Initiated in 2013 by Andrea Rodríguez Novoa, Veronica Valentini, and Juan Canela, BAR project is a curator-run organization supporting local and international artists and curators and promoting transdisciplinary dialogue, hospitality, collaboration, and exchange. “Drinking while walking while hosting while thinking while making together” is the leitmotiv of BAR project, which takes its name from the popular and social gathering place in southern European culture in order to recontextualize it, and to be able to work and practice (reflection-in-action) in a flexible, informal, and critical way. This working condition and status goes beyond the bar extending curatorial practice into working in the public realm and takes the city of Barcelona as a public project space. Through a public program of international residencies, screening programs, pedagogical formats (BAR TOOL and BAR module), encounters, and collaborations related to a leading topic, BAR’s curatorial practice aims to highlight relevant subjects in the current political, social, and economic paradigm.

Last May 6 and 7, 2016, BAR project organized The Right to Be Unhappy. On the Politics of Control of Human Behaviour and the Psychotropification of Society, a two-day event of cinema, performance, and discussion among practitioners of care from art to psychiatry, at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation and French Institute, Barcelona. The two days of events were developed according to BAR project's 2016 curatorial program exploring the politics of control of human behavior. In addition to guests like Montserrat Rodriguez, Virginia García del Pino, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Dora García, Mathilde Villeneuve, Alexandra Baudelot, Josep Rafanell i Orra and Carles Guerra, the spring group of BAR project residents composed of curator Florencia Portacarrero and artists Warren Neidich and Valentina Desideri were also invited to work within this framework.

The following conversation among BAR project curators Veronica Valentini and Juan Canela and artist Valentina Desideri revolves around care, hospitality, independence, or institutionalization. The conversation was recorded at Bar La Farigola (Barcelona) in July 2016 and was recently updated. We were drinking cañas, tomato juice, and water.

Valentina Desideri: What was your first interest in working with The Right to Be Unhappy?

Veronica Valentini: At the beginning of the project The Right to Be Unhappy, there was the invitation from Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Mathilde Villeneuve, Alexandra Baudelot, and Dora Garcia, to work together on an edition of Les Printemps des Laboratoires. Their research revolved around the concept of “psychotropification de la société,” about the general use and abuse of medicine by contemporary society, and we turned it toward the politics of control of human behaviour and extended it to our curatorial program, looking for a sort of common ground on which to discuss and share it with the artistic and curatorial practice of our residents. Having experienced your Political Therapy at the Kunstverein Amsterdam in 2013, I thought it would be the kind of practice essential for this project.

Juan Canela: Before that, we worked around the topic of how to live together, reflecting and focusing on alternative ways of living and working together. We invited artists like Alex Martinis Roe, Christian Nyampeta, and Maria Guggenbichler. So this subject around the politics of control of human behaviour in society relates in some way to the previous one, and this is the way we try to articulate our program, working with a new subject that relates with the previous and with the next. As a curated residency program, we curate more time than space, so we are very interested in this kind of “subject-relation.” So we decided to bring the “psychotropification de la société” into our field and work with it from different perspectives, expanding the topic to issues such as meditation, measures of control in society, and how we can also work these kinds of things in other way, and here is where the notion of care was important.

The Right to Be Unhappy curated by BAR project at Tapies Foundation and Institut Français, Barcelona (2016). Photo by Eva Carasol.

Reproductive Labor
VD: Care is one of the points of interest we shared with Florencia during the residency. She was reading about the affective turn in feminism, and I was reading This Bridge Called My Back, a collection of writings by radical women of color, so we ended up talking a lot about the kinds of reproductive labour we are engaged in, that allow society, and capitalism, to continue.

Reproductive labor is the labor of care, of reproduction of other humans, of love and friendship that goes unpaid while producing surplus value for capital (by reproducing its workforce and their well-being). It sounds like a very crude description of love, but when you think about it in those terms, it really sucks!

