Joan Fontcuberta and Andrea Soto Calderón
Tuesday 6 March 2018, 7 pm. Virreina LAB
Free entrance. Limited places

As part of the research into image performativity conducted at the Virreina Lab, we invited Joan Fontcuberta to speak about the genesis, development and current status of a notion in and with which he has been working on for a long time: countervision.
 

Just under a year ago, our small 5-person strong group, that was working with images, began a process of experimentation with this operation. Since then, we’ve not only experimented in the senses proposed by Fontcuberta, but we’ve delved into the research by means of stretching, twisting and desecrating it. Working with a countervision as a means of exercising the poetic indiscipline of looking.

Countervision is a concept proposed by the Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta. He used the concept for the first time in 1977 in an essay published in the journal The Village Cry. He would later try to develop the concept alongside German photographer Andreas Müller-Pohle and Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser. Unfortunately, this project never got off the ground, but enthused by the idea, a few days later, Flusser sent them a preview of a possible essay entitled Counter-vision.

In this short text, Vilém Flusser drew up a challenging vision of photography and its powers in the transformations of our ways of seeing the world. For Fontcuberta, countervision is fundamentally related to a particular type of relationship. It is not about reality and its representation, but the way in which we see things.

What could convey the message of see things differently? What can a project proposing a countervision consist of? What are the links underlining our relationships with what we see? Looks and images that contradict consensual images and which change the senses of what is common.
 

Joan Fontcuberta is a renowned Catalan photographer, teacher, critic, exhibition curator and historian. He won the National Photography Prize in 1998, among many other distinctions. He has been a visiting professor in universities in Spain, France, Great Britain and the United States of America. He has published several books and essays on photography, such as El beso de Judas. Fotografía y Verdad (1997), Ciencia y fricción (1998), La cámara de Pandora (2010) and La furia de las imágenes (2016), among others.

Andrea Soto Calderón, doctor in Philosophy, is currently conducting a research project into the relationship between image and fiction at the University of Paris 8. She works as a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory. Her research projects are based on the transformations of the aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, artistic research, the study of image and media, and the relationship between aesthetics and poetry.