2 | The Memory of Rocks Johannes Pfeiffer (Germany) Sitio Cero | Port of Antofagasta Dignified Beauty Ángelo Álvarez (Chile) Casa Azul Cultural Center The Line of Destiny Óscar Muñoz (Colombia) Minera Escondida Foundation Art Gallery | Antofagasta Masculine Device (The Coal Miner and the Stripped Miner) Derek Reese (United States) Esquina Retornable Mooring Eric Conrad (United States) Antofagasta Regional Library Pacha-Tikray, Inversion Chamber Nicolás Sáez (Chile) AIEP Professional Institute | Antofagasta The Language of Stones Sebastián Riffo (Chile) Minera Escondida Foundation Art Gallery | San Pedro de Atacama The Future is Prehistory Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey Antofagasta(Argentina) Regional Museum The Window Becomes Wind Nicolás Consuegra Huanchaca(Colombia) Ruins Cultural Park Desert Traces – Approaching Atacama Michael Hirschbichler (Germany) and Guillaume Othenin-Girard (France) Parque Cultural Ruinas de Huanchaca The Language of Rocks Speaks to Me in the Form of Drawing Sebastián Riffo (Chile) ISLA+ The Sea is the Mountain Alexandre Christiaens (Belgium) Traffic Signals in La Chimba After the Apocalypse, Open Call for FrenchSpeaking Belgium: Living on the Edge Adrien Tirtiaux Mushrooms and Mould Elodie Antoine Cave In for Later Carole Louis Huanchaca Ruins Cultural Park International Call for Flood: The Day After the Flood Carolina Cherubini (Brazil) Media-aguas Martina Mella (Chile) When the Earth Speaks Julio Palacio (Spain) Flood Doesn’t Have Borders Rita Doris Ubah (Nigeria) Simulated Security Miguel Sifuentes (Mexico) Dominium Aimée Joaristi (Costa Rica) TILT Mariana Liesegang (Brazil) Melbourne Clark Historic Pier September - December 2021 EXHIBITIONS JURY TEAM Enrique Winter | Chile Cristian Segura | Argentina Adriana Almada | Paraguay Marcio Harum | Brazil Dagmara Wyskiel | Poland-Chile director | Dagmara Wyskiel general producer | Christian Núñez management and outreach | Carlos Rendón communications | Karen Alfaro and Iván Ávila web and digital support | Juan Troncoso, Álvaro Hanshing and Sebastián Faune graphic design | Álvaro Hanshing educative project logistics| Esteban Pinto and Claudia León administration | Roxana Hernández coordination of mediators | Gabriel Navia video and audiovisual production | Javier Araya photography | Sebastián Rojas coordination and logistics | Miguel Ceballos other photographies | Alexandre Christiaens, Bartek Buczek, Kinga Olesiejuk, Matías Rodríguez, Hazhard Espinoza, Francisco Bahamondes, Karla Gahona, Gabriel Navia, Carlos Rendón, Esteban Pinto and Dagmara Wyskiel art handling | Jorge Guerrero (Fido), Javier Araya, Bartek Buczek and Factoría Desierto EIRL SACO 1.0 CONTEMPORANY ART BIENNIAL FLOOD
EDITORIALMEDIATORSTEAM Josseline Alfaro, Ángelo Álvarez, Vicente Araya, Francisco Baeza, Mariam Bahamondes, Tomás Binvignat, Luis Carrasco, José Chirino, Jorge Cuello, Jesús Escobar, Ariel Flores, Fabiola Gómez, María Gallardo, Ignacio Herrera, Katherine Lara, Galem Martínez, Raly Molina, Bastián Montero, Andrea Orozco, Javiera Páez, Marcia Paredes, Jordan Plaza, María Rivas, Esteban Rivera, Matías Rodríguez, Víctor Salazar, Rocío Zuleta, Diego Varas and Francisca Zaro.
Antofagastawww.colectivosevende.clwww.bienalsaco.com100|Chile|july
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director | Dagmara Wyskiel editor | Enrique Winter proofreading Carlos Rendón translation | Elisa Montesinos and América Soto Droguett graphic design | Álvaro Hanshing
SpanishCopies: edition 300 English edition 2022 ISBN: 978-956-410-617-5
We thank the support of The Wallonia-Brussels Delegation, Goethe-Institut Chile, French Institute in Chile, Embassy of Poland in Chile, Emporia State University, Embassy of Colombia in Chile Foreign Affairs, Embassy of Mexico in Chile Foreign Affairs, Antofagasta International Terminal (ATI), Aguas Antofagasta, Faculty of Architecture Bio-Bio University, Antenna, Retornable Cultural Agency, La Tintorera Foundation, Antofagasta Regional Library, Minera Escondida Foundation, Antofagasta Regional Museum, Port of Antofagasta, Casa Azul Cultural Center, Huanchaca Ruins Foundation, AIEP Professional Institute, Helena Horta and Guillermo Chong. Media partners: Universes in Universe, Artishock, El Mostrador, Bío-Bío Radio, Arteinformado, Elige Cultura Program, R2TV, CreatedCulturizarte.and produced by SACO Cultural Corporation
SACO1.0 Biennial was organized by SACO Cultural Corporation and presented by Escondida | BHP. Financed by the 2021 Fund for Regional Incentive of Antofagasta Regional Government and the Support Program for Collaborating Cultural Organizations (PAOCC) from the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage. SACO adheres to the Law on Donations for Cultural Purposes.
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The Future is Prehistory by Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey
The Language of Stones the Language Rocks to Me Form Drawing by Sebastián Riffo Chamber by Nicolás Sáez
99 Pacha-Tikray, Inversion
143 The Weight of the Work, Talk
83 Mooring
in 99 the
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117 Dignified Beauty by
147 Mooring, Co-production Workshop
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149 Mediation in Contemporary art,
The Window Becomes Wind by Nicolás Consuegra by Eric Conrad (The Coal Miner and the Stripped Miner) by Derek Reese
111 Desert Traces – Approaching Atacama
123 Diverse Interventions by
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The Sea is the Mountain by Alexandre Christiaens by Michael Hirschbichler and Guillaume Othenin-Girard Ángelo Álvarez Bartek Buczek Riffo Arellano by Alexandre Christiaens by Sebastián Riffo by Johannes Pfeiffer by Eric Conrad Workshop by Rosario Arellano Chamber Co-production Workshop by Nicolás Sáez
135 Introduction 139 Photographic Portfolios, Talk and Review
4 | FLOOD 13 Flood. 30 Years After One of the Ends of theWworld. Curatorial Text | Dagmara Wyskiel 15 From September 30 to December 15 at the Pier | Marcio Harum 16 Art, Desert, and Participative People | Enrique Winter 19 Quality of Regional Cultural Development | Escondida BHP 21 MUSEUM WITHOUT MUSEUM | Pedro Donoso 35 Non-stop Flight: An Interview With Óscar Muñoz | Artishock y SACO 37 The Line of Destiny by Óscar Muñoz 47 The Memory of Rocks by Johannes Pfeiffer 53 Flood, Group Exhibition by Carolina Cherubini, Aimée Joaristi, 61 Julio César Palacio, Rita Doris Ubah, Martina Mella, Miguel Sifuentes and Marina Liesegang 61 After the Apocalypse, Group Exhibition by Adrien Tirtiaux, Elodie Antoine and Carole Louis 73
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133 Why Mediate Art? | Rosario
141 Painting and Community, Workshop
152 Pacha-Tikray, Inversion
| 5 Polluting Structures, Workshop by Adrien Tirtiaux and Elodie Antoine 161 African Body Painting, Workshop by Rita Doris Ubah 163 The tangible of Sound, Workshop by Martina Mella 167 Experiencing Our Environment Through Knitting, Workshop by Carolina Cherubini 168 The Sound of Earth, Virtual Talk by Julio César Palacio 170 Objects in Culture are Closer Than They Appear to Be, Virtual talk by Nicolás Consuegra 171 Earth Movements, Pedro Donoso’s Book Release 173 The Line of Destiny, Master Lecture by Óscar Muñoz 175 Sensitive Discontinuities, Workshop by Javier González Pesce 179 Do It: From the Visual to the Stage, Workshop by Esteban Pinto 182 TERRITORY 187 Material Flows, Sensitive Flows: Three Cases of Substance Transfer 189 in Antofagasta | Javier González Pesce 189 Brief Meetings and Farewells | Eric Conrad 199 Quality in the Artistic Industry | Bartek Buczek 202 Antofagasta and the Artistic Challenge of the Atacama Desert | Johannes Pfeiffer 205 The Language of Stones | Sebastián Riffo 209 Seas and Mountains: Fragments of a Trip | Alexandre Christiaens 212 The Kid and the Fridge | Carole Louis 219 Lichens | Elodie Antoine 223 Another Sky in the North | Melanie Garland 224 SACO CORPORATION 229 From Contemporary Art Week to Biennial 231
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These photographs are a heartfelt tribute to 1991 flood victims from those of us who were there to defend the city, 30 years after the mud and water swept with everything, leaving behind a scary amount of deads, injured, landslides, and material losses, as never before in the history of this place.