Because not only was capitalism made possible by colonization and the brutal exploitation of colonized lands and bodies, it also continues to thrive on it. As Silvia Federici pointed out, this moment of colonization and exploitation that Marx called primitive accumulation is not just an originary moment that has now ended, it is on the contrary an ongoing process of exploitation that is necessary for the survival of the system.

Now, this reading is painful. It makes me, my love, my sense of care for my friends, an intimate accomplice of this ongoing violence, and yet this pain has to be assumed and become the starting point for imagining another politics, which is for me simply the way we experience and experiment life together.

It’s from this point that we began with Florencia to think about care as a practice that could subvert those processes rather than reproduce them. Audre Lorde was of great help with her definition of the Erotic as power. She talks about the Erotic as the power that circulates through/amongst bodies, an infinite resource within each of us, that operates its own routes, often deviant from those indicated by the Law or the State or Capital. I have a feeling that care also could also travel through those Erotic routes and that we could think of practices of care, of a certain maintenance or collective rest that is generative of another politics. Practices that would not rest on or reproduce the same values.

So the question was how to invent ways of caring for and with each other that set up their own values, their own ways of valuing, that bet on their own ethics?

Or maybe just how do we displace existing forms of care?

And even before that, how do we begin to pay attention to the kind of affective and reproductive labor we already perform and sense its underlying ethics?

Because really, it’s quite hard to see! And it’s quite hard to question it without sounding like a total bitch!

If I say to a lover or my parents or my children: “Look, when you‘re texting me again and again and expect me to answer so I can confirm to you that yes, I like you, you’re asking me to perform affective labor that is perhaps not necessary right now,” I sound like a horrible person! Because it’s so embedded in common sense, as if it was something you should naturally feel, along the line of: “If you really loved me you would text me, etc.” And that’s not true. It’s just a specific practice that we recognize and feel comfortable with because it had been practiced on us before that, and our good feelings were rehearsed in it. It is also difficult to question attending to the affective labor we do, because it can be straight-on painful. A lot of the ways in which we “care” for each other are ways of maintaining certain systemic privileges that can be totally obscured by our “innocence.” And with this I don’t mean that care is just something capitalism has imposed on us, we would care for each other anyway, but it has been put to work in specific ways that reproduce specific values. I don’t know, but for example when I started to do the Political Therapy, it’s not that I had a plan, or understood what I was producing or reproducing, I just bet that if we tried to talk about politics starting from physical sensations, we would be able to speak about it differently and undo some of the categories we usually employ when thinking about politics.

Reading is a Practice of Being Aware
VV: Could you tell us more about your ideas on how to be aware of the affective space and how to organize the space of care?

VD: Yes, the first question is how to become aware that I am even doing this affective labor, whom is this labor serving, and what is it producing. How do we concretely even begin to attend to it? I guess this is where reading helps me, so the reading practices I engage in: like reading tarots, astrology, bodies, palms, but also reading philosophy…they are practices that allow us to attend to a situation not in simplistic terms, but assuming its complexity and without trying to solve it. When one does a reading, one begins from a problem, a crisis, a question and from that one lays down some kind of constellation that is a complex imaging of the situation, and from there one begins to read and describe the situation from different directions, thinking, feeling, allowing for contradictions, in conversation, without having to determine what it is and what to do about it. Or at least in the way I read...

JC: It is a set of different ways of understanding the world, not in the rational ways…

VD: Well, reading is rational in its procedure, although those tools have been deemed “irrational” as a way to disavow them…or perhaps in relation to a very narrow definition of rationality! When you read, you still make sense of things through some kind of system. When you look at an astrology chart, it is divided into 12 Houses that are different stages where different Planets perform and interact according to the characteristics of the different Signs they fall under. Or the different spreads one could make with the Tarot cards…when I do the spread of the Celtic Cross, I draw eleven cards to create an image of the situation, and the person who is being read is signified only by card six, which is a card that is there on the side, partaking in the situation but not at its center. That’s very important. When I tell you about a problem I’m experiencing, just because of grammar I have to begin: So I did this, and then this happened, and I feel… it’s a more or less linear sequence of subject+verb+object that tends to orient the description as if it was always departing from me, the subject. So it’s good to have those tools displace the subject a little bit. Also those reading tools, those ways of imagining a situation, allowing for contradictions, diverging elements and narratives that one weaves together (or apart!) through the reading.

