SACO9 Now or never

THE LIGHTS OF ART TURNED ON | Elisa Montesinos María Esperanza Rock, an art historian with a PhD in Ethnohistory, has worked to contribute to the territory with creative, contemplative and critical thought.

Her workshop, Visual Field Ethnographies, generated great enthusiasm among the attendees, with whom she reviewed various ethnographic methods that can be used in art mediation. These are her reflections about how to train cultural managers for change.

Banners Every territory has its own codes and its own rhythms, which form unique ways of experiencing life, or even just surviving, such as in colonized lands like Latin America.

Within this context, art is and will continue to be a human right, a way in which to transmit feelings, and by sharing them, opening up rich veins of language, while also shedding light on certain problem areas in society that tend to be hidden or simply overlooked. For that very reason it becomes essential to have creative, local, and territorial systems for the development of art. Regardless of the trends, movements, or styles these may deal in, they will nevertheless become testimonies, records, and oftentimes banners in the fight for social justice.

Micro-Curatoring, Curating From the Margins is one such contribution. We need to educate –or “uneducate” in every sense of the word– change agents, people who would help make up a critical mass defined by what they could offer in creative, affective, and effective terms. We are facing a short, medium and long term challenge.

What Doesn’t Fit On the Screen Crises are large forces that open the way for the destruction of a failing system.

That is when we must fall, colliding with ourselves so that we can reconsider who we are, and reimagine the systems in which we live from a different perspective.

One can view a crisis as a profound problem/opportunity if one approaches these breaking points as thresholds of change.

Keeping this in mind, there has been an almost spontaneous reaction to recent events, and it has been to transfer the artistic experience in general to digital platforms of visual media. Though the crisis has pushed us into using these new channels of communication, I am still not sure what I think about the phenomenon.

Even now, after another professional and academic year has passed, I am just starting to feel the sting of failed attempts to “humanize” virtual relationships, incorporating more and more technology, that, in the end, is just technology, a computer, a cell phone. Surely, there are some forms of artistic intervention that 148