Ricardo Rabanal Bustos Professor, Master in Education, historian, chronicler and fireman.
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Flood | 15 FLOOD 30 YEARS AFTER ONE OF THE ENDS OF THE WORLD. CURATORIAL TEXT
Dagmara Wyskiel Following three hours of intense rain during the early morning of June 18, 1991, a mudslide swept through the capital of the driest desert on the planet. The water stripped the soil from the barren hills, incapable of absorbing the falling rain, and into the ravines, carrying rivers of mud up to 2 meters high that inundated Antofagasta. One geologic layer abruptly covered another, nullifying it, destroying it, overcoming it. The hills came tumbling down, converting the neighborhoods into archaeological sites. In the radiant light of the subsequent dawn, a cataclysmic scene was revealed. According to the Bible, the flood was a tool of punishment, a way to silence the earth. It was working more or less until the nationwide popular uprising when the skies cleared up again. The people lost their innocence and raised their voices in furor. And then came the global sanitary shutdown. The fog descended and covered everything. New layers were once again superimposed, this time of resistance. Trying to control the uncontrollable, in liquid times, those who cling to the masts end up underwater. Cities are more alive than ever because they get sick just like us; they are neglected, shut down, depressed. They feel. Then they get up one day, having overcome their mourning, they shower with the rain, get all done up with the sun, and go out dancing. The times following a crisis are often the most fertile. How to live after an apocalypse? The world we once knew has ended; we must now flow into the aftertimes. When both the adrenaline and the dust subside, there is no longer space for heroism. We must now roll up our sleeves and bury, demolish, and disinfect; organize, get rid of what has been destroyed, and thus clear the way for something new. We count the victims; we make tables and graphs. “We’ll be better prepared next time,” write those in social media who have survived some other finale. Game over. We have another life. We got to the next level. Here, there are other bad guys that we don’t yet know. It is time to get lost and wander off in some new direction, not in social media, not in posttruth, but rather in the streets. Only a casual encounter, face to face, of which no algorithm would suspect, allows for real expectation, not something predesigned –this is what freedom means. And it’s not about reinventing yourself because we are not of our own invention, nor are we hardware with some auto-reset system. We need to tear down the binary system of success and failure that has characterized the way in which we interrelate throughout the haughty era of the Anthropocene. Preparing for rain in the desert, and not only from climate change, which makes it even more likely but because everything is possible –if we make the switch. And if there is still any doubt, look backward. The desert is nothing but the sea, with a temporary absence of water. The desert is nothing but the sea, with a absencetemporaryofwater.
SACO1.0 Contemporary Art Biennial included the participation of artists from 15 countries, distributed in 12 venues, and 14 free exhibitions intended to discuss this desertic region alongside the Pacific Ocean in the north of Chile as a place for artistic creation, experimentation, research, visibility, circulation, and legitimacy. The biennial´s first edition pays homage to the memories of reconstruction after the 1991 flood when 30 years ago, one hundred people lost their lives due to this natural catastrophe provoked by El Niño, a predecessor of the climate change phenomenon. The Melbourne Clark Historic Pier, a port facility linked to saltpeter exportation and the Pacific War conflict between Bolivia and Chile (1879-1883), was Flood’s heart. All the mud from the tragedy slid down from the hills into the sea, arriving there. The seven site-specific works selected were part of an open call announced during 2021 first semester. SACO nominated an international jury for choosing the open-space exhibition proposals closer to the concept of flood, with a sense of update to the current pandemic scale. We decided on the projects from seven artists: Dominium by Aimée Joaristi (Cuba-Costa Rica), The Day After the Flood by Carolina Cherubini (Brazil), When the Earth Speaks by Julio Palacio (Venezuela-Spain), TILT by Marina Liesegang (Brazil), Media-aguas by Martina Mella (Chile), Simulated Security de Miguel Sifuentes (Mexico) and Flood Doesn’t Have Borders by Rita Doris Ubah (Nigeria). In pandemic times, the collective installation outdoors became a space of relationships, collaboration, and interchange. It was similar to the solidarity among the community members who strengthened ties after a catastrophe. The exhibition at the pier alludes to a devastated home that is starting to recover its shape: the works on display raise enlightening critics to the market system and the security resources of the material goods we rely on when living in urban centers. The recovery spirit that appears the day after a disaster is also present in some of the Artists from 15 countries, distributed in 12 venues, and 14 free exhibitions intended to discuss this desertic region alongside the Pacific Ocean as a place for artistic creation, experimentation, research, circulation,visibility,andlegitimacy.
16 | Flood FROM SEPTEMBER 30 TO DECEMBER 15 AT THE PIER Marcio Harum
Two years after the social uprising, it is wonderful to notice the course of a new biennial in Chile and, what is more remarkable, outside the country´s capital. In Antofagasta, indeed, the mining epicenter par excellence. As a Brazilian coming from a political reality that swept away the Ministry of Culture in 2019, it’s fascinating to witness the scene where this biennial arise, with the Mapuche academic Elisa Loncon chairing the Constitutional Assembly in charge of writing the new constitution and Gabriel Boric being the president of the country. All these amid the COVID-19 pandemic managed by the Ministry of Health.
The unique character of SACO1.0 Biennial resides in promoting the occupation of non-artistic spaces aiming to boost a cultural advance in the region. The biennial contributes to widening the scope for the local production of culture, searching for the balance between the outdoor exhibition and climate-controlled rooms specially conditioned for the projection of moving images.
In the era we live in, this kind of artistic platform brings an open and trustworthy dialog for meeting again around multiple voices, places and origins, leaving behind recent traumas due to confinement. The open space, the sound of the sea, the blue sky, the birds flying, and the heat of the desert sun over the Pacific Ocean are the best examples of that.
Flood | 17 works. The different perspectives to approach the natural and urban landscape, like a change of status or sensitive re-positioning, also appear in the dialog between the pieces. The perception of the passing of time and the artistic paradigms in the face of life events are entirely in line with this maritime location surrounded by sea lions.
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The open calls are focused on the territory. The artists are not invited –with a few exceptions, like the recent conference of the amazing Óscar Muñoz. They are chosen among hundreds of proposals by a jury from different countries and artistic backgrounds. In this way, the commonplaces of fruitless monologues from within disciplines speaking to themselves are avoided. By a combination of factors, the openness to the general public is possible. Once the artworks are mounted, it becomes evident that the museum is the open space for SACO. From the pier they now administrate to the ruins of a silver foundry, this unique experience spreads out in Antofagasta. In addition to these spaces, the few available cultural centers and galleries open their doors for international artworks and a healthy local scene. The route continues into the desert to Quillagua and San Pedro de Atacama, where the artworks are introduced to the local people by enthusiastic mediators trained by the organization itself. In Antofagasta, there is no way to escape from the artistic reflection since creative workshops are also offered at schools. On this occasion, the subject was the flood. In a region with practically no rains, the territory overflows when they fall, causing tragedies like the one that happened three decades ago. The seven winning proposals for the exhibition at the Melbourne Clark Pier approached this event, building an extended home from divergent perspectives. This year the usual stroll at the dock had a cardboard door with a big lock challenging our security sense. Once the work by Mexican Miguel Sifuentes was opened, we got inside a hut made of PVC pipes and whistles. Martina Mella from Concepción reflected on the precarity of Chilean housing solutions. In the backyard of her piece, Brazilian artist Carolina Cherubini hanged the freshly washed sheets used the day after the flood. She evoked a sailing ship about to weigh anchor while showing how the women’s work is made invisible. One step after, the colors in Nigerian artist Rita Doris’s work enabled another textile craft to set sail. At this point, the public –already a piece more in this reflective play– was surprised by the perspective shift offered through the platform created by Marina Liesegang from Brazil; and the ceramic domino game by Costa Rican Aimée Joaristi leading them to the sea. Those more perceptive could sit on the inclusive bench with an unnoticed speaker. Then, we felt “when the earth speaks” along with Julio César Palacio from Spain. How have they achieved an audience of 30 thousand people where there is not a museum or an art school?
For a decade now, Poland artist Dagmara Wyskiel and Chilean producer Christian Núñez have been organizing art weeks, festivals, and since 2021 a biennial of contemporary art in Antofagasta. They have been planted in the sea and also in the driest desert in the world. Under a sun with a shadow that sinks in the mining are the mummies from our ancestors and tons of discarded clothing, where everything remains intact. One year after the other, SACO has harvested a loyal public for artistic practices that would possibly not find space in different zones of the country. How have they achieved an audience of 30 thousand people where there is not a museum or an art school?
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ART, DESERT, AND PARTICIPATIVE PEOPLE
Enrique Winter
20 | Flood In the desert where everything is preserved, these pieces –and those from twenty-one artists that attended other residencies– seemed an ephemeral gift. But they put tension on the territory, its inhabitants and its history, transforming their own shapes and the ones of those who interacted with them. Conceived from and for social change, SACO returns its gaze to a participative people. Maybe these memories will accompany them forever, like the sea and the desert.
Flood | 21 QUALITY OF REGIONAL CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Escondida BHP Through its solid program and permanent commitment of more than 23 years to the regional cultural development, Escondida | BHP makes real the aim of “gathering people and resources to build a better world” and, thus, a better city and a better region.
