PUBLIC EVENTS & WORKSHOPS
Having grown up in a small place where the experience of contemporary art was limited, it has become part of my commitment to contribute to make art more accessible to the public. Many of the exhibition projects I participate in involve some form of public engagement activity or collaboration. That may be a live performance or a workshop that uses a practice based, organic learning approach to explore the intersections and associations between images, landscapes of memory and automatic writing.
The Familiar Landscape, Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 2023
Family Archive and Creative Practice, Casa Planas with Casal Solleric, 2023
Rehearsing the Real, Peckham24, 2019
The Familiar Landscape: Cyanotype & Still Life Workshop
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
2023
Devised & led by Erola Arcalís with the support of the Hauser & Wirth learning team, in the collaboration with the Menorcan Art School, this workshop was part of the public program of the exhibition After the Mediterranean.
The Familiar Landscape invited fourty art students to work closely with the landscape for three consecutive days. During that time they were phone-free and were given a notebook to write or sketch instead. They carried with them a picture from their family album where the landscape of Menorca was present. With that image in mind, they were encouraged to collect plants and found objects to produce a series of abstract landscapes using the cyanotype process. The activity took place both in the gallery space - that was adapted to build a darkroom for the students - and in the surrounding area of the small isle where the gallery is located.
![]()
![]()
![]()
Family archive & Creative Practice Workshop
Casal Solleric & Casa Planas, Majorca, 2023
Devised by Erola Arcalís and led in collaboration with Marina Planas, this workshop was part of the public program of the show Flotsam (and other utopias). The activity was organised in the postcards and photography archive of Casa Planas.
Family archive and Creative Practice reflected on what constitutes a family archive. How do we remember a person, object or landscape that no longer exists? Which is the role of archives in enabling the communication between people and their personal and collective histories? This activity open to the general public delved into those questions taking a practical and suggestive approach to archive making and narrating.
Institutions & partners: Institute of Balearic Studies, Casa Planas, Palma Cultura, Palma Council, Casal Solleric.
![]()
Rehearsing the Real: Live collaborative essay Durational Performance
Peckham24, London, 2019
Led by Tom Lovelace, in the context of the group show Rehearsing the Real
Live Collaborative Essay was devised and perfomed in collaboration with artists Joshua Leon, Emma Bäcklund, Ramona Güntert, Steff Jamiesson & Erola Arcalís
Live Collaborative Essay was a durational performance sharing thoughts about image-making and reflections about what constitutes an image in relation to memory and the art practice. An hexagonal temporal structure contained a collection of research and artworks in progress. Chairs were borrowed from the local church, glasses and books were brought from our own studios, and the purposefully unfinished tiled floor was composed of handprinted photograms made for the occasion. The public was invited to join a space of ideas in the making and the process through a live performance, to occupy the seats or read together.
Rehearsing the Real presents a collection of contemporary artworks that seek to unravel and rewind across media including photography, film, performance and text. These acts of unfolding will come in the form of undoing narratives, histories and visual languages. A central element of the exhibition is a live collaborative work that will manifest throughout the duration of the exhibition and will bring together artists Arcalís, Bäcklund, Güntert, Jamieson and Leon within one creative space.
Tom Lovelace
![]()