The Right to Be Unhappy curated by BAR project at Tapies Foundation and Institut Français, Barcelona (2016). Photo by Eva Carasol.

VV: It’s funny because yesterday morning I had my first family constellation and in the afternoon my session of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. I got two different readings of the same situation. When I told both women (guidance counselor and psychotherapist) I was practicing their therapies simultaneously, they disagreed with the fact I was doing something considered at the opposite of their own practice. As for me, I enjoyed both a lot, and I have more interpretations.

VD: It’s funny that the different practices would need to disavow each other…as if, of course, the value of your theory or practice comes from the disavowal of another one, or the value of your person come from the disvaluing of other people, because you do something more unique or special or beautiful. I mean, this is the kind of scarcity that is constantly produced (and reproduced) by a certain idea of value. So something is more valuable when it’s scarce, not available (be it truth or money), otherwise it’s just air, nothing. It’s sad that this is the attitude those practices have to keep towards each other in order to function in this economic system. That’s why there is the saying that poor people go to Tarot readers and rich people to psychoanalysts! But really if we would use reading, what we would be looking at in your situation is the abundance it contains! Actually, reading is a way of attending to abundance. So yes, let’s say you lost a lover or a job, and that makes you feel bad or changes your situation, the suffering is there, it’s not disavowed. I wouldn’t tell you to just chill and be happy! But readings could perhaps expose what else is also happening at the same time. Maybe there are other processes taking place that might be generative and that you might want to explore…

Bar Methodology
VD: I also have a question for you, more in relation to care and how you work together: how do you attend to the erotic levels of organization?

VV: BAR project was born out of rethinking the work situation in which we, the three founding members, found ourselves in 2012: freelance workers. The next step was to analyze the state of affairs. We performed a critical analysis from the personal to the extra-personal, the position/figure of the curator (ours), as well as that of the artist (our colleagues). We carried out an analysis of the local context and what we detected was needed in the city, such as a greater critical dialogue and exchange with what is outside the city, and we valued artistic labor as a paid job, etc. The concept of mobility that was being experimented with and the willingness to invite people to come to the city led us to work with the notion of hospitality, and from there to the idea of making a curated program of residencies instead of a curated program of exhibitions. It was more than just putting works into a defined space, the intention was to move people, ideas, and discourse into a much wider space: from the world to the whole city of Barcelona and vice versa. We decided not to have our own exhibition space and that our (public) project space would be the city of Barcelona, because we wanted to invest the money in human infrastructure instead of architectural infrastructure: the artists and curators with whom we wanted to work, and who with us, obviously, would carry out the project. That led us to work in collaboration and to optimize what the city offered by seeing this act as complementary. This "rethinking," this entering into discussion, thinking, inventing, and re-formulating things that were already done or existed, pushed us to take a lot of care of the forms of working, and the truth is that today it continues to be the engine. BAR project is a curatorial organization made by people, therefore changing and moving by desire, whose way of working and practicing is what most distinguishes it. We are committed to sustainability, flexibility, informality, and collaboration. But also for the redistribution of knowledge and goods. In other words, we work around the access and the right to the city. Perhaps the most singular aspect of the project concerns its spatiality. We work in a mobile way, and the projects take place in most varied existing spaces to challenge them and create some sort of f(r)iction.