The first Contemporary Art Biennial in Antofagasta allowed the community access to great worldclass artistic experiences. The interventions presented placed value on historic sites, intertwining contemporary art made by different artists with patrimonial spaces and important local referents. The audience was touched by the learnings this event left. Decentralizing and democratizing access to art and culture, allowing the community to enjoy unique, enriching, and high-quality experiences, is part of our commitment to creating social value while contributing to education and the complete development of the Antofagasta Region.
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museum without museum | 35 MUSEUM WITHOUT MUSEUM Pedro Donoso
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In this interview, the artist talks about these and other questions: his first visit to Chile in the framework of the SACO Biennial, what the return to presentiality in art has meant to him and what are the points of encounter and disagreement between the digital and analog image in an increasingly virtual world. He also talks about the pandemic experience of Lugar a Dudas, the mythical space for residencies that he co-founded in Cali in 2005, together with the current general coordinator Sally Mizrachi, who joined the second part of the conversation.
NON-STOP FLIGHT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ÓSCAR MUÑOZ Artishock and SACO
On a direct and non-stop flight between Cali and Antofagasta, Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz arrived at the SACO1.0 Contemporary Art Biennial to present the exhibition The Line of Destiny and offer a guided tour of his works. This invitation materialized after years of negotiations and was the perfect opportunity for him to give his first and only lecture in Chile.
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For Dagmara Wyskiel, director of SACO, the fact that Oscar Muñoz’s work was shown in the north “symbolically builds a bridge between these two cities stigmatized for various reasons within their respective countries.”
The Line of Destiny was installed in a darkened room at the Minera Escondida Foundation, in Antofagasta, as a sort of recreation of a darkroom that immerses visitors in the intimacy of Muñoz’s work. Narciso, Biographies, Sedimentations, and The Line of Destiny were the four works in exhibition, which reminded us of the ephemeral and fragile human condition.
Through audiovisual projections whose images become deformed until disappearing but reappear when the video’s time is reversed, the artist invited us to reconfigure concepts such as presence and absence. Using portraits of anonymous, forgotten beings who briefly return to life, he focuses on death as suspended time. His work moves between the enduring and the perishable, recognition and marginalization, memory and oblivion.
In times of expansion of new technologies in contemporary art, Muñoz uses the analog method as an artistic exercise, creating a space for reflection. Through the image, he invites us to question everyday communication. Since we are more connected and with more information than ever, could it be that in the midst of the saturation of continuous production, we no longer question the value of the moment in an image?
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I hadn’t given a talk for a while. I had planned to read a text, but given the opportunity to meet people interested in listening to me, I considered it more important to talk to them and look them in the eyes, that is, to have a more special closeness in these times of so much distance.
I think it is important to emphasize that we are constantly in a dynamic of remembering and forgetting. We remember because we forget, and vice versa. It is a bit like breathing, a dual-action. If we talk about breathing, we talk about duality: inhaling and exhaling. My work approaches that crucial instant where the document, the image, the impression or the trace may or may not be consolidated; and that is why there are two possibilities: that of remembering or that of forgetting. A critical moment similar to the instant when we are about to remember something we have forgotten, or in which we are about to forget something we have remembered. It is in that critical gap where I want to situate my work.
Like the problem of the “memorious” who does not forget and does not live new experiences, because every minute of today is remembering yesterday’s: we need to forget in order to have experiences today. It is a vehicle driven by two forces, as if in tandem.
I liked talking about things that interest me a lot, such as the processes involved in my work, how I do them, and being able to tell the public what’s there. Then, obviously, going through this small exhibition of only four works, which shows a group that spans from 2004 to 2010 in video works, projections, and installations. Presence and absence, memory, the ephemeral nature of life and the passage of time in the image are fundamental axes of your work. What is the role of oblivion?
Only four works compound the exhibition that spans from 2004 to 2010 with video works, projections, and installations.
40 | museum without museum we need to forget in order to have experiences today
Your participation in the SACO Biennial is marked by two important events: your first solo exhibition in Chile and the keynote lecture that culminated in an on-site tour through the show. How was the experience of the encounter between the public, you and your work after two years of confinement?
Your work’s approach to the volatility of the image and to its temporality. Its imprint on our perception is very pertinent today in the conversations about the image in the virtual sphere. There are too many images circulating, an excess that we do not manage to process and that because of its speed does not allow us to question or reflect. The vast majority of images have become dispensable, disposable. They are no longer even printed for posterity, they only go viral and float in cyberspace. What is your position on the digital image, and what is its role and value today?
museum without museum | 41 My work has been developed within mechanical and analog processes rather than digital ones. In fact, I applied it by discovering the mechanics of analog photography. However, I have recent works that somehow move a bit in that field of immateriality and reflect on the digital image, on virtuality.
The analog method of fixing the photograph is a critical instant that turns that image into the past once it is frozen and stopped. Once the image is revealed and fixed it becomes past, history.
The digital image is floating and is only saved, as Derrida says in Archive Fever, when the save key is pressed, meaning that it is fixed on a hard disk that retains it. It is basically the same mechanics of chemical fixation in analog photography. If we are writing with ink on paper and it gets wet, it will be erased, but if the ink dries on the paper, the document is consolidated.
There is an interest to pick up certain images that are part of the memory, to find again their meaning, or to re-signify them. In this sense, and taking into account that you have always been interested in “developing” as a concept –as an image is “revealed”–, what should we value, or recognize, from analog photographic methods?
These systems bombard us and overwhelm us every day with an endless amount of images that reach us in different ways and at different times and places. Every day we manage to select what we discard, and what we retain in our brains. This routine process causes yesterday’s images to be maintained or covered by today’s images. That is why I consider images to be fragile and perishable.
Another technique used in your work is the loop, which goes from being a purely technical tool to a method. What is the purpose of its use and how does it relate to the ideas you seek to convey to the viewer? In many cases the repetition is the same, but in many others it is not, so it is not a repetition. It is interesting to me the act of bringing back an image, because we are not the same when we remember, nor is the image the same each time we remember it. In this sense, the image is not fixed, it is unstable, stammering, changing and altered by many things and memories. For example, we do not see the same thing when we watch a film at two different times, somehow it is not a repeated action. In several of the pieces I showed at the conference this happens, as in Narciso, where the image is printed. Still, when you see it one day it will be different from when you see it another day. Some micro-movements, events that happen in the evaporation process that makes the image not the same because it is in an imperceptible movement which makes it changeable. It seems to me that something like this would work with memory. Some pieces here propose that the “printed” image is exposed to a transformation in time, so it is affected by time.
Sally Mizrachi: We opened the residencies a few years after the inauguration of Lugar a Dudas´ venue. The residency program was perfectly in line with our idea of establishing a platform for encounters. We wanted to boost the interaction and relationship between the city and the local artistic community with the resident visitors. At the same time, the possibility of circulation of local artists in other areas of Latin America. I believe that these encounters enriched the local scene through the dialog between the artists who arrived, the city, and the community itself.
S: As I said before, Lugar a Dudas bases its activity on the encounter, on convening and being with others, and the residency is just that. It is the place of experience, the encounter with others within the city, the dialog. That is why it has been very difficult for us to understand what a virtual residency can be like... you feel you are missing out on something. The experience of seeing each other, seeing each other’ s faces, gestures, feeling you there and not just through a screen with a little square at the top and one at the bottom. I think that to reside is to be in a place, and always suggests going out to a new context, and if you are in your own chair and your computer, what is the point of “residing”? Maybe it should be called in a different way, a Zoom or Meet exchange.
42 | museum without museum a center in the province What were your motivations for founding the Lugar a Dudas space for residencies and experimentation in Cali, and what has it been like to develop this work from a non-metropolitan city?
We are not the same when we remember; the image is not fixed, it is unstable, stammering.
In conversations with the founders of ISLA, SACO’s residency program, reflections emerged about how the health crisis affected your respective residencies and how you see the transformations and new challenges. Sally, from your experiences, how indispensable is face-to-face attendance?
The program began when the director of Triangle Arts in New York came to Cali to visit Lugar a Dudas and suggested creating a network. It was something very important because we created the first network of residencies with similar organizations in South America. We are neighboring countries, but we don’t have much exchange or knowledge of each other. We established a permanent call program with Capacete in Brazil, Kiosco in Bolivia, and Basilisco in Buenos Aires. These four organizations started the network and exchanges. It was also very significant that after three years another organization, the AECID Foundation, a Spanish agency in Brazil, became interested in this first network that we had formed and wanted to expand it to many other Latin American and Spanish-speaking countries. For four years we worked with the support of AECID, forming a much broader network of 20 organizations. Projects that came from different organizations were hosted by others in the network, which was very important for the contribution to the local residency program. The focus was not to take it to the capital but to create another center decentralized from the capital, to be a center in the province.
Ó: SACO is a very interesting biennial format with a lot of potential... As long as it develops projects that are closely linked to or detached from local life, context, air, temperature, materiality, space, stories, and political life. I feel that it could become very powerful in that sense. The public spaces, the history, or the facts, are the elements that give a special dynamic and a particularity to an event like this.
