1st Sur Global Meeting

Aníbal Jozami: “A joint projection of multiple individual opinions”

Aníbal Jozami, General Director of Bienalsur, presented the main guidelines of this new artistic event, which is promoted by the countries of Unasur and will gather artists, critics and curators from different countries to put forth a new cartography of contemporary art. 

“We wish this biennial to be a joint projection of multiple individual opinions”, pointed out the rector of UNTREF, who was accompanied by the then Minister of Education, Teresa Parodi during the first public action of the biennial at the Muntref, Museum of Immigration venue.

With these words, Jozami officially opened the Sur Global colloquium, a platform for contemporary art thinking that brings together an array of voices form the cultural field in a biennial whose main challenge is to enable the art of the region to be expressed on an equal footing with that of other territories, thus becoming a world landmark. 

Charly Nijensohn: “My secret is to wait for the exact moment when magic springs”

“The spiritual core of my work is Latin America; and my work is based upon finding magic moments in magic places. My secret is to wait for the exact moment when magic springs, as I lay low and calm in the certainty that it will happen”, said Charly Nijensohn, an Argentine artist who lives in Berlin during his presentation entitled “A glance at the American space”. 

In a dialogue with Diana Weschler, Nijensohn participated in the Table 1 of the 1st Sur Global Meeting, where he addressed the notions of contemporary art, nature, landscape and territory with focus on his work, a series of photographs and video installations featuring sequences where people are exposed to natural forces. “My praxis is based on a constant struggle. I can only conceive my work from the notion of the warrior, not against others, but against myself. There is no road other than struggle”, observed the artist, who has developed works in the Uyuni Salt Flats, the Amazon and Patagonia, among other locations.

Ticio Escobar: “The breakdown of temporalities in contemporary art explains the presence of popular and indigenous art”

“Contemporary art/Popular art, between artistic practice and critical theory”, was the title of the conference by Ticio Escobar, Director of the Barro Museum of Paraguay, at the 1st Sur Global Meeting. He described contemporary art as a myriad of voices including the presence of other art modalities, such as popular and indigenous art. 

“Contemporary time is primarily a time of linear temporality breakdown, and therefore of anachronism: multiple pasts, memories and presents, as well as multiple futures, or the wishes for the construction of a future. Such a breakdown is one of the first issues that explains the presence of other art modalities, particularly in Latina America”, asserted the former Culture Secretary of Paraguay.

This art curator, critic and professor then spoke about his experience in three contemporary art events –the Curitiba Biennial, the Santiago de Chile Triennial and the Valencia Biennial, in which popular and indigenous art was incorporated into the programmes, and he exhibited images of the works.

Finally, Escobar talked with artists Mauricio de Mello Dias (Brazil) and Walter Stephan Riedweg (Switzerland), members of an artistic collective that presented “Funk Staden”, a project shot in a shanty town of Brazil combining the history of the conquest, Afro-American traditions and contemporary art.

Días&Riedweg said that they have been working together in the field of visual arts and performance since 1992, and that their work unfolds between documentary and free fiction. “Our work enquires into the ways private psychologies influence and define the public space, with the participation of the public as its main feature, in a permanent attempt to question the individual’s perception of each context. 

Stéphane Aquin: “It is important to understand the integration of the works from a wider perspective”

 “We are one of the few museums with such a rich collection of Latin American art. Yet, we have never had a department of Latin American art. We resist this idea. It is important to understand the integration of the works from a wider perspective”, pointed out Stéphane Aquin, Curator in Chief of the Hirshhorn Museum of Washington, an institution of the Smithsonian with a collection of thirteen thousand art pieces of modern and contemporary art.  

In a dialogue with Gabriela Siracusano (Director of the Art Centre, Materiality and Culture -IIAC-UNTREF), Aquin discussed the Latin American presence in the institution, which features pieces by Joaquín Torres García, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Martha Botto, Alicia Penalba, Rómulo Macció, Guillermo Kuitca, Eduardo Basualdo and several other artists. 

 “The separation of works in departments would be akin to a demographic division of society, something we disagree with. We are aware of the existence of cultural movements, national scenes, urban identities, but is there anything that can be called the Mexican or Cuban essence? Indeed, there is some sort of international conversation. A valuable example of this is Torres García, the great 20th century nomad who infiltrated modernism into Latin America with a sense of self identity.”

Ramón Castillo: “There is a gesture of resistance in re-drawing or blurring the traditional borders of geopolitics”

“¿What can be done with the territory? How do we occupy it? Which is our own cartography’ There is a gesture of resistance in re-drawing or blurring the traditional borders produced by geopolitics”, indicated Ramón Castillo, Curator and Director of the School of Fine Arts of Santiago de Chile, during his conference entitled “The artistic South American scene in the international arena”, within the framework of the 1st Sur Global Meeting.