JC: When we started BAR project, we thought a lot about different structural and important things that will be guidelines for us. But at a certain point, we just start working and keep the project organically open to evolve along this guideline…I think the three of us have this will of doing things, this belief that we can do something if we want…We thought a lot about how we wanted to work with other people, among us, how we wanted this project to be. We know that we wanted a long-term project, a professional and flexible project where artists, curators, and also ourselves could work according to the terms and conditions we think are adequate to our time, our interests, and our ethics. It is like creating a structure where we take care of the people we invite, in the sense of providing the proper resources to work in a professional but informal way, but also to provide a hospitality context for them in town that maybe we missed in other residency programs.

VD: In which ways did you want to take care of residents in a way that other residencies programs didn’t?

JC: Like hosting them, working with hospitality as our main resource, going out with them, introducing them to other practitioners or friends in town, the basic things in life, that sometimes we forget about when we work. Showing them our favorite places in town, sharing our social life…These little things that are important also for us.

VD: Well, if you read this at the energetic level, you could also see how the project emerged from a common desire, and that desire was driving the action. So you could be quick, dedicated, etc., and that energy made the project work, but then as it works well and it gets recognized, you also get recognized and you get invited to curate more projects individually, and then that’s great, but also you become busier and have less energy, and this is where perhaps the work together becomes harder, or more complex.

VV: When I proposed stating that “BAR project is initiated by,” it was because I had in mind the idea to hand/pass the project to other people in the future. Maybe this is the space of anticipation that embodies possibilities. “Initiated” incorporates something else from the beginning, at least it’s just ambition but it is there. If you “make space” for something else (the unknown) from the beginning, there will be always space for more. This also works for the economic aspect: if you consider it as constitutive of the project you will find ways to get it; the same goes for caring: if I can take care of myself, I can also take care of others.

VD: How could we imagine an institution as a collective practice of care? Imagining it not so much in terms of architecture or infrastructure or as a designed system, but rather as a set of specific practices between all the people involved? I mean practices as ways of doing things—it can be practices of economic exchange, of talking to each other, of making decisions, etc.,just shifting the focus of where to begin organising from.

VV: BAR project is primarily a curatorial project, for which we do not select but rather proceed by invitation and offering proposals. The criteria—so to speak—are more practical and in line with our philosophy, in line with the research that guides the program and other sensitive factors such as the economics and overall coherence of the project. In addition to our human and curatorial accompaniment, logistical guide work is carried out, which is extremely useful when arriving in a foreign city. For example, we offer a place to live (BAR apartment), a space to work (studios in Fabra i Coats), round-trip travel, a monthly fee, and production for an end event that reveals the practice put in connection with the city. We help to connect with local agents and with “the local,” and we organize My Studio Visit. The City as Studio, in which a local artist is commissioned to give a visit of a special location in Barcelona in order to speak about his/her practice through the city and out of the common studio space. We are especially committed to supporting intellectual production and development of a practice.

JC: One of our aims is to work in an informal way but with a professional attitude; sometimes it is difficult because when you are really open, and almost everything can happen, when you are doing different things, in different periods, in different spaces...sometimes it is difficult to communicate what you are, and it takes time until the context understands what you are doing. In fact, we work more with the temporal aspect of the residencies and the projects.

BAR TOOL, practice-based training program. Photo by Eva Carasol

Working Practices of Care
VD: For example, if we think about the trajectory we described before; the project grows, you also grow artistically, the community also grows and is harder to organize, takes more energy, and you have less time, etc. If we keep the frame of looking at BAR as a collective practice of care, how to organize yourself next year? How to face growth? What practices are changing and how?

JC: Maybe the challenge is to be able to keep being present in a physical daily way; maybe us or someone else. It’s just to keep doing what we are doing in a consistent way, and not lose the parameters of our identity in the process of growing.

