible force.
He writes in magazines of art and film criticism, architecture or political research.
Some of them are Experimenta, Nosotros, El cuaderno, Tendencias, LUMIÈRE, The Mental State, Ajoblanco, El Salto, Atlántica XXII or Other Weekly Part, whose visual arts section co-edits today.