To us in Lugar a Dudas, as a meeting and contact place, attendance has a lot of power to develop a project. Also, because at Lugar a Dudas we never asked for a previously thought-out proposal, but rather that the city itself, the relationship with the other and the artist’s stay allow an idea to germinate or grow.
S: I have met people, artists who have been in online residencies and they say it is another way, but I have also heard other ways of doing research, connecting with people who are in that discipline, making a previous collection of information by Zoom and then arriving to the territory to experience the proposal and carry it out. It is a very different way that can work out and can be complemented.
S: To promote these encounters between citizens and artistic proposals may stir up, provoke or raise doubts and reflections among citizens. And it is very valuable to make that possible.
Ó: At least from our perspective, based on our experiences, the concept of residing can mutate or be rethought, perhaps, but for us it is still very important to be there, face to face, as they say nowadays.
the role of biennials What were your experiences and appreciations while touring the SACO Biennial’s museum without museum circuit? According to your opinion, what is the role of biennials in the world and more specifically in Latin America?
S: The important thing is the format of what Óscar says: the city and how the journey through different parts of it integrates the artistic proposals, which can take place in any space. A biennial could be a big venue where you enter and all the works are in one place. Still, the beautiful thing here is the invitation to tour the city, which I think is more complex, but addresses several points of “occupying the city” and creating a dialog with the artistic proposals and the people. That relationship is super valuable, allowing the city to create a dialog between artists and inhabitants. The mobility of the routes – library, museum, among others– opens that possibility in the biennial. As Óscar says, each work has its own creativity, but the theme of mobilizing all these in a province and not in a central city is also very inspiring and a powerful achievement.
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Ó: I also think the local scale is important. I like the fact that it doesn’t have the magnitude of the big biennials. It is not a meaningless tourist tour either, it is well integrated with the daily life of the city and that is a strong achievement, beyond being a cultural tourism ritual. It seems to me that it is more about the possibility of connecting with the citizens, with their conflicts and their past.
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museum without museum | 45 SACO Biennial has a lot of potential as long as it develops projects linked to local life, context, air, temperature, materiality, space, stories, and political issues.
If the mission of a photographer is usually to obtain an image to seal the existence of an instant, in the case of Muñoz we are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
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THE LINE OF DESTINY BY ÓSCAR MUÑOZ
We could say that the dramatic possibilities of light and shadow in relation to the definition of the image are a proper way to enter the work of Óscar Muñoz. However, perhaps the right way does not always allow us to enter into the mystery of a work that, realistically described, is more related to the instability of what we see. If the mission of a photographer is usually to obtain an image to seal the existence of an instant, in the case of Muñoz we are at the opposite end of the spectrum. His work pursues the process of formation and deformation of what we see and understand visually. And this can be quickly verified when walking through the gallery of the Minera Escondida Foundation. In his projections displayed on the wall and on the floor, we see the appearance of faces that form and fall apart repeatedly on the surface of a container. The prominence acquired by the stain appears as a key to understanding that those faces that accompany us in the tour of the room are, like each one of us, a desire, a search, an illusion. Before our eyes, they reveal how a visual composition is produced from a stain that we associate with something known: based on the projective method of diagnosis inaugurated by the psychoanalyst Herman Rorschach, the stains would allow us to recognize certain symbols that determine our inner life. What we would distinguish there is, in reality, what our emotional memory projects, the ghosts that inhabit us. We are made of that which we see blurred, our emotions and fears haunt us in those black splashes that form like omens on the white of a washbasin.
museum without museum | 47 “In an era of increasing global political uncertainty and heightened states of anxiety, the works of Óscar Muñoz help to remind us how fragile we are.” Those were the words of Mark Sealy, chairman of the 2018 Hasselblad Prize jury, as he bestowed the award on the Popayán-born Colombian artist.
The awarding of the prize came as a rather exceptional gesture. Technically speaking, Muñoz is not a photographer like the other laureates of this prestigious competition. His lineage is not that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, or Graciela Iturbide, however, his handling of the image penetrates with precision into a place where it has been necessary to recognize a unique ability.
What Óscar Muñoz makes clear to us is the veracity of the inexact, the power of suggestion that exists in the indefinite and, of course, reopens the discussion on the precariousness of the human, as shown by the immanence of his own face reflected on the water he accumulates in one hand. That impossible narcissism is just an act of recognition of what marks our line of destiny: condemned to appear and disappear as if it were a heartbeat, images are, at times, a backup that helps us find a memory of what we are looking for. “My work is focused on that crucial instant,” the artist himself pointed out in an interview, “where the document, the image, the impression or the trace can be consolidated or not; and that is why there are two possibilities: that of memory or that of oblivion”. By opening the blurred mystery that appears in the images that make up The Line of Destiny, photography is shown in a revelatory function from its visible inconstancy. This paradox of a photographer who, instead of fixing, delves into the essential inconstancy of what our eyes perceive, makes Muñoz an exceptional artist capable of “reminding us how fragile we are,” as Mark Sealy rightly pointed out. On the other hand, isn’t this fragility the deep breath of what is alive?
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Circumstantial sculptures and witnesses of everything, the rocks concentrate the memory of the place: this is the subject matter that Pfeiffer deals with.
museum without museum | 53 Footsteps crunch on the ground of stones and sand. Above, the sky imposes its blue identity amidst an implacable sun. Johannes Pfeiffer steps through the desolation of the Atacama Desert, where “the stones scream as they crash against the air” as the poet Raúl Zurita writes. The questions that haunt Pfeiffer’s imagination contrast with the wind and the silence: it is the second time he has been invited to this landscape, the driest on the planet. Around him he now finds the solemnity exuded by the large rocks, inhabitants of these latitudes for thousands of years. The scenery is dramatic enough and requires a very precise intervention. To think of land art and its great excavations and displacements of material is untenable. Pffeifer must make decisions to act with a gesture that is both definitive and subtle at the same time. Sometimes compared to the lunar landscape, the desert attracts by its emptiness. Everything there seems to be arranged as on the first day of the world when life had not yet arrived. Or perhaps like the last. And in all that uncountable time, the only presence that has remained there are the rocks, those enormous pieces made by a ceramist without purpose, shaped from the magma of the Earth. They concentrate the inclemency of time and keep in their body the furrows made by the wind, the notches of the sand with the rubbing of the centuries, the paintings and engravings of the native peoples who spent their lives in arduous exchange with that arid and hot environment.
And in all that uncountable time, the only presence that has remained there are the rocks, those enormous pieces made by a ceramist without purpose, shaped from the magma of the Earth.
THE MEMORY OF ROCKS BY JOHANNES PFEIFFER
By tucking a number of stones in red canvases, the association with blood emerges, of course.
“In beauty there is always a wound,” the German artist has pointed out. And if we think about it, the same color is present in the long strands of wool that artist Cecilia Vicuña uses to recall the menstrual character of the landscape. In Pfeiffer’s case, however, this textile gesture also alludes to the shroud, that cloth that wraps the corpse when it is laid out for burial. The paradox is that the red cloth serves here to unearth the rocks; to make them visible as genuine bearers of the silence of the desert. Because the enveloping action of the artist is completed by extracting the code inscribed on the rough surface of each stone and transferring it to the city of Antofagasta, to a site next to the port where the containers rest before being shipped full of merchandise. Pfeiffer’s rocky shrouds, despite being containers with an empty structure, will not set out to sea nor will they serve for any other trade than the recovery of the anonymous memory of these pieces of the planet’s surface. They will mark a pause in the shipping and commercial agitation. The structure left in the desert by the tons of weight of the mineral mass will serve as a scenographic gesture to allow us to rethink “the desert of the real,” to paraphrase the expression of the theorist Slavoj Žižek. The mention of the
54 | museum without museum transplanted rocks brings an image of the landscape where the stones, hard and silent, inhabit the immobility, the slow advance of what remains in geological time. We could imagine them as if they were bones of the landscape. And what Pfeiffer has rescued is their skin to assemble a fragmentary rendezvous in the middle of a productive port, forced into the frenzy of world trade.
The transfer of these fragments of the landscape is an aesthetic gesture that proposes obvious questions about the weight of things and about our way of trading with the world. Their presence without market value and totally unknown reminds us that they have nevertheless survived for centuries in their original location: in the driest desert in the world, where “reality” has not yet made its presence felt. In silence, they have seen entire armies and civilizations march by, so should we think about establishing another relationship with these rocks and their memory, through a slow and silent dialog? Some years ago, the philosopher Michel Serres wrote about “a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity, in which our relationship with things would abandon dominion and possession for admiring listening, reciprocity, contemplation and respect, in which knowledge would no longer imply ownership, nor action, dominion.” We could begin to imagine something like this.
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On the other hand, Costa Rican artist Aimée Joaristi assumes the effect of the fall, the burden of displacement generated by the flood, and adds a playful element to it. Her work Dominium plays with the domino effect which, as we know it, implies the chaining of falling pieces placed at the right distance. If one falls, they all fall. Opening up to the possibility of an effect that will reveal the need to lose everything and rebuild it is imposed as a recovery of dominion. Hence, the piece proposed by Joaristi leads us to think about an inevitable bet: how to provoke the first action that will trigger another flood, another cumulative fall. And furthermore, what kind of flood should it be?
