Participantes:
Andrés Duprat, Eduardo Basualdo, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Gustavo Buntinx, Lia Chaia, Tadeu Chiarelli, Fernando Farina, Eduardo Gil, Luis González Palma, Melodía Leiva & Fernando García, Aníbal Jozami, Jacqueline Lacasa y Diana Wechsler.
Table 1
Tadeu Chiarelli: “It is not easy to make contact with contemporary art expressions”.
Tadeu Chiarelli is from Brazil and directs the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo. During the debate entitled “Contemporary Art: What for? How? Where? For whom?”, which was part of the 2nd Sur Global Meeting, he conceded that many people have difficulty making contact with contemporary artistic expressions though they all feel the need for visual arts to be understood.
In turn, Gustavo Buntinx from Peru, Curator and Director of the Micromuseo of Lima pointed out that art “has to recover the space of emotion, create room for silence and withdrawal against the roaring contemporary noise. It has to forge physical spaces where we can be in solitude with our own thoughts, which is something the system dreads.”
Andrés Duprat from Argentina, Executive Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts asserted that “high intellectual respect for visual arts does not exist with regard to other creative disciplines. I advocate the return to a sensitive experience of art as opposed to the intellectual approach that does not happen in other art disciplines.”
At the end of the debate, which had the participation of Aníbal Jozami, General Director of BIENALSUR, and Diana Wechsler, Artistic-Academic Director of the Biennial, Uruguayan artist and critic Jaqueline Lacase addressed the need to create museums and institutions that can be become “a public place, a transgenerational and transdisciplinary space”. It is impossible to think of contemporary art unless links with other fields of action and reflection are established.”
Table 2
Artists of different nationalities gave an account of their aesthetic itineraries.
Contemporary art as a space of uncertainty and multiple questions, where artists pursue answers through their creative proposals, was the main topic of the debate that gathered Lia Chai from Brazil, Luis González Palma from Guatemala, and Eduardo Basualdo and Eduardo Gil from Argentina, in a dialogue with Fernando Farina at the 2nd Sur Global Meeting.
“I often use my own body as a platform. I am keen on the idea concerning the will to tame nature”, noted artist Lia Chaia while she examined the main works in which she employed an array of media, such as photography, video, installations and urban interventions to address the perceptions and experiences of everyday life as well as the permanent tension of culture vis-à-vis nature.
In turn, Luis González Palma, who was born in Guatemala and lives in Argentina, outlined that the glance was the main axis of his work, while beauty represented one of his most significant concerns. He projected a series of images with a religious and melancholic poetics that influenced his work and revealed the impact of photography, which he regards “simply as a medium to research forms of perception”.,
“In my pieces I strive to tell a story where the outcome is taken away. I try to keep up the tension, the expectation that something might happen further on in order to find out how long the trust in a work can last”, observed Eduardo Basualdo as he analyzed his main creations.
Finally, photographer Eduardo Gil stated that his work is always in conversation with his first piece, the most significant one as an aesthetic and political action: El Siluetazo (The Silhouette Act), a series of images of silhouettes made on the streets towards the end of 1983, still under a dictatorship, to represent each of those who had been detained and disappeared.
Table 3
Celeste Boursier-Mougenot: “In my pieces I try to engage the spectator as long as possible.”
“My work is largely based upon the presence of visitors as an essential part of the piece at the time when they are there, and I try to engage them as long as possible”, explained French artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot in a conversation with Aníbal Jozami during the closing of the 2nd Sur Global Meeting.
“My projects often begin with an aesthetic principle that is then adapted to the conditions of the milieu where they are exhibited, as if it were the starting point of an adventure”, pointed this out this creator, who was born in Nice in 1961 and represented France in the Venice Biennale.
During his ten years of work as music composer, the artist began to conceive sound structures that accompany the spaces. He then developed installations in which he reconfigures the objects to reveal or enhance their musical power.