This anthology introduces the writing and the textual work, alongside the poetry and curatorial and graphic design, of the artist-curator Raymundo Albano. It addresses the concerns of Albano in the intersecting fields of the creative, the critical, the cultural, and the curatorial. It is to these that Albano speaks: the discourse and practice of art making and instilling it with presence in the world of ideas, exhibitions, and the particularities of lived life. This is the ecology of the writing, its province.
In Albano’s agenda, roots, basics, beginnings (taken from an eponymous exhibition in 1977) matter, and primarily because they constitute the material through which process or method takes place. Whatever may be inferred or alluded to or intuited in the long duration of the creative struggle emerges from lineage, technology, and origin. Whether critique comes in to complicate or interactions intervene, the “intelligence” of the material cannot be severed from the “integrity” of the lifeworld from which it is generated and through which such lifeworld is reinvested. Some would call this “context,” others would say it is “impulse” or “urge.” Whatever it is that may be brought to our attentiveness as that which excites what we broadly reference as art, it should stir up a world that is, in the imagination of Albano, “suddenly turning visible,” a condition quite akin to Michel Foucault’s “sudden vicinity of things.”
Download the accompanying book Raymundo Albano: Texts here.
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Undated
