Keep On Playing, by Juan Antonio Cerezuela

Keep On Playing aims to accommodate one of the main issues raised by the P L A Y project developed during the Homesession Exchange residency grant in Belgrade AIR (Serbia). The project employed a personal approach to explore whether it is really possible to stop being an artist, and whether there are other ways of being – or not – in art.

During the residency period, the artist was able to channel this question through basketball, a field completely alien to him that carried to an extreme his relationship and commitment to the reflections raised by the project.

Keep On Playing presents a dialogue that combines reflection, play and performance, addressing several issues surrounding this research: the feeling of loss that occurs when leaving a comfort zone (which in turn originates from a discomfort); the exploration of undefined grey territories of identity (and, therefore, unclassifiable); the implicit relationships between mind and body or between control and lack of control; reflecting through the body; accepting failure, and the idea of recovering play as a lost part of the creative process.

Juan Antonio Cerezuela (Cartagena, 1982)

Based on an interdisciplinary practice, the correlation between language, time and space is always present in Cerezuela’s artistic research. It appears in the form of installations, performances and site-specific intervention projects in which silence, latency, invisibility or illegibility are constantly repeated to reveal a variety of tensions. His work has been exhibited at El Born CCM, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Fabra i Coats, La Espronceda, Fundación Gabarrón (Murcia), CEART (Madrid) and MAC (La Coruña). He was the recipient of the Homesession Exchange residency grant in Belgrade AIR, the ICARM grant for visual artists and La Escocesa experimentation grants. He has been a resident of La Escocesa creation factory since 2018.

Activity in collaboration with Homesession.

Prior registration required at lacapella@bcn.cat (until 16 May)

NOTE FOR THOSE ATTENDING ACTIVITY: Wear comfortable clothing or sportswear.

COLLABORATORS: The activity is in collaboration with members of the basketball team from the Panteres Grogues LGTBI+ & friends sports club in Barcelona.