By Beatriz Lemos
Traveling? In order to travel it is enough to exist.
Fernando Pessoa
1st Trip
In 2005, during my first trip to Buenos Aires where I was, first, as a tourist, I realized that when I met artists, moving around its events and learning from the social dynamics of the circles of art, the understanding of history and culture of that country became clearer, and the works, quite familiar. Would it be possible to run the world and understand it as having an entry door to the contemporary art? Understanding the context through aesthetics and appreciating specificities taking into account situations was - and continues to be -the engine for my mobility. Following this track, I start the research / articulation around Latin American countries with the constant concern: how to disseminate this desire to realize my own work from the confrontation with other, the different, the distant, and the opposite?
Chasing this thought, I have proposed migration exercises among artists and theorists of Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well as among Rio de Janeiro (where I live and work) and other Brazilian states and cities.
There are no foreigners in art[1]
We live the period of displacement with vigilance. The same enthusiastic euphoria about the Great Navigations era - the period between XV and XVI centuries - is present in a time when communications technology that enhances every moment and globalization is much more widespread than understood in all its complexity. Economic factors and government incentives allow us to witness the ease of travel and cultural exchanges, however, in parallel and contrary movement, the obstacles pop up for those border crossings, due to the wave of international fear and paranoia, raising tensions and frustrations.
Nowadays, we don’t travel with caravels, which enter the sea to conquer new worlds or to meet the exotic. We move quickly (many without a fixed landing). We are mobile, transient, and we share the utopia of a borderless world.
There is a clear familiarity with similarities and cultural differences that we perceive, although we live this paradox of coming and going. If culture is the way we understand and behave toward the world, this cultural re-knowledge, from the displacement, triggers different forms of perception and understanding of world and life. That is, the more opportunities we have to untie a comfort zone for experiencing unprecedented situations, or even external situations to the routine, we know that on returning home we will be more hybrids[2]. In the art of recent years this search for canclinian hybridity has become the focus of artistic and curatorial investigations, generating concepts for works and exhibitions[3].
Trips, residences and logbooks are no longer part of the process only; they are also the result of researches. The atelier becomes the mobile space or may be restricted to one notebook: the record often is the memory.
This experience in personal level (experience), which translates into Art, allows other relationship with space and time. Guidelines cartographic hallucinating drifts and affective exchanges in movement provide oxygen to researches and works, at the same time that constitute initial dynamic for the legitimate interaction with the place. In proposing a work from displacement, paying attention to the specificities of each context, it has to nurture the sense of belonging making it available to identify conflicts, solutions and possibilities for mediation, that is, let you be affected by the place.
Network of contacts - collaborative actions
The displacement of artists has always been an important factor for the construction of identities and social emotions in the whole history of culture. Currently, this practice is widespread in a significant way through the artist residency programs. The artist doesn’t move further just for the registration or documentation. Mobility is practiced targeting the maturation of production and exchange, whether among people or in relation to the place. Through the spaces of residence and their actions on the network, the art work receives tools for interaction.
Much of these spaces constitutes independent initiatives (some started as art projects) and self-organized that support their activities from the experience and the work in process. They rely on collaborative networks of information, dissemination of projects and the intersection of proposals for participative programs, of which costs relating to the exchange are provided. With regard to Ibero-American areas of residence, their collaborations in networking, since 2008, have occurred in large scale by residencias_en_red [residenciasenred.blogspot.com]. This networking, which is currently logistically and financially coordinated by the Centro Cultural de Espanha (Spanish Cultural Center) in São Paulo, aims to sewing a joint project of self-management and financing, taking into account diversities found in each context.
In countries where public policies for culture can not reach satisfactory levels, initiatives that encourage the practice of thinking about other ways to make art, not those tied to large legitimating institutions, are more than answers to local needs - they are the result of a society and its reflections.
Three examples of independent initiatives that transformed the artistic scene in their cities, and that I could see up close as a resident curator, are: Lugar a Dudas in Cali,Colombia; Kiosko in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia and Batiscafo in Havana, Cuba. Lugar a Dudas [lugaradudas.org] was my first artistic/curatorial residence. From that and from the experiences involved in Cali, I outlined the intentions of my research project. Conceived by the artist Oscar Muñoz and coordinated by him and his partner Sally Mizrachi, Lugar a Dudas, currently focuses a space with accommodations for residence, documentation center, exhibition halls, periodicity in publications and film festivals, which brought great recognition and visitation. It started its activities in a local landscape completely poor of political spaces for contemporary art, but today it is already the center of reference throughout Colombia, as in others Latin American countries. For the local scene, its emergence has enabled exchanges with other residence centers around the world, the impulse to collective and public actions of art and the incentive to research and critical production, increasing even more the fervent Colombian production in art.
In Bolivia, the contemporary language, however, is meeting resistance from more traditional art class and the current government, hindering the work of artists, theorists and managers of the area. In two months I spent in the country as a resident, I had no knowledge of public programs for financing and found a few independent spaces. The presence of Kiosko Galery [kioskogaleria.com] and its residence program are of extreme activating force for the nation. The gallery and the program are part of the organizational chart of Simple design studio, which started its activities autonomously due to the initiative of a group of artists and designers. Located in the economically stronger city (with characteristics and political positioning opposed to the capital La Paz), Kiosko generates to Bolivia a fundamental exchange of ideas and projects, because, next to the Proyecto Martadero Cochabamba, it articulates the possibilities of residences in the country.
