Jose Antonio Vega Macotela

The ballade of the qaqchas

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, The Academy of Fine Art

Images on digital platforms, such as Instagram, are cumulative, a tsunami of information, a succession of snapshots, which are not a means of telling but of informing. In the information age, there is no vacuum; the aim is for everything that has been experienced to be retrieved. If everything that has been experienced is available, if everything is memorable, there are no memories because human memory is selective and different from the pure accumulation of information. Memory sometimes dilates or shortens time intervals, skips years and decades, and presents gaps and voids, but in its apparent fragmentation, it creates meaning and spins its pieces like a narrative, being much more than the sum of its parts.


During my three-year stay in Oslo, I realized that in addition to what a museum usually exhibits, there is an invisible narrative that I am interested in developing —adventures, dialogues, ideas, and other stories that occur in such a community. I am interested in the idea of narration instead of the mere accumulation of information, as storytelling allows us to relate more intimately and deeply to abstract ideas and events. From these reflections, I added an extra layer to my work, an "experimental fairy tale" narrated from drawings and verses wich method I would like to share in this forum.

Antonio Vega Macotela among other Fellowships and residencies has been a fellow Resident of The Rijksakademie Van Beldende Kunsten, PH. Dthe National academy of art in Oslo, and  the ETH in Zurich.He has exhibited his work in international venues such as the 23th and 34th Sao Paulo Biennial, the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Second Triennial of the New Museum in NY, Manifesta 9 in Genk Belgium, Prospect 3 in New Orleans, dOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel, the Center Pompidou’Metz and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles among others. 

 


Presentations

Artistic Research Forum

This talk concerns narrative and accumulation of information as layers in Artistic research.