Lucía Antonini

1. What made you choose art as a profession?
I don’t think you choose art as a profession; it’s an activity you do because you need it. In Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s words, “we’re artists because we are”. I see art as another way of searching for knowledge and personal and social development. I think it should be a natural attitude for everyone, but first we need to rethink our existing language that boxes it into places where it doesn’t belong.

2. How would you define your work?
I don’t like to define what I do as work. I’d rather talk about my activity, my action. My activity consists in trying to turn what we call reality or ‘normal’ on its head to reveal certain paradoxes in our understanding of things.
This is linked to relational aesthetics, the philosophy of John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Monty Python, Duchamp, the Situationists and the Fluxus, Zaj, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina…

3. What subjects are you interested in?
I’m interested in identity, systems of knowledge, popular culture, language, society and the relationships we strike up between ourselves. In short, the invisible networks that make up our cultural systems.

4. What resources – formal or otherwise – do you use in your work?
Some of the resources I use include: borrowing established, recognised communication formats, mining everyday life for most of the keys I work with, the ambiguity of language, which is simply the reflection of the complexity of reality, humour…

5. What relationship does your work have with reality? What are your raw materials?
I think this question contains its own answer. I think that over the course of history, art has always tried to strike up different relationships with reality.

My relationship with reality is constant questioning; I work to create conflict with what we understand by ‘reality’. Its limits are never fixed, but mould the vision of each and every one of us and our specific context. This is what I like to show. Nevertheless, I think this is true of art in all times. Personally, I feel close to the relational art of the 1990s, which included reality itself as a format, with its dynamics, social relations, rules, systems of knowledge… These ‘places’ that shape our knowledge of reality, our identity, etc. are my raw materials.

6. What, according to you, is the point of art?
“Metaphysics, theology, science and art are no more than ‘useful fictions’” (Allan Kaprow, using Hans Vaihinger’s term). I think this quote expresses my idea of the usefulness of art. Together with other areas, which may appear to be totally opposing, such as science, at the end of the day, I think these are all constructions of reality that help stop us getting bored with ourselves.

7. How do you hope the public will receive your work? What audience are you aiming at?
I don’t believe in the existence of an audience. As Armando Montesinos says in reference to Allan Kaprow’s work, “work is a ‘conversation’ between people who aren’t ‘the artist’ and ‘the audience’, but members of a community.

8. What qualifications have you got? What do you value most from your time in education?
I studied at the Department of Fine Art at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. I then took two doctorate courses and carried out research into new concepts of ‘time’ linked to new technologies of the image – all from work by artists, mostly in the field of painting or drawing. I also spent time at the Fine Art Academy in Munich with an Erasmus scholarship. After university, I attended several art workshops with Nacho Criado, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Joan Fontcuberta, etc. and travelled around Spain, getting involved in different projects to get to know what was happening in other cities. I also value my experience with art collectives like Artistasdeguardia, ACA and Latejedoraccec, amongst others.

I keep a close eye on work by communication companies linked to creativity and culture, like Amasté, Zemos98 and YP, to name but a few. The time after graduation is what I value most.

9. How would you define your current professional situation? And in the future?
At the moment, autumn 2010, I find myself passing from one phase to another. I’ve felt happy doing certain things and after a period of reflection I’m working on new ideas.

I’m weighing up the possibility of spending some time abroad. I think it would do me good to see other forms of action that aren’t as clearly marked out as in Europe. I want to continue exploring the lines of action I’ve started.

10. Many artists say it’s difficult to make a living from their work; how do economic considerations affect you when it comes to work? Do you think this has a bearing on your work?
How to make a living is a creative act for anyone and it’s clearly difficult yet necessary to combine this with art work. I can’t currently live off my artistic activity and I work part-time in cultural management at a small art foundation. Until now I’ve found it good to have a certain degree of economic stability to work on art without economic pressure and enjoy more freedom in my ideas, without having to link them to the market. However, I don’t travel as much as I’d like. Even so, I’d like to find a formula for making a living without having to have a parallel job.

11. What do you look for or expect from your relationship with promoters and curators? What advantages and difficulties have you found with these relationships?
I’ve always had very positive relationships with promoters and curators. If there’s a good connection, it can be very enriching for both sides. The main advantage is that work is divided up, and as an artist I don’t have to worry about management, which I really appreciate. And if there’s a dialogue on the work, new ideas can come up. The important thing for me in these relationships is to try and get a greater understanding of artistic work in itself.

12. What do you think sets the arts scene in Madrid apart from elsewhere? What would you say are its pluses and minuses?
I think there’s a lot of creative movement being generated in Madrid. There are more and more independent movements, individual or collective initiatives on the fringes of any institutional or market dependency.
This is the real breeding ground for creativity, art and thought. There are more and more self-managed places that make a lot of effort to run their activities, since there isn’t enough support from the government, but they’re there anyway.

There’s a lot of artistic movement in Madrid; what’s missing is getting out on the street more and joining forces, leaving behind the competitive ethos that swamps the art world, to support each other instead of trying to outdo each other, which is the more negative side to the Madrid scene. This is something that sets it apart from other cities where there is greater collaboration between people doing the same thing, but where there’s less cultural activity.

From the institutional point of view, considerable effort is being made in Madrid too. But institutions have a major problem in the form of their bureaucracy, which makes them rigid structures that are difficult to activate as much as we’d like. I think that institutions are obliged to position themselves as cogs for connecting and expanding everything that comes out in other spaces, independent places, the street, the internet, etc. and becoming more permeable to everything.