Opening: Monday September, 8th, 6 p.m. Fragmenting Obsolescence is a curatorial project comprising multiple exhibitions within the framework of BIENALSUR 2025. It explores works and artists that challenge the modern notion of technological progress, opening new ways of observing matter and time, objects and their durability, with the aim of disrupting the future as it is currently imposed. This project was developed through a call for submissions for faculty and master’s students from the Postgraduate School of the Universidad de las Artes. Participants were selected for their work on collaborative, intimate, political, or performative collection practices, as well as research on obsolete technologies and their poetic, material, or symbolic reactivation. These themes align with a curatorial axis of BIENALSUR 2025 and the university’s research lines. The results of this call highlight highly complex research that engages directly with the territory, both in material and symbolic terms. They also incorporate practices from popular culture as a way of seeing, exhibiting, and recreating that which seems subject to rapid obsolescence under the demands of contemporary productivity. In this context, technology, collection, and an oblique perspective converge in a term specific to Ecuador: the “chambero” (a person who salvages discarded material). The concept of technology is thus redefined as a practical know-how applied to certain practices of transforming objects and materials, of living and non-living things, even using obsolete or simple elements. Clarisa Appendino
Image: AI SEEDS, tipa gan dataset