S/T mapa de relacions / Untitled map of relationships

S/T mapa de relacions is an online interactive work built from information extracted from the Fundació Suñol library catalogues on some of the renowned artists in the Suñol Soler Collection, past or present.

Antònia del Río has made an exhaustive reading of this material to link up artists who knew one another personally, according to the sources. The map also includes information normally associated with the private realm such as the artist’s family status; whether or not they had sons or daughters and whether the names of their progeny are known; and whether their parents were artists.

(You can navigate in the relationship map, click on the different names of the artists to display the information and see the links between them)

Art history habitually uses artists’ biographies to weave a narrative which justifies aspects of their work such as style, technique, language or chosen themes. An artist’s biography thus contributes to a certain extent to constructing the idea of the artist as genius; and the artist’s work is often explained by their life.

This proposal by Antònia del Río also sets up relationships between the private and public realm of the artist’s life. Here, however, this does not serve to reinforce a laudatory discourse, but to signal everyday aspects that are often ignored. In highlighting personal information and focusing particularly on the artists’ paternity, a crack opens up through which we can imagine its implications in the careers of these men, free as they were of institutional obstacles.

Antònia del Río uses this strategy to build a dialogue with renowned artists through which they can be seen through a less reverential lens, and the ideological foundations of certain narratives can be questioned, reminding us that the private is also political.

This project is complemented by the intervention Una poètica de l’ús: fer servir la biblioteca, a site-specific project open for viewing at the Fundació Suñol in which Antònia del Río invites us to immerse ourselves in the pages of selected books, to question categories and encounter a wide variety of possible counter-narratives.

S/T mapa de relacions / Untitled map of relationships 

3D digital interactive work

Made by: Laura del Río, Oriol Sala