VV: BAR project is celebrating its five-year existence. Apart from the residency program and the multiple activities associated with specific projects, we started BAR TOOL, a practice-based training program for five participants that allows us to strengthen the exchange with our guests and to create a forum for discussion in the city at various levels, and generated by different voices. We were able to start this project because we got a grant that allows us to hire a person for a year. The idea has been to empower her, adapting ourselves to her, asking her to centralize all the information and data, in order to feel being part of the project and managing it.

JC: It’s also nice to have this opportunity to have this person at the moment that we need more help; she will stay with us for one year thanks to the grant, but we want her stay longer with us, so we have to start looking starting now for the money to pay her when this grant is finished. And along this line, from the very beginning we had known that we wanted to take care (of our guests and of ourselves) on the affective and personal level, but also on an economic and professional level. For us, it is essential to be able to pay anyone working with us and ourselves, something that is not common in other independent (and some institutional) projects in town, and we think this is another level of taking care and avoid precariousness.

VD: Yes, and of course the needs change, and the capacities, too. To me, it is interesting how to have these conversation on needs and capacities and change…how to make decisions. Maybe that’s where the erotic level comes in. Do you make readings? Do you have tools to sense your needs? Or to listen to each other or the city or the people around?

JC: We also learn during the project to talk among ourselves, and we have had different moments of discussion. One of the most interesting things about working in a collective is that this is your project, but at the same time it is not just your project…your authorship is there, but at the same time it’s diluted among others, and this is beautiful, but at the same time you have to learn how to manage it.

VD: I’m just thinking how to somehow fictionalize those situations, or make them more (art)ificial, not just to be creative like in a Google office, but rather to open them up, to attend to them differently, or perhaps to care? It’s easy to take for granted that the way we make decisions is that we sit and talk about the points on the agenda, or that we vote…but these are not a given, and we might choose to not reproduce them in that way.

For example, you are making possible the production of art—how does the content of the artists you work with feed back into the ways in which you work, live, and organize? Because I think this reciprocity is interesting—do you integrate a practice, or an image or a score that an artist has shared with you into your own process? That’s also a way of undoing the alienation of work.

VV: The person we invite—artist or curator—is a sort of extension of ourselves. Each one can develop a project that we all desire to do. Inviting people is a gift for us and also generates something else for them and for the local community. It’s a mutual “gift.”

VD: The duration of three months for the residencies is very good, because it allows this reciprocity to happen in unorganized manner, more emerging from a shared sociality. Although I got so much into sociality that by the time I left, I felt I was just at the beginning of something!

Experimental Space of Anticipation
JC: We wanted a period of time that you are able to enter the city, meet people, develop some kind of project…and at the same time a period that people are able to move to another city. If you invite people for six months, your possibilities are reduced.

VD: Yes, here I managed to organize just two sessions of Studio Practice, one on anger and one on shame. It took time to gather people, either by just meeting them socially, or individually doing sessions of political therapy, just because I wanted to make sure that we would all be entering the sessions on even ground. It was clear to me that I did not want the sessions of Studio Practice to be like workshops or events/performances, where one could come and watch, or take part in something already organized for them. So it was two small events, but from doing them I learnt that the kind of engagement I am looking for might have to be constructed over a much longer period of time. Actually, it was very interesting to finish the residency at BAR and go straight into Elsewhere&Otherwise at PAF [1] where I felt that the Studio Practice was actually happening there and on its own! E&O is a meeting dedicated to practices and knowledge that falls outside of the academic grid, which means that as we (me and Daniela Bershan whom I organized it with) went around meeting people; I would tell those I thought were onto some similar interests to come there so we could all meet. And it happened! And at once there were all those incredible people, and the level of exchange was so high because they’re each so committed to their own practice, and everyone is learning. And now I know that this is gonna happen for the next ten years (at least!), once a year we meet. So in a way Elsewhere&Otherwise has become what I always imagined the Studio Practice could be. So you see? I imagined this practice where people come and study together, but do it transversally (physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) like in the dance studio; so I formulated it as an idea, I tried to do it, etc., but at some point I understood that this is only possible in another temporality, so I have to imagine totally other conditions of production for it or sense where else this is happening and perhaps displace it or learn from it or allow it to manifest in all its possible different forms.

