SLL40800

Learning Outcomes:

Students who successfully complete this module will:

• Have become familiar with key theoretical approaches to materiality and the body for cultural,
social and political analysis.
• Have developed a firm understanding of the diversity and interdisciplinary quality of
contemporary artistic production in Spain.
• Have the capacity to situate critically Spanish cultural production in relation to the most topical
issues shaping contemporary Spain, including sexual politics; migration; memory politics;
cultural heritage and ecology.
• Have the ability to conduct in-depth context-sensitive and theory-informed critical analysis of
contemporary visual and performance art.'

Indicative Module Content:

The following topics will addressed in the module with focus to a range of visual and performance arts:

Week 1:

Introduction

What is a Body?

Week 2:

What is Matter?

Theoretical approaches to corporeality and materiality

Week 3:

Visual Methodologies. Setting the scene: Linear Perspective, the Vitruvian man.

Week 4:

Re-writing Art History´s master narratives: Queridas viejas (2017) by María Gimeno

Week 5:

Appropriating the female body and gaze in Eulàlia Valldosera early 1990s photographic series

Week 6:

Embodying Identity: Sol Picó dances Charlie Chaplin (2008)

Week 7:

Haptic and Optic visuality: Elisa K (2010) by Jordi Cadena and Judith Collell

Week 9:

The matter of sin: the plastic installations of Olga Diego

Week 10:

Displaced bodies and temporalities in Gonzalo Ballester´s videoart Mimoune (2006)

Week 11:

Digital identities: the hologram in ‘La pareja híbrida’ by Alicia Framis (2023)

Week 12:

Cultural heritage, voice and corporeal presence in LBA_04 (2016) by Begoña Egurbide

UNESCO highlights a set of key competencies that support individuals in their development and support society in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). UCD has adapted these competencies and is combining them with others to form a general framework of learning competencies. This module will help you develop the competencies below to the levels specified. 

The United Nations identified seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as core to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and UCD contributes in general to SDG 4 Quality Education. Further SDGs explored within this module if relevant are listed below. A scale of 1 - 5 indicates the extent to which the SDG is covered.


 

Student Effort Hours:

Approaches to Teaching and Learning:

This module is delivered through two consecutive weekly 50-minute lectures. Attendance, active participation and engagement with material and tasks made accessible in Brightspace is crucial for successful engagement with this module.

Students may use AI tools for limited support in this module (e.g. idea generation, practice questions, or as a study aid). However, students remain fully responsible for the accuracy and reliability of their learning. Any use of AI must be cited appropriately.

Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.

Module Requisites and Incompatibles

Not applicable to this module.
 

Assessment Strategy

 

Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 

Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

Advice on assessment tasks will be available in advance and individual feedback will be available post-assessment

Recommended and Compulsory Reading:
Body and Matter in Contemporary Spanish Art and Performance Culture

Bachelard, Gaston (1994) [1969]. The Poetics of Space. Trad. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bal, Mieke. “Migratory aesthetics: Double movement”. Exit, vol. 32 (2008): 150-161.

Barker, Jennifer M. (2009) The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Battista Alberti, Leon “Book One. The Rudiments”, On Painting (22-43).

Best, Susan. (2007). The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta. In Art History, 30:1, 57-82.

Bennet, Jane (2010) Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things. Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press.

Bishop, Claire (2005) Installation Art. London: Tate Publishing.

Bishop, Claire. 2014. "The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: Tate, MoMA, and Whitney." Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 63-76.

Borja-Villel, Manuel and Enguita Mayo, Nuria. (2009). Foreword. In Dependences. (pp. 13-16). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

Braidotti, Rosi (2013) ‘Post-Humanism. Life beyond the Self’.The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press (13-54).

Bru-Domínguez, Eva. (2023) ‘Femisnism and Space: Approaches to Catalan Visual and Contemporary Art’. Asparkía. Revista Feminista, (43): 37-61.

Bru-Domínguez, Eva. (2023) ‘Temporal and spatial displacement: Home in Eulàlia Valldosera’s 1990s artwork’, Compàs d’amalgama, (7): 38–42.

Bru-Domínguez, Eva. (2019) “Embodied memory: Shadow and index in Family Ties by Eulàlia Valldosera. Contaminated and dislocated bodies in Catalan visual and performance cultures”. Journal of Romance Studies (special issue), 19:2 (2019): 263-281.

