Today is Tàpies: Remei Sipi – Erick Beltrán
Today is Tàpies is a series of conversations across generations and disciplines, led and moderated by arts journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997) and organised by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It sets out to interpret the artist’s texts as a starting point to discuss current issues such as environmentalism, self-determination for peoples, interculturality and the political commitment of art.
The series will encourage people to think about the artist’s words and thoughts though thirteen events at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies involving people from a range of professional backgrounds (arts, education, science, politics, the environment, health and life sciences) and different generations. Altogether it will construct a polyphonic dialogue that will be recorded in podcast form thanks to cooperation with Catalunya Ràdio, in order to recover and experience the knowledge generated in a different format and a different context.
Chapter 8: Activism from the sidelines
Tàpies celebrates the moment when Europe finally comes up against “other cultures up to then considered savage that shifted the hitherto untouchable centre of gravity away from the shattered humanism of Europe for good.” The artist was clear that looking beyond Europe did not mean fleeing, and that in the art of some communities described as backward there was useful wisdom for modernity. In this conversation, Remei Sipi and Erick Beltrán will be discussing why some western values still seem untouchable to us and some forms of cultural expression are regarded as exotic, taking as a starting point Antoni Tàpies’ thoughts on the Eurocentric bias in the art world and about the colonial inheritance in our culture.