VV: I always wanted to start a “school project” and have someone for a longer time and develop his or her project in order to work with another kind of temporality and intensity.

VD: Yes, also we need to give ourselves permission to work at another temporality. For example, I could think that ok, this idea of the Studio Practice does not work, or not immediately, not as I thought, so I should get rid of it, it’s a bad project. But actually there are things that require another temporality, or things that are working but at a level that is not yet visible and if you somehow insist in being curious, in staying with the failure of the thing not working, then maybe something else can happen.

VV: When BAR project decided not have an exhibition space, it also decided to not make exhibitions, which is the typical thing you do when you start an independent curatorial project. So we decided to organize temporary events and use the city as a project space. Instead of inviting one artist per week to develop an exhibition for a month, we invite an artist for three months to develop a three-hour project. Our aim is to support (performative) intellectual production, more than (static) objectual production. I consider BAR project an anticipation space where you can “test” and experiment with things. Also, I like to define BAR project as a curator-run organization, which comes from artist-run space, and focus on the term of organization instead of the institution. I look at the human scale and human vulnerability.

JC: It is like expanded institution-making. When you create your own independent structure or self-organized project, what you create is a place where you can do whatever you want—of course, with the resources and structure you have—but you are the one deciding how the “institution” works. When you develop a curatorial project in an institution, you always have to negotiate and adapt the project to the structure of the institution… Here, the structure is flexible, we try to adapt it to each project, and it is a place for thinking, testing, and researching in an organic way.

VV: Even if we weren’t aware at the beginning, I think we have been able and clever to manage a budget, and in that time we have also developed tools and skills. In the art world and cultural sector in general, speaking about money is a taboo. I think it’s an historical problem...but now we cannot afford this anymore. Without a budget, a modest infrastructure, in our case made by the combination of skills and desires of the three of us, you can’t go so far if you really want to build something.

Institution-Building as a Generative Space
VD: It’s interesting for me to imagine how those spaces/structures we build can be generative at all levels; that’s why I would like to think of them as practices of care, of a maintenance of some kind of life.

I’m thinking about PAF—Performing Arts Forum in France. I think about it as a space that allows for the maintenance of something (a way of working/living) that is beyond whatever PAF wants itself to be. There is an excess we maintain there. It’s perhaps the gap between planning (which sets what the space wants to be) and how people inhabit it, or what the space also allows that was not planned for, and instead of trying to close the gap and have a more efficient organization, how do we let this gap proliferate, and germinate within the planning, so that the plan may also change and follow a process. It’s paradoxical... It means that on one side the planning has to be very ambitious, and on the other, not ambitious at all!

VV: In our case we want to keep the human scale. We are three and maybe we will be five, but no more. Otherwise, it will become something else.

VD: If we go back to the question of how to have those conversations (about changing needs, or about organization or making decisions), one interesting thing is that in the case of PAF, we always talk about it as a performance, not an institution or an art space, just because that enables another language and another way of thinking.

VV: We never define ourselves as an institution, and in fact recently we started to define ourselves as a curator-run organization.

VD: Do you think you have to maintain this scale in order to stay experimental?

VV: We want to. For example, for BAR TOOL we will have a maximum of five people, in order to be able to manage it at all kinds of levels.

JC: The scale is very important for us; we want this scale because it allows us to do things in the way we want. Then there arrives this moment when you have to try to keep the scale and be careful about how you grow, how we can grow maintaining the scale.

VD: Yes, I also feel like protecting a certain scale, in the sense that I want to protect the capacity for the space to stay open and not crystallize into just one function or one thing it may become more known for and then it should capitalize on. In this sense, yes, scale is not size, the size could change but the scale as a kind of horizon or dimension that can stay.

