Mallorca translocal meeting

16.06.2013

To talk about WTAF, is to talk about art, to talk about water… finally to talk about feelings. Because water is the symbol of feelings, especially in the tarot cards. In WTAF I keep the emotion in the same memory box as the intellectual experience. All nice people, curios cities, the taste of the food, the hard setting up, all is together in my mind. To remember Sofia is to feel this emotion again, a sweet lacy stress during tree days, with a Bulgarian mixed surrounding.

Sofia is pretty, at night you can feel all this subway water under your feet. It’s like a rumor hard and warm. No matter the weather, the water always runs warm and sweet. I feel comfortable, it reminds me of my hometown, a chaotic city at the Mediterranean coast, near the European border, looking at Africa.

Since 2010 we have been collaborating with IME. In 2011 we presented some projects in Cervantes Institute with the assistance of WTAF, and this year, there are two Mallorcan artists participating in WTAF again, and we are proud of it.

WTAF is warm with the visitors, and it is always close to your heart. It’s professional, an open door for Bulgarian and foreign artists. You can always count on it, that it will be back in Sofia in June, to begin anew, to continue or to find the lost flow. It’s an opportunity for every artist – young, old, west or east. It’s the cup, the golden cup on the lady’s hand.

Last April Sant Marc NGO invited IME NGO to participate in our event Mallorca Translocal Meeting. That involved an introduction of Water Tower Art Fest in an open conference in Joan Miró Foundation in Mallorca. It was an experimental meeting of different initiatives promoted by artists. Twenty artists gathered for a month to create a forum for sharing ideas that involve new management structures and other channels within the field of contemporary art, to develop shared projects and to create a network of contacts that allows the exchange of artists between Mallorca and other countries.

IME fit in it perfectly, better than us Sant Marc with our brief experience in this international, translocal understanding, because no organization aspires to represent a whole country but just the local scene from which it comes. They came to speak, to make projects and installations, to make graphic work, drawing, and exhibit together. For a month, they shared debates, hospitality, and especially the dinner table and the bottle of wine, with artists from the UK, Netherlands, Armenia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Mexico, but also with the local initiatives and artists involved.

Both of the facilities of the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation and the exhibition in the Can Gelabert cultural centre, were quite interesting and valuable not only for the quality of the works, but because they gave us keys to understanding and empathizing with the different perspectives of Europe. That is the goal, a conscious mobility. WTAF offer us the possibility to meet, to understand, to reflect, to feel and of course, to appreciate the variety.

Marcos Vidal Font
Mallorca, Spain June 2013
Sant Marc NGO

Post photo credit: Photo installation “Secret Doing” by Nia Pushkarova at “Translocal Meeting”, Can Gilabert, Mallorca 2013