Until May 15 the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, “Marx Lounge” is presented in the CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo). The conceptual site invites visitors to reflect on the political and philosophical ideas that have come up over the past centuries and their validity in understanding our present.

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago de Chile, in 1956. Architect and filmmaker, he started in art in the late seventies as an engraver, sculptor and installer. Thanks to a grant, he based in New York and began to develop an internationally recognized career.

Member of the current conceptual art, he was part of the Chilean avant-garde movement with a visual proposal that questioned art as a communication platform to approach the social space. Starting in the 80′s, his work was characterized by the rejection of racial, social and economic discrimination that dominated the world.

With a camera in his hand he has shot poverty, hunger, war, the agony of AIDS and racial and social discrimination, to reflect on the power and the media that trivializes and perverting by simplifying everything.

His facilities are short and the viewer is invited to be part of the work, to transform their passive role in active. That’s what he searches in his work “Marx Lounge“, where the space invites the viewer to enter a huge archive of reading material focused on Marx’s and other theorists, philosophers and writers philosophical, political, economic and human ideas. The installation is a reading room where the viewer can sit and read, rethink the importance of Marx and Marxism in the context of globalization. Jaar intended to provoke the viewers by taking them closer to a school of thought that dominated the progressive minds of the twentieth century.

The work consists of a large room where there is a huge table full of books, walls and floor painted in red, alluding to the ideology printed in hundreds of books by Marx, works by Slavoj Žižek, Stuart Hall, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Fredric Jameson, Pierre Bourdieu, Frantz Fanon, etc.

One of the latest works by Alfredo Jaar, “The Geometry of Consciousness”, was dedicated to the memory of the disappeared and executed by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet and is on permanent exhibition at the Museo de la Memoria de Chile, created to keep alive the debate on the massive violations of human rights that occurred after the 1973 coup.

For further info http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/cultura/caac/programa/jaar11/frame.htm

Nancy Guzman

If you are in Seville you can visit the work “Marx Lounge” at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, an interesting conceptual work by Alfredo Jaar that challenges us to review the thought and understand that the great philosophers are beyond time, that their ideas are valid when they speak of justice and equality although we are repeated every day that they are obsolete. Then go to enjoy a little less intellectual pleasure in Seville accommodation

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Translated by: Maria
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The Birkebeinerrennet is a legendary, marathon ski race which takes place once a year in Norway, with around 12,000 participants running the 54km of land between Rena and Lillehammer.

Each contender must carry a bag with a weight of at least 3.5kg. This rule has symbolic significance, as it refers to the weight of King Haakon IV The Elder when, as a baby, he was saved by two warriors called Skevla and Skrukka in around 1206, after successive civil wars had ravaged the country. The race is held in honour of the King’s rescue, and commemorates his royal career, which is known for the successful unification of Norway, and is shrouded in mystery and legend, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

Speaking of stories – there is an old tale, well-known all down the coast of Northern Europe at the time, about the seals that took off their skins to reveal themselves as beautiful youths that danced nude in the sand. One day, a young prince snuck up on them, and robbed one of their skins so that it’s owner wasn’t able to return to the ocean. The Prince married her, and they had children, but she never stopped looking for her seal-skin, which her husband had hidden from her. Until one hot day, one her children came up to her and exclaimed, “Oh, Mother look at this strange thing I have found in the old chest, it’s smoother than snow.” The woman-seal snatched the skin, and putting it on immediately, took off towards the beach, and with one deep dive, she was lost forever in the cold waters of the sea.

It’s possible King Haakon’s daughter Kristina Haakonardóttir, (1234-1262),who’s eyes changed colour with the skies, had heard this story as a story a little girl. It’s almost as though she ended up suffering a similar type of melancholia, when she had to leave her home country to marry in Castile (for reasons of empire, dynasty, and the state – little to do with love) – to Felipe, an old knight, brother of Alfonso X, and author of the Great General History, a wonderful mix of history, myth and legend.

The beautiful, unfortunate princess ended her short life, a few years later in Seville. She didn’t have any children to show her the way out of her troubles.

After extensive research, novelist Espido Freire has retold this story, from first person, in Flower of the North, her latest book.

Paul Oilzum

Not a bad book to take with you to your rented apartments in Seville where you can read about the Norwegian princess who died from sadness.

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Translated by: Poppy
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