SACO9 Now or never

IT’S NOT REALLY NECESSARY FOR MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES TO CONTINUE WITH THEIR RESPECTABLE LABORS | Elisa Montesinos The artist, curator and cultural manager Jorge “Coco” González offered the workshop Domestic Curating for non-traditional spaces. Critical and reflective, he expounded on some of his more controversial ideas surrounding the concepts that were developed in the program, Micro-Curating.

Margins Personally, I have been increasingly distancing myself from concepts that cause us to view ourselves as somehow unworthy or unimportant. I don’t entirely agree with the whole idea of curating from the margins, since the term itself is so loaded with preconceptions about the center and the periphery, a concept that was widely adopted throughout the world of art during the 1980’s.

I feel the same way when I look at, think about, or travel through Latin America.

In the end, our continent does not need to seek validation from some other supposedly superior world. Obviously, we have another universe that we can share and communicate about, but not under some watchful, paternalistic eye looking into our affairs. Writers like Enrique Dussel, Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui, Ticio Escobar, Gabriel Salazar, Ronald Kay and many others have been talking about these things and beings from a Latin American perspective for some time.

Latin America has a knowledge and power that many foreigners are again viewing through the eyes of a conquistador and fortunately for us, the visual awakening is a real, powerful phenomenon right now, not only among creative people but people in general.

All that energy gives me a real sense of security in terms of what we have to contribute to the coming visuality, no longer crying about what we don’t have, but rather, sharing our own strength and cosmogony.

Art and Crisis It seems to me that one of the foremost values of art (if it has any at all), is that it is in a perpetual and profound state of crisis. It doesn’t provide any truths, it isn’t trying to guarantee anything; and as such, it will always be a critical entity.

Art is a living organism. For a long time, it perfectly represented the courtly system of patronage, which was finally overcome by a visuality of common life. As such, it has had to evolve new systems for questioning reality, no small task in Latin America. The racially mixed nature of our continent can be a big help at a time in which we are experiencing a new relationship between the virtual world and the supposed reality that we think we are living in. In times like these, the only 140