Bru-Domínguez, Eva & Gaspar Jaén Urban. (2014). Olga Diego. Transgressive Architecture. Bruno, Giuliana (2002) Altas of Emotions. Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. London and New York: Verso.

Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York & London: Routledge.

Burt, Ramsay (2003) ‘Memory, repetition and critical intervention: The politics of historical reference in recent European dance performance’. Performance Research 8:2, 34-1.

de la Villa, Rocío. (2013). En torno a la generación de los noventa. In Vicente Aliaga, Juan and Mayayo, Patricia (Eds.), Genealogías feministas en el arte español: 1960-2010 (pp. 261-284). This Side Up.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2019. "Touch and Gesture: On the Borders of Intimacy." Framework 60 (1): 9-25.

Elsaesser, T. and M. Hagener. 2010. Film Theory. An Introduction Through the Senses. New York: Routledge.

Enguita Mayo, Nuria, Marí, Bartomeu and Valldosera, Eulàlia. (2000). Conversation. In Eulàlia Valldosera. Works 1990-2000 (pp. 19-44). Witte de With.

Antón Capitel (2012) ‘“History of art” by Ernst Gombrich”, Cuadernos de proyectos arquitectónicos, (3), pp. 141–143.

Caradeux, Dinka Acevedo and Luz Gil Salom. 2013. "Social Representation of Gender in Award-Winner Short Films in Spain."
Procedia, Social and Behavioral Sciences 95: 126-135.

Grosz, Elizabeth (2011) Becoming Undone. Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art. Durham University Press.

Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á. (2011) “Out of synch: Visualizing migratory times through video art”. In Art and visibility in migratory culture: Conflict, resistance, and agency, eds. Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, 191-208. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi,.

Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art. Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kraus, Rosalind (1977) ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’. October. 3, 68-81.

Lepecki, Andre (2004) Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Marí, Bartomeu (2009). Actions, objects and devices in the oeuvre of Eulalia Valldosera. In Dependences (pp. 105-115). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Marks, Laura U. (2000) The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Marsh, S. 2014. “Editor’s Introduction. Untimely materialities: Spanish film and spectrality”. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(3): 293-298.

Mayayo, Patricia. (2013). Imaginando nuevas genealogías. Una mirada feminista a la historiografía del arte español contemporáneo. In Aliaga, Juan Vicente and Mayayo, Patricia (Eds.), Genealogías feministas en el arte español: 1960-2010 (pp. 19-50). This Side Up.

McDonald, Helen (2001) Erotic Ambiguities. The Female Nude in Art. London: Routledge

Micu, A.S. (2021). ‘Performance Art’. In Performance Studies: The Basics (pp. 22-44). London: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1999) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ The Routledge Reader in Gender and Perfomance. (296-301).

Nead, Lynda (2006 [1992]) The Female Nude. Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge.

Martí-Olivella, J. 2014. ‘Historical Memory and Family Metaphor: New Catalan Documentaries’. Journal of Catalan Studies, 53-71.

Pakes, Anna (2020) Choreography Invisible. The Disappearing Work of Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pollock, Griselda (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London & New York: Routledge.

Pollock, Griselda. (1999) Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Art’s Histories. Routledge.

Pollock, Griselda and Rozsika Parker (2013 [1980]) Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London; I.B. Tauris.

Pujol, Anton and Jaume Martí Olivella (2024) Catalan Cinema. The Barcelona School and the New Avant-Garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Roche, Jennifer, 2015, Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer. Moving Identities, Queensland, Queensland University of Technology.

Sobchack, V. 1992. The Address of the Eye. Princetown: Princetown University Press.

Sontag, S. 1979. On Photography. Hamordsworth: Penguin.

Vitruvius, Marcus (1 BC) Vitruvius. The Ten Books on Architecture. Book III, Chapter 1, ‘On Symmetry: In Temples and in the Human Body’. Trans. Morris Hicky Morgan.

Westgeest, Helen (2016) Video Art Theory. A Comparative Approach. Wiley Balckwell: Malden, Oxford and Chichester)

Timetabling information is displayed only for guidance purposes, relates to the current Academic Year only and is subject to change.