BACKGROUND
MMAC is an independent artists’ center founded in 2006. It focuses on the artistic development of talented emerging artists from within Barcelona and abroad.
FONDO
MMAC, formerly known as “Mamacuchara”, was established in Poblenou in 2006 by two visual artists. The initiators aimed to create a structure that would meet the need for beginning artists to have direct contacts with colleagues in a professional working environment.
Currently located in the historic Gotic district of Barcelona, Mamacuchara´s loft was born in 2003 when Giovanny stumbled upon a 200 square foot warehouse in the district of Poblenou filled to the brim with objects culled by a local from garage sales, abandoned buildings, and flea markets. In 2010, the space relocated to the Gótic district, where Giovanny Páez remains the Center Director and Curator and is currently working in partnership with BCN L.I.P International Language School as logistical support.
As artist in residence, Giovanny lived in his loft for 7 years. In 2004, he rented a home, and the loft evolved into its current incarnation as a creative hotspot. The center features artists from around the world and embraces and welcomes works of all mediums.
HISTORY & VISSION
MMAC (space for contemporary art and thought) was founded by Giovanny in 2007 and started with an artists’ workshop in Upstate Barcelona in the summer of the same year. The workshop brought together a group of emerging and mid-career artists from Barcelona, Japan, South America and Germany, who spent weeks making work alongside each other. The workshop aimed to provide the artists with space and time to enter into dialogue and exchange ideas, knowledge and skills with each other. As such, the focus of the workshop was directed more towards the process of making work (the process) rather than the product. Today, the centre serves as an exhibition and work space in an international network.
MISSION
Since its inception in late 2006, MMAC the Center for Contemporary Art and Thought has been active in collecting contemporary emerging art and supporting artists in the production of their work.
The Center is dedicated to providing a platform for visual culture between Europe, Asia, Eastern countries and Latin America. Through research and publishing initiatives, support for exhibitions, conferences, educational seminars, the development of its collection, an artists’ research initiative, and an emerging artist’s prize, the Center will develop sustainable forms of cultural dialogue and debate within the region and beyond. The center has been staging regular activity in event production since 2006 with special emphasis on multidisciplinary activities understood as visual projects, theoretical and interdisciplinary creation.
Acknowledging the fact that artistic activity today is increasingly research-based and involved in the processes of knowledge production, the Center (MMAC) Projects Initiative will commission six to ten artists per year to develop and document their research-based activities.
The initiative works to engage the Internet, in partnership with one of the initiatives of the Centre, Format 0 (www.mmacgallery.com), an international network of artists, art centers, galleries, private companies, and new forms of patronage as a generator space to create new artistic and curatorial projects, while also providing a platform to show processes of knowledge production and research involved in creative practices.
THE FOUNDER
CAVANNO Giovanny Páez is an Ecuadorean interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer of contemporary art projects in Europe and abroad. His work also engages different curatorial approaches to site specific performance, action and intervention in the public realm. His projects are often socially engaged and use a combination of participative and collaborative methodologies. Currently, Giovanny focuses her investigations on two areas: networking and Institutional critique; archiving – bio-art “as a representation of power and social issues”.
In 2002, he has been invited as a visiting artist as well as a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Eastern, Western and UK of Kentucky, EEUU.
He has been creator and ideologist of “Format 0” (international exchange platform, reciprocity and collaboration on production, movement and residence for emerging artists). Founder of the Center for Arts and Contemporary Thought MMAC which he is Curator and Director. (Space created for exchange network of exhibition projects.)