The chronicles of the flood that occurred in Antofagasta in June 1991 give an account of one of the most violent climatic phenomena recorded in local memory. In the course of a few hours, the unexpected irruption of the rain provoked a deluge of water in the middle of the night that descended from the high ravines of the hills that overlook the city. A rumor of stones, trees, and indescribable objects accompanied the advance of the mud in the middle of the darkness. In its wake, that thick current acted like the cold lava of a water volcano that would engulf numerous citizens and their places of life. The rainfall not only broke all statistics but also unleashed a lethal paradox caused by the eruption of an element of maximum scarcity in the desert: water. The contradiction of this unpredictable effect, that is, the calamity caused by the excess of a scarce element, served the organization of the SACO Biennial to start thinking differently thirty years after that memory. “How to live after an apocalypse?” was the question raised in 2021 to think about that tragic past and relate it to a future that today looks confusing. This attempt to see beyond and “clear the space for something new” was the invitation accepted by more than two hundred international artists, seven of whose works were chosen. Following the testimony of the victims, Brazilian artist Carolina Cherubini’s The Day After the Flood appeals to the moment of cleansing that follows the catastrophe. A flood is, at its most basic, mud and stones that descend with fury, covering houses and infiltrating rooms, public and private spaces alike. As everything is stained by the spillage, it becomes a uniform brownish color. The press shows the images of the following day with dozens of people engaged in cleanup tasks trying to restore the colors to the city. When everything is earth-colored, Cherubini strives to reactivate life through an act of cleanliness, a domestic and insignificant act: hanging up the freshly washed clothes. In her desire to portray a moment and overcome it, her installation seeks to purify the dirt caused by the mud, just as the sheets unfold in the wind. Her work combines the allusion to a testimony of recovery through a large structure of clothes laid out as an arrangement of flags that flutter with the relief of having overcome the catastrophe.
FLOOD, GROUP EXHIBITION BY CAROLINA CHERUBINI, AIMÉE JOARISTI, A cardboard door is not capable of generating a shelter but only a screen that hides something we do not want to see.
JULIO CÉSAR PALACIO, RITA DORIS UBAH, MARTINA MELLA, MIGUEL SIFUENTES AND MARINA LIESEGANG
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If Julio César Palacio’s vibrating sound piece understands that there is no stopping the constant movements and modifications that the life of materials imposes around us, the textile Flood Doesn’t Have Borders reinforces this concept of the “vibrating matter” that is spread around us, taking the term from the theorist Jane Bennett.
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A house made with PVC pipes means assembling it by the secondary parts. The pipes that should carry the water become structuring elements of the most popular emergency housing in Chile. The investment in the material order of the construction points, of course, to the fragility that defines this type of dwelling designed to replace a single-family space in emergency situations, increased in turn by the acoustic character of the work. Whistles are blown by the wind that enters the tubes. The initial suggestion of Chilean Martina Mella’s work renders transparent the fragility of a widespread social solution that ends up pushing the victims into a condition of permanent refugees. Usually designed to house four people in a surface of 6.2 x 3 meters, we can see in the replica without walls of the work Media-aguas that its accusation does not stop at the irruption of the catastrophe but, what seems worse, at the consequences of a housing response that insists on perpetuating the vulnerable conditions of those who have lost everything.
An appeal to insecurity is also found in Mexican Miguel Sifuentes’ Simulated Safety. A door opens to another place, allows or closes the passage. The fascination of creating a threshold of access or even exit gives the door a symbolic component that we often overlook. This installation, also functions as evidence of the condition of the port itself, whose natural vocation is to activate a
In his sound installation When the Earth Speaks, Spanish artist Julio César Palacio reminds us that sonority is also part of an invisible world, but as eloquent and direct as the vibrations that reach our skin. His installation with loudspeakers on a dock bench is presented as a surprise to the visitor who takes a seat. The visitor might immediately think that it is the sound of the engines of the big boats docked at the pier. Or, in a more sinister version, it could be the hoarse rumble of a landslide. The tremor that announces a cataclysm reaches here the one who senses the disaster. In this anticipated uneasiness through a familiar object activated by a sound installation, the surprise of discovering the proximity of danger looms, the familiarity of what vibrates as a veiled threat that could come to mean a sudden and devastating change. Contrary to a warning alarm with its annoying and circumstantial stridency, the work of Julio César Palacio gives rise to a vibratory confusion that we cannot avoid: the rumor of a geological system in constant adjustment and Thereconfiguration.textilepiece
Flood Doesn’t Have Borders by Nigerian artist Rita Doris Ubah takes up the narrative opened by Carolina Cherubini to immerse it into a chromatic abstraction. The canvases gathered on a large-format frame seem to describe the waves of colors that rushed from the hills to the sea. This colorful narrative also appeals to disasters that occurred in the artist’s own country, suggesting that borders don´t determine the occurrence of such a phenomenon. The shock of these sudden acts of nature unites the inhabitants of all those places ravaged by devastation. If we think of the flood as a phenomenon that repeats itself in different geographical locations, this great loom places us before the planetary reality of our existence on the surface of a rocky sphere that vibrates, moves, and undergoes transformations, many of them of anthropic origin.
museum without museum | 63 space of passage from one place to another. Port and door are words that are similar to the Spanish language. However, the light material of the work brings to our perception a problem that disarms the protective reality we seek in it. Simulated Safety approaches the fragility of the houses that are distributed in the upper part of the city, the most vulnerable to a flood. In those neighborhoods where insecurity reigns, a cardboard door is something that is not capable of generating a shelter but only a screen that hides from view something we do not want to see. An open book, a large billboard, a sign for distant reading. All these interpretations can be attributed to the simple orange TILT structure by Brazilian Marina Liesegang. However, it is not as an object available to our gaze that the artist herself conceived this installation, but rather as an observation platform. We have to mount on it and rest our back against its surface, our head upwards, and in that angle of vision the surrounding reality takes on a different distance. Marina proposes to us to see again, to return, to give the opportunity to the body of each visitor to sensorially experience another time and another form of intermediate perception, neither lying down nor standing up. The work forces us, then, to incorporate a different angle of play, a position where the view rises to a suspended place. An observatory is, first of all, a place where we become aware of the shape of our gaze. Our senses, passing through this old historic pier, receive a variety of stimulations, echoes that refer to a distant catastrophe, to a wave that overflowed the hill into the sea. That inverted phenomenon, that wave of land that came from the ravines, brings us uneasy thoughts about the pontoons of the pier. While the legacy of that history speaks of impotence and pain, our gaze cannot avoid today the reading of a slow violence that extends in our dealings with the environment. If 30 years were enough to trigger the social outburst that devastated the cities of the country like a flood, perhaps we should now think that 2022 is also the time to start another way of relating to a climate catastrophe that is announced inevitable.
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museum without museum | 73 Après l’apocalypse (After the apocalypse) was the title of the call for entries between SACO and the Belgian organization Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI). We have lived through complex times and we must begin to rethink things. The global health emergency, seclusion and social distancing have encouraged the dispersion of relationships in a world inhabited through digital networks. On the other hand, the concept of flood that inspires this version of the biennial, appeals to the ability to overcome calamities by following “models of social transformation through art with concrete actions.” In tune with this spirit of resistance and readaptation, the proposals chosen to travel to Antofagasta acknowledge that the world has already ended several times: so many that it is impossible to think of a definitive end. They are all a provisional rehearsal of the story of a disaster that we must rework from time to time. Here are three examples awaiting for a new event after the end of time. An important part of the final crisis we are facing is the human aspect: in an era of environmental conflict, the “humanist” optimism predominant in the last three or four centuries of Western history has been lost, as Viveiros de Castro and Danowski argue. Aren’t we ourselves the plague that will end our lives in this post-apocalyptic period? Elodie Antoine appeals, then, to the coexistence with other realms to invoke the renewal of life on the surface of this planet and escape the expiration of humanity.
The protuberances that sprout from the walls in her work Mushrooms and Mould resemble skin eruptions, outgrowths of an unclassifiable species that point to a new presence on the hard surface of the concrete of the museum or even on the rough stones of the ruins. By means of a careful fastening system, the artist recomposes the adherence of mycelia and fungi, adapted survivors of the catastrophe. Surely, after the apocalypse, it is not only necessary to think of another life but, above all, of another death. This is what Carole Louis addresses in her work and performance entitled Cave In for Later, whose translation could be “resign to what will come later.” With a touch of irony, her reading of the funeral ritual flirts with death thanks to the repurposing of half-buried refrigerators on the grounds of the park. Distributed like white sarcophagi, each one served as an integral element of the inaugural performance where the artist introduced plastic flowers into them, which she sprinkled with fancy drinks: suddenly, this post-apocalyptic scenario became the consecration of petroleum-derived polymers. Arranged like a living plantation, these elements now mark a form of permanence in the desert. The tombs and animitas1 themselves speak to us of a reading of death adorned and revered through artificial and inert materials, flowers of an imperishable burial that will subsist for decades without decomposing with their false colors.
