February 17–June 11, 2017
International Centre for Contemporary Culture
Donostia-San Sebastián 20012
Spain
T +34 943 11 88 55
info@tabakalera.eus
Curator: Oier Etxeberria (Head of Tabakalera’s artistic projects)
Advisors: Max Jorge Hinderer and Pablo Lafuente
Participating artists: Lorea Alfaro, Ibon Aranberri, Erick Beltrán, Alice Creischer, Ines Doujak & John Barker, Fernando Palma
With works from Otobong Nkanga, Juan Luis Moraza, José Miguel Prada Poole, Jorge Oteiza, Maruja Mallo, Henri Michaux, Mark Lombardi, Nicolás de Lekuona, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Antonin Artaud and Patricia Gadea, as well as photographs, maps and pieces from public and private collections.
The aim of the exhibition Stimulants: Circulation and Euphoria is to explore the stimulants—coffee, sugar, cocoa, tobacco and opium—that began to circulate at global level following the trans-oceanic voyages of discovery that took on special importance in the 15th century. These substances, introduced via the routes that sprang from the process of colonisation and economic expansion, generated a circulation that transformed consumer habits in western societies. Flows of exchanges that ushered in an era in which economic reason came to be considered the foundation for collective life.
Analysis of the geographical routes covered by their trade, their uses in everyday life and their status as active ingredients taken to alter the body are the elements of a study that enables us to think about our place in the contemporary world. The building that houses this project, an old tobacco factory, also has its origin in this web.
Stimulants: Circulation and Euphoria invites the viewer to think about the present on the basis of the image of a network of circulation and relations in which the divisions between the subjective and the objective, the economic and the biological, the individual and their environment, are suspended. An image that could well resemble a nervous system, that other network that runs through us and shapes us.
The exhibition, divided into seven "chapters," brings together specially-commissioned pieces by artists together with other works of art, objects and documents from different public and private collections. It also includes five reference modules with materials generated during the programme of talks, seminars and workshops held as part of this project in the course of 2015 and 2106 at Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture.