Batiscafo [batiscafo.org] operates in Cuba in a clandestine way, like other initiatives on the island that aren’t administered by the government. It has no fixed headquarters - residents stay in the homes of Cubans - and constitutes only a small staff (which aren’t fixed as well) working at the logistics and in the follow-up of artists and visitor curators. Currently, the residence passes for some indefinition regarding to its continuity, due to the termination of foreign funding for scholarships and no possibility of local support. However, since 2002, Batiscafo manages exchanges between pairs - always a Cuban artist and a foreigner - by promoting debate and action on Havana that reverberate throughout the world. Batiscafo is primarily an initiative of resistance. Political activism in the shape of residence program.
Articulations in research or The traveler curator
Encouraging the sewing of these networks of affections and desires, has been my activity- almost daily - for 5 years. In person or virtually, I try to weave experiences, physical or intellectual, of displacement and propose situations between zones of intervals. The notion of space-time via Internet expands and compresses simultaneously, making distances, personal rhythms and merged languages promote communication to the tool that celebrates diversity. By taking advantage of this great technological network (the brain of the world) we have the opportunity to act in cooperation for the effectiveness and dissemination of experiences among countries, states or cities. Some are the thoughts and projects that I have been taking from my own trips. How does the act of going from one place to another distant one, interfere with the production of an artist? Which place would be more instigating for a person? What artist would be more stimulating for a particular context? And also: what are the possible ways in landscapes of scarce resources, to conduct an artistic residence?
The approach to these questions, through the curatorial logic, only becomes possible (in a loyal way) after research in situ, in which local specificities are treated with respect and become determinants. Understanding the curatorship as the activation of responsible dialogues among artist, context, work, audience, individual and world, leads to a practice to an articulating of senses performance, close to a political and ideological thought. As branches of Projeto de Pesquisa Intercâmbios (Research Project Exchanges), proposals for exhibitions, works in collaboration and movable residences have happened during these past years, playing a unifying role. The art project in Loco (2009-2010) [inlocoproject.blogspot.com], which I shared the curatorship with Pablo Terra, carried out the exchange between Brazilian and Argentinean involving exhibitions and a month of residence in each country. The actions took place in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, with exhibitions at the Fundação de Estudos Brasileiros (Foundation for Brazilian Studies) and Museu da Maré, respectively. Belén Gunset, Daniel Murgel, Ezequiel Semo, Federico Zukerfeld, Joana Traub Cseko, Loreto Garín, Luciana Lamothe and Yuri Firmeza participated in the exchange project, which generated almost a year of conversations and reflections on the urban space, the conflict between cultures and the importance of fun in art. “If it’s not fun it is not sustainable “[4].
As a suggestion to reconnect ties attached during my wanderings, and literally taking tips from travel books, I continue to call Brazilian artists to the movable residences within the project Mobil(c)idades (Mobil (c) ities): f. s. 1 motion communicated on any force [mobilcidades.blogspot.com]. The mobile residence Mobilidades consists of and exhibition and journey on different cities within the same country, with the intention of aggregating visual and sensitive baggage to the artist. At this proposal has already boarded Gustavo Speridião to Bolivia, Guga Ferraz to Ecuador, and in March 2011, Julio Callado will go to Chile. This initiative is supported by collectors and producers of art in partnership with the artists themselves. Strategic solutions for the circulation of productions and international/transitional experiences. The pioneering proposal of displacement of artists in my curatorial performance was the “projeto 4 territórios” (4 territories project) [4territorios.blogspot.com], which I believe is a good example of expanding the public’s understanding of artistic residencies. The project was awarded by the edict Conexão Artes Visuais Funarte (Connection Funarte Visual Arts) in 2007 and had its completion in 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, Olinda, Brasilia, Curitiba and Belém. Seven artists and a collective, working in duos, switched homes to make interventions and videos that proposed travel diaries. The project doesn’t consecrated catalogs, exhibitions and lectures - understood as possibilities of record of results and evidence of accomplished work. It consisted, with emphasis on the justification for the edict, the importance of experience. The art from travel reaches ramifications perhaps unthought before.
In these situations it is not only the artist or their work which become visible and with which we must be related. In travels, supportive lodgings[5] and collaborations of work, the person behind the professional (artist) is also in constant evidence. It is in this detail that the eye of the curator is of singular importance. The success of a project that depends on moments of coexistence relates to the very wise choice of place, environment and personality of each person. This happy decision must be intrinsically connected to the curatorial proposal. The coexistence and displacement, if they want to be productive, should contain, in identical and accurate measurements, tension, anxiety, creativity and wealth.
Translated by Denise Pierrotti
[1] Proposed sentence as one of the curatorial axis of the 52nd Biennial of Venice.
[2] Thought held by Nestor Garcia Canclini on hybridity in the cultures in: CANCLINI, Néstor García. Culturas Híbridas: estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.
[3] As examples: 52ª Venice Biennial (2007) and Tate Britain Art Triennial (2009).
[4] One of the criteria used by residents of sustainable communities in times of decision making. Here, the ownership refers to the allusion to the meaning of the verb to bear.
[5] As research proposal, when traveling without prior invitations from residence spaces, I try to stay in homes of local artists as a faster way to interact with the place. So I try to articulate the same for artists, attached to or not in artistic projects, they want the displacement at low cost and the expansion of their network of friends.