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, GROUP EXHIBITION BY ADRIEN TIRTIAUX, ELODIE ANTOINE AND CAROLE LOUIS
Elodie Antoine appeals to the coexistence with other realms to escape the expiration of humanity. 1 funeral altarpieces
In turn, with artificial arrangements of post-natural life, Adrien Tirtiaux chooses to amplify the expansive presence of the sanitary mask as a prosthesis, to transform it into a shelter suspended in the air. If our access to the world today occurs thanks to this respiratory filter, the installation Living on the Edge enlarges the mask until it becomes a shelter made of sticks and white cloth: a medical igloo. That bandage covering our faces has served to keep us alive, but it has also led us to a larval isolation that suspends us on the edge, like chicks in a nest attached to a corner of the building. That ambiguous sense of fragility and safety is in conflict in this hanging structure of light materials: the opposite of the imposing ruins that stand in the background of a postapocalyptic scene.
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A window is a device intended to open a connection between two spaces, one could think of it as acting as a connective membrane. Or perhaps it is the window itself that generates the spaces? Surely, the first thing a window allows us to do is to look. Its rectangular shape frames a perspective between the inside of a building and what is outside. A window is, therefore, a viewfinder that focuses on a certain perspective. At the same time, it is a source of light that, symbolically, allows us to breach the confinement and makes visible what is contained inside an enclosure. Vision, light, connection: all these elements are somehow present in the installation. But we must also add a temporal dimension that, being an installation placed in a heritage complex, opens a new conversation, a dialog with history, with what once existed there. In a certain way, what Consuegra allows is a variable relationship not only with what is right there but, above all, with what is no longer there. The ruins. Looking back to an era associated with the ancient gears of the machinery for the processing of silver ore leads us to think of the grinding of the stone containing the metal, the noisy processes of heavy industry, the hectic activity of the workers and laborers determined to obtain the desired resource under the sun. This image of extractive work appears at some point in the vision of the windows of Consuegra, which incorporate a rotating mechanism, a metallic grid that evokes the movement of a mill. That industrial ancestor reappears in a device to measure the time that passes blowing. The window becomes the wind, is the title of the artist’s proposal. And that wind, we might add, is the one that blows with history Arranged in pastel tones like the buildings in the background, which increase the contrast with the dark presence of the stone blocks of the Huanchaca complex, these three windows allow us to hear the wind that sneaks through the rotating grid and brings us the rumors that the memory of that place keeps. Of course, everything that is installed in the proximity of a ruin has the inevitable mandate to coexist with the rescued remains of the past to restore some form of historical relationship. In this case, Consuegra bursts in with a geometric and colorful work that reopens a conversation between the newcomer and that which is part of the place. To be part of the place is also to have to understand its history. This speculation on the wind of history seeps through these windows and, at some point, reminds us once again of Walter Benjamin’s words: that stormy wind that pushes us into the future, leaving ruins in its wake, is what we call progress.
THE WINDOW BECOMES WIND BY NICOLÁS CONSUEGRA
museum without museum | 83 “If the theory that sensations do not reside in the head is true, and that we feel a window, a cloud or a tree not in the brain, but rather in the place where we see them,” says Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street, then –we can continue– when we observe the windows of Colombian artist Nicolás Consuegra installed in the Huanchaca Ruins Cultural Park, we realize that we feel them revolving in the time of large stones next to the old industrial mining site. In general, the field of art conceives the specifically installed object as a way of opening a relationship with the space where the work and its context are affected and propose a scenic tension of their own. What we call a specific installation, in this case, not only allows the appreciation of the work itself but also the appearance of another way of seeing the place where it is placed.
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MOORING BY ERIC CONRAD
The allusion to a space that moors the public and the personal is, seen with due distance, the space where the biennial itself wants to settle, whose works are spread around the city in an effort to open other dialogs, other distances. What Conrad achieves, then, is to bring what is personal out into the street, breaking the rigid mold of the culturizing institution from a proposal of reading without complexes. As the artist himself pointed out in an interview, “for me that was the interesting contradiction between such a public space and something that is intimate and that really refers to vulnerability.”
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All the elements are gathered in the center of the city. On one side, the library rests behind its classic facade of gray and solemn tones. The Plaza Colón, in front, describes a square polygon where monuments, water fountains, lawns, and tall palm trees are spread out. Passers-by move around its perimeter, sit down to rest from the sun, take refuge under some shade, and approach civilly. The scene confirms the civic form of a central point of the city arranged for the encounter in the public space. The one that adds up all the individualities until combining them in a collective phenomenon of diverse possibilities, precisely where we become citizens, where we share with those we do not know, where others are the measure of my freedom. Approaching the work of the American artist Eric Conrad implies going out from inside the Regional Library of Antofagasta.
In fact, it is like a communicating vessel between what is inside the building –which is also for public use– and the reality of the city outside.
The exhibition is called Mooring, which in English is equivalent to a berth where ships can moor.
Of course, the connection between the public and the private goes through intimacy, that is, that fragile area where we cannot expose ourselves. Our intimacy must be protected because the way we understand it escapes the security of the defined structures: inside we are a shapeless reality, we are like that pile of cloths that hang while we try to order the life that surrounds us. A stereotypical expression of intimate life is, precisely, the so-called intimate garments. From the front of the library hang wide underpants like a flag of intimate identity exposed to the sight and patience of passers-by who, depending on the case, may laugh or frown. Because we do not know if the purpose is only playful. We do not know either if it is a declaration of a change of purpose of the building that, from all the solemn seriousness it shows in its facade, appears now ridiculed, invaded by an inappropriate garment to display. Would we be able to believe that, perhaps, within the relativization of the importance of the public through an exhibition like this, we can begin to think differently in its sense? Then, it is not necessary to define it as a space but as a way of relationship where what we expose becomes something shared. And if it is an amalgam of sticks and canvases, suddenly we must know that this intimate confusion is also public. Let’s add that the installation was created thanks to the call for a workshop in which students from the city participated. Necessarily, in this exercise of approximation, of contact through the canvases and the sticks that they had to arrange, a dialog with the artist began, an elaboration of their doubts until they reached this fragile, laughable, even confusing proposal.
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The adventure of man does not seem to change. A leap back in time to remote eras shows him as a hunting animal who strikes and runs after great beasts, crosses the plains dragging tools and weapons, and sleeps tormented by the noises of predators in the middle of a night lit only by ancient fire. Doesn’t this prehistoric man already employ the same elements of the masculine story that seeks survival in a century marked by extraction? In this case, perhaps we should rethink the story and its attributions of strength assigned to the virile. This is where the two videos that make up Masculine Device make their incursion.
The reiteration of the basic gestures of a mining worker, whom Derek Reese places before the mirror of his masculinity, takes up again an old struggle to know how much determinism we can see in the elemental and repetitive acts of a man dressed as a man. It is, for one, a question that extends not only through the reiteration of a political economy of survival but, above all, to a problem of gender. The masculine has been consolidated in the idea of a man as the principal agent of labor who fights against the environment to obtain what he needs to live. The male develops his corpulence and reaffirms his options by making his way with the strength of his musculature. Strength and extractivism have been related for too long. We move forward, then, the story from the prehistoric male hunter, and now we see the man equipped with metal tools, the same predator in search of sustenance based on strength. He wears a uniform and a helmet. The reflective stripes on the safety equipment also speak of improved risk management. What’s underneath all that paraphernalia, Reese asks in a city whose prosperity is dominated by the widespread presence of the mining industry and its red trucks. Conceived as a tracing account of the history of materials, of the tools of the trade’s exploitation –which includes, incidentally, the uniform– Reese “examines and subverts the hierarchical value (power) of objects and materials to create a personal language,” and does something beyond his own explanation: he links the form of technology of exploiting the landscape with the search for an impotent reformation of habit. Is it the uniform that makes the miner, even if he is only left to dig his own grave with a shovel, as he suggests in his video? The reconversion of the masculine slips an ecocritical bias that suggests a new relationship with the environment where a little less testosterone is employed. Is it the uniform that makes the miner, even if he is only left to dig his own grave?
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MASCULINE DEVICE (THE COAL MINER AND THE STRIPPED MINER) BY DEREK REESE
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Gasparolo and Rey populated the cliffs and dry cracks surrounding Mejillones, Río Salado, Meteorite Valley and the ruins of saltpeter offices with these imaginary beings. They included many elements to boost life: “On some occasions, we also used seeds, wood, rocks, pigments, and so on. We included elements of the landscape materiality. Rock, wood, bones, as well as its symbolic energy. A molten glass, a fragment of pottery. Charcoal, salt. The scene is already part of the landscape. It is implanted but also arises from it.” A mise en scène thrown into the future that could give clues about what should happen then.
94 | museum without museum Everything gets lost in the desert. Its unfilled and broad character signed by the water absence increases a depressive disposition. That abrasion under the sun is a memory of hell or of a distant and lonely planet. “The desert is real and symbolic. It’s empty, and the hero expects crowds,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in the preface of Dino Buzzati´s The Desert of the Tartars. During their experiment, Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey penetrated that essential depopulation to bring back settlements between rocks and the Atacama dry dust. It was necessary to reinvent life there. In a long tour throughout its landscapes, the pair of artists developed a ludic process of reverting history. Thus, the future became the oldest thing.
