PARALLEL LIVES / UNLIVED MEMORIES
SECOND ROUND / ALTERMODERN

After redefining the project as a biennial travelling show, this year we are presenting a new proposal in order to establish the ground rules and direction, which will set the standard. With curators from various European countries forming part of Young Artists from Europe, parallel activities have been created to stimulate debate within artistic and educational circles on the future of art in all its forms. The diversity of languages used by these young people to express themselves shapes a network for exchanging ideas and artistic manifestations, which circulate freely, without borders, and offer a panoramic vision of creation coming out of European art schools and centres.

From the respective cities that are part of this inter-European connection network of knowledge and the arts, the young artists we are presenting are in the process of making the transition from academia to society, since their training is coming to an end and their professional and artistic careers are just beginning. They are consequently unspoiled and somewhere between cult artists and “concealed” artists, between the valued and the valuable, between products and the precious. Questioning the function of art outside commercial channels and supposing that creative praxis is a selfish attitude that emotionally exists thanks to the artist, we want to bring things that are developing in education centres out into the light. We have engaged in an enriching dialogue with teaching staff, who have endowed the selection with an artistic versatility that accomplishes the conceptual proposal: a social reflection on the mundaneness and mimicry surrounding us.
As we approach the end of the first decade of this century, we are now presenting several young artists who are just setting out on their journey across the choppy seas of contemporary art and who are experiencing not only the first economic crisis but also an ethical and aesthetic crisis of society itself; in some ways it is symbolic of what they are forced to live through and the intangible desires of their own oneiric existence, in other words, those of their dreams. They offer us paradoxical views that embrace issues ranging from an examination of history to the mundaneness of recollections that can be expressed as something unlived. It is an ambitious proposal because of the huge potential to interiorise the emotions that prevail within us, which they examine from totally disparate angles and perspectives in line with their individual interests.

Immersed in social ups and downs and the rise in the amount of information that circulates in a sort of new universalism, they experience a constant rise in existential qualms. In addition to the migrations of cultural habits and thoughts, and in a context of multiculturalism and a mishmash of identities at the same time, they develop the potential for a new vision of contemporary art, an altermodern, like a melting pot of interpretations and artistic approaches that are more universal. And the young artists do all of this from their respective geographical locales of identity and reference.
In this edition we are considering a reflection on our lives and the reinterpretations made of this by these young novices, who are transforming the landscape of their dreams into another means of seduction (or flight).