Castillo underscored the importance of the creation of Bienalsur, which he envisaged as “the region’s declaration of autonomy”, and showed images of a foundation (www.biennialfoundation.org) that has chartered the 150 existing biennials around the world, most of them located in Europe. 

Next, Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa reviewed the cartographic history of the region from the perspective of her artistic work, which bears a connection to the files on Latin American dictatorships that the CIA  and other intelligence agencies have declassified. “These documents, which I have been working on for 15 years, have led me to think how the historic trauma works through a common history in a dystopian manner rather than in a poetic one”, she said. Finally, Paraguayan artist Claudia Casarino –Director of the Migliorisi Foundation- went over some of her most representative pieces, which she has developed around the trope of identity and gender, and showed images of a map of South America with the apocryphal demonyms originated in wars, such as “curepas”, “paraguas” or “brasucas”, among others.  

Jorge Macchi: “Collectionism preserves and enhances something that exists at present”

“Collectionism plays a key role: to preserve and enhance something that exists at present”, observed artist Jorge Macchi in a dialogue with Portuguese collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, during the debate entitled “Collectionism and Contemporary Art”, which was part of the 1st Sur Global Meeting. 

“Undoubtedly, there are many artists who have no visibility but still produce, and such is destiny. It is hard to grasp everything, but collectors with various perspectives sweep the cultural scene, and in doing so they rescue or follow up on people. In that way, artists survive the cruel passing of time”, explained the artist. 

“My collection is my art work”, asserted the Portuguese collector, who owns three thousand pieces, including installations, drawings, videos, sculptures, photographs, and paintings, mostly by Latin American artists, curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil. 

Tatiana Trouvé: “One has to choose to have a new vision of the world”

“I am very keen on the idea that to live is to be everywhere, that one does not have a space to define the territory; instead, one has to choose the notion of disorientation and has to have a new vision of the world, which makes the world ours. I think that it is a highly significant aesthetic experience”, argued Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé during her presentation entitled “Materials for Contemporary Art”, which was part of the 1st Sur Global Meeting on November 20th, 2015, at the Centro Cultural Kirchner. 

 “The design of my pieces arises from such disorientation and reorganization, and this brings us closer to architecture: spaces combining various spaces without a clear or defined reading;  what is inside or outside does not matter, what matters is that all those worlds co-exist in the same dimension”, pointed out the artist in a dialogue with Aníbal Jozami. 

Trouvé, who was  born in Cosenza, Italy in 1968 and currently lives in Paris, revised her artistic career characterized by entropic installations, spaces between the real and the imaginary, always focused on the architecture that hosts them,  “just like a journey in which the different perspectives change and are endlessly reconfigured”.  

Daniel Santoro explored the footprints left by history on iconic paintings

“Art and tradition” was the title of the conference by painter Daniel Santoro, in which he looked into the main paintings of Argentine history that inspired a reflection on the national being, with regard to his own pieces associated with Peronist iconography. 

“Sin pan y sin trabajo” (Without bread and Without Work)  by Ernesto de la Cárcova, “La vuelta del malón” (The Return of the Indian Raid) by Angel Della Valle, “La familia obrera” (The Working Class Family) by Oscar Bony and “La civilización occidental y cristiana” (The Western Christian Civilization) by León Ferrari were some of the pieces analysed by this Argentine artist in a dialogue with art critic Alicia de Arteaga, which he alluded to as the “founding images of our imaginary”. 

“The problem we have in the constitution of our identity is the use of the concepts of civilization and barbarism in confrontational terms, when they should be complementary”, expressed the creator in reference to the set of works that he called “our symbolic heritage”.

Gilles Lipovetsky: “The true worth of contemporary art is subjectivity without a universal truth”

“The true worth of contemporary art is subjectivity and individualism without a universal truth”, said French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky in a dialogue with Aníbal Jozami, General Director of Bienalsur, during the conference entitled “The aestheticization of the world”, which was part of the 1st Sur Global Meeting on November 20th, 2015.

“If we look at history, the first art forms were very conventional. In western art, a more subjective dimension gradually managed to express itself. In today’s contemporary art everyone can take from the world what they see, what they regard as real, and what used to be universal gave way to heterogeneity. This is what we like about contemporary art: the diversity of worlds, of truths, the fact that individuals may like it or not, acknowledge themselves in it or not, understand it or not”.

“Hyper individualism appears at the same time as the star system with Andy Warhol in the 1960’s, which represents a true revolution. This seems to me the first step of contemporary art: a pairing is established between art and fashion, art and business, art and success. In order to set the economic engine in motion, everything concerning emotions had to be offered. It was an absolutely original economic system because it accomplished the hybridization of everything that opposed it”, remarked the author of the essays “The Age of Emptiness” and “The Empire of the Ephemeral”.