THE FUTURE IS PREHISTORY BY ELIA GASPAROLO AND SANTIAGO REY
In the same way we send probes into space searching for information that one day will return to the planet to be interpreted, Gasparolo and Rey assembled the essential things that could exist in the future and left them under the sun with accurate geolocations. The second part of the project consisted in creating an appropriate archaeology to interpret results and the possible impact on the environment. In that fiction of a future and its potential calamities or successes, the desert was revealed as a vital laboratory to invent a myth, as the own artists would declare while they went ahead with the project. The scenes were later gathered in room 13 of the Antofagasta Regional Museum, creating a narrative that inserts itself as an unsteady input into the region´s history. Once installed indoors, what happened in that prehistoric future resulted in a cautious provocation, guided by the illusion
Everything gets lost in the desert. Its unfilled and broad character signed by the water absence increases a depressive disposition.
One of the first aspects that surprise those who venture into the Atacama Desert is the raw naked fragility: the extreme conditions transform each act into a dramatic, epic gesture. Keeping oneself alive is the goal. Any mistake could have lethal and scorching consequences. The installation The Future is Prehistory proposes scenes of desertic life as a challenge and pilot to be observed at a later time. With dedication and caution, the couple of artists immersed themselves in different locations to install little life scenes starring by figures made of clay from the banks of the Loa River. This gesture refers to the pottery tradition through which archeology has interpreted whole cultures: clay vases and implements used to eat and drink have been a great source of coded information about extinct human groups’ aesthetic and cultural values.
Maybe for that reason, the exhibition ends with a shadow box projecting a couple of figures onto the wall. The Platonic myth of truth and the illusion we made of it appears here to make us understand what we already suspected: it is the sun out there the one that illuminates the truth of ideas. The next step is getting out of the cave and returning to the desert.
museum without museum | 95 of returning life to the desert and assuming other possible developments and minimal civilizations.
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The black and white video shows different frames of the coast of Antofagasta. There is no sound and the eye must listen carefully to the wind and the breakers. It is a gazing exercise accompanied by a set of drawings made by Chilean artist Sebastián Riffo. Made in the context of the art&archaeology residency of the SACO1.0 Biennial, the video represents an effort to fold into the territory that the artist has come to interpret as a dialog with the rocky textures, the swaying of the seawater, the foam, and sediments. The arrangement of these ingredients of a landscape in formation is part of the work exhibited in ISLA, and whose general purpose is aimed at a local conversation that the artist would gradually begin to discover between May 21 and June 11, 2021. This exploratory incursion during his residency would also lead him to elaborate a meticulous work of observation that would be housed at the gallery of the Minera Escondida Foundation in San Pedro de Atacama.
Months later, we approached Riffo himself to learn more about his experience inside the desert. He doesn’t hesitate to state “Taira is still alive.” Taira is a group of pictographs engraved on the rocks in the upper course of the Loa River. The unprotected rock paintings is a unique archaeological site that the artist has investigated with great care. “It would be enough for any heartless person to scratch it, or for stones to continue to be taken, for it to be destroyed. There is a deep, deep fragility. For me as a contemporary artist, this dialog in time is useful to take the picture today. But in sixty years I don’t know what this space will look like.” His words show that the exhibition The Language of Stones is part of a dialog that recovers the deep time of these Neolithic cultural expressions that, on the other hand, reveal the fragility of our human history engraved on stones. As a painter, Riffo seeks to link himself, then, through a possible return to the gesture of those hands that more than 2,400 years ago painted animals and llamas. Science has insisted on seeing these ancient paintings as a case of what the artist calls “sympathetic magic.” Riffo wishes to banish any functional purpose such as the one attributed by scientists to these expressions and chooses to return to the most essential pictorial gesture, the one where the pigment unfolds on the surface. That is why he makes paintings that accompany the video in San Pedro, where he exhibits frontal portraits of Taira’s pictograms with all the details and irregularities typical of the stone surface. The use of natural pigments, on the other hand, is linked to his research at the beginning of the residency, when he met the space La Tintorera, led by Verónica Moreno. From the foundation installed in San Pedro de Atacama, she recovers the use of natural dyes extracted from vegetables, earth, and insects. As part of the field research that seeks to recognize an old way of working with the elements of the environment, Riffo identifies a link with the ancestors in these dyes. The tension between the history of painting and the reality of the technique becomes a complex and stimulating component in this journey through time and space and leads him to a gravitating question: “Do I do rock art? Well, what I do is a conceptual contemporary painting that interacts with these scenarios through scales and supports.” Do I do rock art?
THE LANGUAGE OF STONES AND THE LANGUAGE OF ROCKS SPEAKS TO ME IN THE FORM OF DRAWING BY SEBASTIÁN RIFFO
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100 | museum without museum As the conversation with Riffo comes to an end, we reflect on the lack of protection of Taira’s pictographs, highlighting the rescuing of a human expression at absolute risk in his work. “This tributeI make from a pictorial discipline to this ancient culture, is also a call of attention both at a pedagogical and patrimonial level,” says Riffo. He is aware of the fragility that threads these llamas engraved and painted on this group of rocks. Having portrayed them is, finally, an intense effort to proclaim the original union that connects the pictorial expression of a disappeared culture with its solitary gesture in the 21st century. “Taira is for me a lesson in painting,” he concludes.
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Now, as we look out from the terrace of the AIEP Institute in downtown Antofagasta, it’s possible to observe outlines that make out the identifiable skyline of a consolidated city. But as we enter the inversion chamber, suddenly everything hangs upside down and an unknown city emerges, floating among the clouds. Although, on some level every representation assumes a variation of the world, in this case we encounter the contradiction that its high fidelity generates. A perfectly accurate image shown by the camera only appears inverted in this tableau vivant. For centuries, the darkroom has been used as a mechanism to ensure accuracy in drawings and paintings. Canaletto, a master, emphasized the beauty of his images of Venice with the help of the dark room, so that the realism of his paintings was not only reflected in the light shaded by his strokes, but also in the precision of his perspective achieved by the image filtered through a tiny hole. Now, the graphic accuracy of the projection at the bottom of this viewfinder cannot distract us from what Nicolás Saéz slips about the Andean cosmovision that inspired his work. Pacha-tikray, in Quechua, means “to turn the earth,” it seems to suggest a metaphor for the elevated and the need to approach a sphere that observes our earthly world in a different way. The vision of the Quechua peoples comprises a tripartite world: kay pacha, which can be translated as the world of human beings; uku pacha, the world below; and hanan pacha, the upper world of spirits. However, Kay pacha, this world that we humans, plants, and animals share can connect with hanan pacha, the upper world. In a way, this inverted vision device ventures into the possibility of reordering the different worlds that make up the totality of what surrounds us. A peephole to another reality opens us to perceive them: “The world is better upside down,” a visitor wrote on the wall of the chamber. An unknown city emerges, floating among the clouds.
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INVERSION CHAMBER BY NICOLÁS SÁEZ
As a principle of reactivation of the environment that surrounds us, the process of inversion could be in the field of what we consider revolutionary. Many of the participants of the experience surely understood it this way, by the tone of the comments they left on the external walls of the dark chamber devised by Nicolás Sáez. This reduced single cabin, which under the pinhole principle lets light through a tiny orifice, achieves the inverted projection of what is outside. Entering this wooden polyhedron that allows observing the world in its darkness entails, at the same time, isolating ourselves to experience a revelation: from inside, what we took for granted, suddenly appears to be in the air “All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx pointed out in his Manifesto when suggesting the inversion of the social order that would bring about the proletarian revolution.
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Two huge photos in dark tones rest like a mute space without selling anything.
THE SEA IS THE MOUNTAIN BY ALEXANDRE CHRISTIAENS
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On the way to the airport, bordering the north of the city, it is interrupted in sections before its final return to the sand. Along the road, some billboards try to catch the attention of drivers and travelers arriving or departing. Among promises of new road infrastructures and real estate offers, the opaque calm of two huge photos in dark tones rest like a mute space not selling anything: they are the posters that make up the photographic installation The Sea is the Mountain. In them there are no words or prominent signs, there is no image of an advertising agency. There is only landscape on landscape, so to speak. Presenting something that does not have a message directed to the consumer or the user, its appeal forces the imagination to connect distant places: those that are shown in the image and those we have around us. In his work, Belgian photographer Alexandre Christiaens displays a mountain or, most certainly, a volcano. The image resembles a place on the Altiplano and it seems almost as if it were covered by a veil of fog. If the stoplight in the corner turns red, we might dwell in front of that sight. Perhaps that fog is the most real, the most sensitive thing in the lonely mountain. It is possible to have reveries before entering the desert; mirages, rather. That veil is real, like the dew of the camanchaca that rises from the sea. The Sea is the Mountain is the title of the work. On the opposite side of the road, the other photo shows us the water, the foam, and the swaying. How do these images merge as they appear on the outskirts? How does an unsolicited and unexplained image become an intrigue of such dimensions? Mystery and nostalgia for other places, insinuations to lose orientation and think that the photo is a promise placed with precision on the edge of a city that is growing: in the background peek recently constructed buildings with their numb disregard for time and origin. It is a promise of another place that can still be invented. There is an image showing a large billboard in the 1980s: Alfredo Jaar’s work installed by the roadside asked “Are you happy?” Christiaens jumps over any direct interpellation to the traveler: the metaphor is here direct and silent; it is the reality of an image veiled by fog where there is no room for questions, but only to accept the unsolicited appearance of the landscape turned into a fleeting flash. Everything will be a coincidence, there will be no questions, and there will be no reason. When the desert and the edge of the city act as a scenic background, the possibility of unthinkable encounters arises. A homeless man sleeps under the shadow cast by that large photograph, tucked in the garbage that the city forgets to its outskirts, as the sea returns the debris laced with foam to the shore. The welcome or farewell to this city that struggles to survive the aridness offers a limited space to speak with a mute expression. In the desert, the shadow is the only possibility to catch up on sleep. Christiaens’ shadowy assemblages make this clear without any pretense.
