The publication A Través de la Arena (Across the Sand) has been created to come to the rescue of the public programmes that were linked to the exhibition of the same name that took place at CentroCentro between 20 February and 03 May 2020, but was hijacked by the pandemic.

Two periodicals from different regions and ways of doing things: Arena and Zehar –which were both launched in 1989– act as a starting point for a series of questions relating to editorial and institutional production, but above all to art. Language, identity and difference will be the tools they use to challenge the consensus and the lack of memory that characterised the 1990s: that “system of positive echoes”, as Miren Eraso, the editor of Zehar, would say, that suffered from “absolute majority syndrome", as Arena’s Mar Villaespesa would add. A post-modern narrative that emerges after four decades of autarchy, a moment in which feminism lays its foundations and another time is configured –that of plurivocity and polymorphy–, inaugurating the new task of culture as regards metaphor, aphorism or gesture as possible formulas with which to tackle the long road of precariousness and provisionality that begins in the year that marks the "end of history" and the birth of the Internet.

The publication introduces that short-lived desire to "Make and Be Public" in a text written by its curator, Laura Vallés Vílchez. It is followed by an essay that deciphers the processes that shaped a series of reading workshops entitled "Fadaiat", that were run by Noemí de Haro, Inés Molina and Lola Visglerio. These workshops are based on the idea of landscape as a catalyst for an exchange that allows us to imagine the "sought-after deserts" and the "forced deserts" of the 1980s and 1990s - such as those proposed in the article "The Dolphin and the Submarine" by Mar Villaespesa three decades ago - but also the deserts of today that sediment, or those that are blown away by the wind. After "A Narrated Visit" to the exhibition, "An Encounter through the Sand" ensues with José Díaz Cuyás, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Olga Fernández López and Maider Zilbeti, in which they discuss the practices of publishing and curating with the curator, as well as the points of friction that have defined a modernity under construction while at the same time hybridising their will to achieve a critical mass, which is presented in the visual essay based on "Miren Eraso’s work in Zehar” following three decades of thinking about publishing in a collaborative way. From images to words and from words to images: a first step towards communication. A transfer, movement or translation on which Jon Mikel Euba has been working for twenty years and whose pedagogical methodology by way of a performative editing exercise brings this edition to a close. Its title, our premise: "Simultaneous or Consecutive... Let's Continue!”.

EDITED BY: Laura Vallés Vílchez
YEAR: 2020
FORMAT: 12 x 18 cm
PAGES: 264
LANGUAGES: Spanish / English
ISBN: 978-84-18299-07-0
PUBLISHED BY: CentroCentro