 

Juan Canela is an independent curator and writer. Co-founder of BAR project, he is member of the Programs Committee at HANGAR, Barcelona. He has been curator of Opening section at ARCO Madrid (2016-17). He has curated projects such as Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!!, at Tabakalera San Sebastián (2017); Irene Kopelman: On glaciers and avalanches, at CRAC Alsace (2017); I Speak, Knowing It’s Not about Speaking, a project with works by La Caixa and Macba collections and contemporary artists performances and interventions at Caixaforum, Barcelona ( 2015); Lesson 0, a long-term project curated by Azotea for Espai13 Fundació Miró, Barcelona ( 2013- 2015); Ignacio Uriarte: 1&0s at Marco, Contemporary art museum Vigo (2014); ¿Estudias o trabajas?, La Ene, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013); He has attended SYNAPSE Workshop 2015 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlín (2015), and he was one of the speakers at Surrounding Education (2015), a two-day program focusing on education and pedagogy meeting artistic and curatorial fields at De Appel Art Center, Amsterdam. He has given lectures and workshops at Curando Caribe República Dominicana, Bisagra Lima, Instituto Di Tella Buenos Aires, and La Casa encendida, Madrid. He is now working on a solo show by Rometti Costales at CA2M Madrid (2018); He prepares the publication Curadora/Comisaria with Angel Calvo for Paper collection in Consonni Bilbao, and he usually writes for art magazines such as A*Desk, Terremoto Magazine, Babelia El Pais, Mousse, and Art-Agenda.

Valentina Desideri is an Amsterdam-based artist. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006) and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she co-organizes the Performing Arts Forum in France, she engages in Poethical Readings with Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva, she speculates with many, she reads and writes.

Veronica Valentini is a curator and researcher. She is founder and head at Emma, a curatorial organization that develops a roaming public program of artistic research, and mediator of Nouveaux commanditaires-Citizen Art Spain Program of the Carasso Foundation (Madrid). In Barcelona, she is co-running and curating BAR project international residency program and the annual practice-based training program BAR TOOL. She is artistic jury at Mecene du Sud (Montpellier-Sete), member of C-E-A. Commissaires d’Exposition Associés, and curator of the Roaming Assembly#22, a public symposium organised by Dutch Art Institute (NL).
In 2014, she has been curator, together with Xiaoyu Weng and Kit Hammonds, for the 2nd CAFAM Biennal Invisible Hand. Curating as Gesture at CAFA museum in Beijing, for which she curated On Ambiguity and Other Forms to Play With (Bik van Der Pol, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Heman Chong, Claire Fontaine, Dora Garcia, Mark Dion, Pablo Helguera, Tobias Kaspar, Lili Reynaud-Dewar). From 2006 to 2009 she has been editor at Flash Art magazine in Milan and New York. She has curated exhibitions and projects, given lectures and workshops in space such ARC Bucharest (Bucharest), Matadero (Madrid), SOMA (Mexico DF), Le Quartier art center, (Quimper), Art-o-Rama art fair (Marseille), Glassbox (Paris), BF15 (Lyon), 40m3 (Rennes), STROOM (The Hague), MACBA Study Centre (Barcelone), Villa Arson (Nice), Institut Français (Barcelona), Tapies Foundation (Barcelona), Plataforma Revolver (Lisbon), Syntax (Lisbon), Careof (Milan), Fine Art school (Brest), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Le MAGASIN-CNAC (Grenoble). http://www.veronicavalentini.org/

BAR project is a curator-run organization that develops a public program in the city of Barcelona issued from different activities of a residency program (2013) for international artists and curators, and BAR TOOL (2016), a nine-month training program for practice-based visual arts and non-arts related practices open to five participants. BAR project is run by Andrea Rodríguez Novoa, Veronica Valentini, and Juan Canela. www.barproject.net