Creative Workshop with Artist Daniel Canogar

17 – 20 October 2024, Podere Trafonti, Tuscany

The acclaimed multimedia artist Daniel Canogar will lead a workshop on creativity accessible to anyone who feels inspired to explore and expand their artistic capacities.

 Art is an essential tool to process and understand reality. It offers insights into ourselves and our place in the world. When we make art, and look at it carefully, we contemplate the intricate, messy, and beautiful nature of life itself.

Through a teaching structure he has developed over three decades, artist Daniel Canogar, will prompt participants to delve into their creative selves. By looking, responding and looking again, something will  take shape.

Central to Daniel’s methodology is collective visual thinking: responding to each other’s creation while a theme continues to evolve. In this way, making gets woven into the experiential mesh of our larger world, as art wants to be.

The first three days of the workshop will be about preparation and inspiration. Daniel will offer a series of presentations on significant themes in our cultures intended to spark conversation, insight, and questions to then be translated into creating. There will be several practical exercises allowing participants to materialise the themes previously explored. The resulting initial works will be shared with the group while Daniel actively engages responses from others and offers his own observations. 

The emphasis of the workshop is on process. These exercises support each stage of a creative process including a final stage: completion. On the last day of the workshop participants will distill what has inspired them into the conception of a completed art project. The resulting creations will be celebrated in a on-premises exhibition, offering a welcoming shared experience for participants and their invited guests.

Daniel Canogar (Madrid, Spain, 1964) holds a Masters’ degree in Photography from New York University’s International Center of Photography and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid. He lives and works between Madrid, Spain and Los Angeles, USA. Canogar’s fascination with the technological history of optical machines inspired him to design his own visual devices. His artworks are mobile-like hanging sculptures that project images onto the surrounding walls. His interest in the possibilities of the projected image led him to create monumental public artworks across the globe, such as Oculus, a generative animation for the zero-energy media façade at the Novartis Pavilion (Basel, 2022) to name but one. Canogar conceptualizes visual media as sculpture. By projecting animations onto obsolete devices, he reignites them to reveal the shared memory they hold within. Memory and its loss are a central theme in his work. Unless we remember, we are condemned to an amnesiac and flat present. Moreover, Canogar wants the viewers of his artwork to engage with it, and to see it with our moving, sentient body. With this full-bodied gaze, the artist believes we gain a richer experience of the world and can claim the right place in it for ourselves.