Madrid, October 68

In autumn of 2018, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire will inaugurate the first exhibition in France dedicated to the Spanish experimental scene of the 1960s and 1980s. The retrospective portrays the incredible adventure of the University of Madrid’s Computing Center, which brought together artists, architects, engineers, scientists and intellectuals to explore the possibilities offered by automatic computer generated calculation. These pioneers formed a community whose—collective—experience working at the crossroads of art and computing asserted a different form of artistic production between disciplines. 

The first computer at the Spanish university made its appearance in 1968, marking the beginning of the Computing Center’s activities. After decades of cultural isolation, artists, architects and musicians began reflecting on the uses of computers within their creative processes. The Computing Center became the most significant space for creative freedom at the end of the dictatorship, thus asserting itself as a collective structure for experimentation, in a context where gathering together “had a special, almost subversive meaning.”

The immunity provided by the seemingly non-ideological aura of technology allowed the Center to unleash unprecedented momentum for Spanish innovation that remained in a continual gestation. Following the double rupture: the collapse of the cultural bloc imposed by the political regime and the erasing of boundaries between different creative fields, new forms of expression and experimentation were unlocked.

By building “bridges between the real world and a totally virtual imaginary world,” the Computing Center opened up writing to broader horizons of experimentation such as music, and visual arts that drew inspiration from the new linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky’s (generative grammars) and Max Bense’s aesthetics of information, as much as the legacy of Spanish experimental poetry.

The exhibition exhaustively displays the historical work of Javier Seguí de la Riva, and forms the necessary corpus to understand the context of the period and the links to works by architects and artists that permanently questioned the cohabitation between the imaginary and experimental. The moving forms of Jose Luis Alexanco, stand alongside the impossible figure of José María Yturralde, dialoguing with the poetry of Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and Guillermo de Searle.

This first exhibition in France, at Frac Centre-Val de Loire introduces the Spanish experimental scene of the 1960s and 1980s into a European and American landscape of radicalism, through the prospective of a utopian architecture—Radical Architecture from Italy, Visionary Austrian Architecture, English Pop Architecture or the Prospective Vision in France.

Curators:
Mónica García Martínez (architect, architectural historian and teacher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia)
Abdelkader Damani (director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire) 

Contact communication:
Frac Centre-Val de Loire: Marine Bichon, marine.bichon@frac-centre.fr
Communic’art agency: Anaïs Tridon, atridon@communicart.fr