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Maintenance

Curated by Mana Pinto

Art Nou 2024 Emerging Art Festival Barcelona

Espai Souvenir

Opening June 19th - 7.30pm

From June 19th to July 15th 2024

​Open by appointment: espai.souvenir@gmail.com 

Maintenance is a project by artist Cristina Reid that investigates the role of archiving, image-keeping, and care in the age of oversaturation, overprescription, and extreme polarisation. The exhibition consists of a constellation of found images, videos, and textiles, and explores the ways in which collective narratives are constantly and repetitively reinforced by the images and information we consume and replicate.

Reid’s work is in direct conversation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, which theorises that society operates on two fundamental systems: development and maintenance. Development is linked to the avant-garde, individuality, and innovation, while maintenance

encompasses tasks of preservation, reinforcement, repetition and care. The manifesto posits that development is valued over maintenance as it facilitates linear growth and progress, prioritised by a capitalist system. Meanwhile, maintenance work, just as essential, is often overlooked, underpaid and undervalued. The work reframes maintenance as a concept, specifically its fundamental role in keeping current social, environmental and political structures in place, and investigates its long-term psychological and generational effects.

Reid explores this two-system division by situating her practice alongside that of the maintenance worker. She collects, organises, repositions, and repurposes narratives by working from a personal collection of found images, thereby questioning the role of the archive in determining which imagery endures over time and sustains our collective histories. She proposes an alternative constellation that plays with image, text, object and the liminal space between these language structures. Images and fabrics are interlaced to explore new possible ways of telling our stories. Images are repeated, copied, translated, cut, placed, dis- placed. Woven into fabrics that are hand-sewn into repeating patterns, washed, folded, used and reused.

In an attempt to bridge the historical to the contemporary, Reid transfers found images onto second-hand textiles to generate dialogues between the past and present, the public and private, and the individual and the collective experience. What does the private and quiet history of maintenance work look like amidst the clamor of a supposed unstoppable progress?

Cristina Reid (New York, 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. She has a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Syracuse University where she co-curated various exhibitions at the university art galleries. She has a diploma from Metàfora Studio Arts Program in Barcelona where she participated in group shows at FOC, Mutuo Centro de Arte, and Galería Joan Prats. Her video work has been exhibited during Loop Festival (Barcelona 2022), 200 Cent (Barcelona, 2023) and at Sala Equis (Madrid, 2023. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Artistic Production and Research at the University of Barcelona, and is a studio resident at Tangent Projects.

Activities:
- 28th June 2024 – 8pm / Performance

- 9th July 2024 – 7.30pm / Collective Archive Building workshop

Text by Mana Pinto

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 Cristina Reid 

© 2024

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