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DESERT TRACES – APPROACHING ATACAMA BY MICHAEL HIRSCHBICHLER AND GUILLAUME OTHENIN-GIRARD
Any extractive industrial process requires approximation tools to probe the territory and make it tame. This preparatory production to face an unknown place allows an access mode to an environment such as the desert, whose aridity and desolation make it a priori inhospitable, adverse and unmanageable. Prospecting devices do not only determine the presence of the desired resources but also generate an order of the landscape that smoothes its discovery. Following this logic, photography has played an important role here. Its portrayal of space has allowed an unconquerable geological extension, when portrayed, to be included in a productive mythology.
In this case, as a producer of the landscape for its reduction and management, photography acts not only as a representation tool but even as an order of intervention in the environment. Based on this complicity between photography and industrial progress, the images gathered in Desert Traces - Approaching Atacama explore a series of characteristic gestures of the visual prospection that Michael Hirschbichler and Guillaume Othenin-Girard raise from the use of archives.
Sketches, diagrams and intervened photos provide the subtlety of an abstract and historical landscape to the delicate black and white scenes the two researchers bring together in their exhibition. This recovery of the industrial patrimony resides between the models and rocks that make up the Museum of the Huanchaca Ruins, created to show the historical process of mineral exploitation in the region. The intervened images by Michael and Guillaume have a mission of their own: to revisit an abstract and distant place –the pre-industrial Atacama Desert– in its process of transformation into an enormous mineral deposit. We can imagine these aerial photographs as distant views of a place that preserves an original “desertitude.” A certain nostalgia begins to show in these “traces of the desert.” Because perhaps, the progress of industrial procedures has finally reduced the Atacama landscape to a potential extraction field where they no longer exist. Therefore, recovering an aesthetic dimension from this visual reassessment of the archived images of the mining industry strays from the complicity with which the momentum of modernity drowns the landscape and suggests a new form of architecture of images. What we thought was known, these images seem to tell us, still holds an unfathomable mystery in sepia tones. In this nostalgia for rethinking diagrams of landscape appreciation, the authors unashamedly leave their own fingerprints, which are marked on the passe-partouts that border each image. The rejection of the impersonal neatness of the modern method is blurred here in each piece, stained and covered with adhesive tape. The appearance of these sloppy traces is not circumstantial to the images but appears as the authors’ own signature in their approach to a desert they no longer conceive as subjected to an image that technology aimed at its domination. On the contrary, Michael and Guillaume’s photos recover plasticity close to the shaky and stained essay that imprints a personal stamp.
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The word “dignity” reverberates through that great geographical corridor that forms the territory of Chile. The events of October 2019 led thousands of people to the streets to demand something that appeared in the great historical aspirations related to the field of human rights. Dignity? A very big word, loaded with intentions to demand the minimum. Suddenly, turned into a formula to fight social degradation, it is a square in the center of the capital from where people fight to recover the value of life outside the system structured by the market. We do not know how history texts will reflect it, but since that month of October, an important part of the country’s population has dedicated itself, precisely, to give it weight and renewing the depth of a term so recurrent that it seemed to have lost its dignity.
In Ángelo Álvarez ‘s work, this is expressed as a form of resistance. In order to escape from the beauty imposed by the bags of taste, his work adopts a basic support: cardboard. The same boxes that contain and distribute consumer goods, something like the skin of consumption, allow Angelo to reclaim a space of access to another pictorial conception of the portrait. To the use of this nonnoble material are added the prints of a series of people lacking social notoriety outside their towns and street protests. It is from there that this effort to resist the aesthetics that marks a difference between those who are worthy of being represented and those who are not is articulated. In these cardboard paintings, so to speak, dignified beauty emerges from the resistance to the codes of conventional aesthetics: the improper material and the unpresentable people appear here in a silent protest, a social vindication that is resolved with a realistic and colorful stroke. The technical mastery and the eloquent brushstroke speak of a painter of enormous perception and expressiveness. In his works scattered on the walls of the Casa Azul Cultural Center appears the humility of a social origin denied under a form that we can consider costumbrist. It is not a question, however, of making those people marked by the dispossession of dignity appear as ancient nobles or monarchs. In Dignified Beauty there is no exhibitionism or paternalism: they are only faces of the popular world that the painter has gathered with sufficient mastery to remind us of their shocking and completely fleeting presence. To quote Pedro Lemebel, “the human X-ray of that malnourished landscape” of poverty is well fixed on the cardboard where the precariousness of the medium is recognized, without renouncing the desire to perpetuate the image against oblivion. We know that the use of painting as a dignifying form is not a new aspiration, nor is the adoption of a popular space in contrast to the white cube of a traditional room. Dignified Beauty was exhibited at the Casa Azul Cultural Center, a mixture of domestic space, workshop, patio of night lights and barbecues, laboratory and home. All this without appealing to any kind of exclusivity. We will have to think then that the dignity of this house reconverted into a space of the SACO Biennial circuit is an example of resistance capable of gathering faces without history, painting without canvas, exhibition without gallery. All subtractions here add up.
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DIGNIFIED BEAUTY BY ÁNGELO ÁLVAREZ
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Trying to ponder Buczek’s incidental action implies that, despite his signature’s absence, a generous contribution is prolonged in each work. Could generosity be a key to understanding artistic practice? This question is, in the conditions we live in, an arrow shot at the heart of stardom and media figuration. But it is also a question that carries the necessary instinct to settle in the times we live in, in an art world interested in contributing to a common process of knowledge and discovery of otherness. No one will be able to establish what is the mission that corresponds to each artist but, certainly, generosity is one of the essential qualities to act in favor of the understanding of the problems that artistic practice addresses. And one of the first steps may be to break with the fetish of the work, of the finished and brilliant product, to see that in reality it is not an object, but a practice, that relieves the experience of art. This was said best by Robert Filliou, a “non-artist,” so to speak, who was associated with Fluxus. “Art,” Filliou said, “is what makes life more interesting than art.” BY BARTEK BUCZEK
museum without museum | 127 Not making art. Or rather, not making his own. Not recognizing any installation, photo, painting, performance, or device in which to show his signature. Distancing from authorship, renouncing to creation. Instead, following instructions guided by the work developed by others, more authorized people, artists with names and last names, workers. Dissolving himself, therefore, in a common cause raised as part of the collective effort that SACO carries out. The description of the anonymous work deployed in the different processes of construction and activation of the biennial artists’ proposals is what the Polish Bartek Buczek carried out with insistence and good humor. In other words, he moved towards the joyful acceptance of the author´s disappearance.
When the renowned French semiotician Roland Barthes dismantled the notion of author as a touchstone for holding authority, he wanted to open up the possibility of a text or a work to generate more meanings. “Once removed from the Author,” Barthes wrote, “the pretension of ‘deciphering’ a text becomes useless. To give a text an Author is to impose a lock on it, to provide it with an ultimate meaning, to close the writing.” In other words, the work that does not press to impose a solemn meaning established by the subjectivity of origin is the one that bears fruit, because it is willing to recognize the role of the reader, the visitor, the observer as another essential participant in a collective process of exchange.
Buczek moved towards the joyful acceptance of the author´s disappearance.
DIVERSE INTERVENTIONS
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130 | museum without museum ❶ ❷ ❸ ❹ ❺ ❻ ❶ RuinsHuanchacaCultural Park 01606 Angamos Ave. Artists selected for the Wallonia-Brussels Call Cave In for Later Carole Louis (��) Mushrooms and Mould Elodie Antoine (��) Living on the Edge Adrien Tirtiaux (��) The Window Becomes Wind Nicolás Consuegra (��) Artists selected for the Franco-German Call Resonances I Desert Traces – Approaching Atacama Michael Hirschbichler (��) and Guillaume Othenin-Girard (��) Oct 6 | nov 30 Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 – 17:00 ❷ISLA+ 0874 General Lagos St. The Language of Stones Sebastián Riffo (��) Oct 9 | Dic 15 Monday to Friday 11:00 – 14:00 and 16:00 – 19:00 ❸ Esquina Retornable 665 El Tabo St. Masculine Device (The Coal Miner and the Stripped Miner) Derek Reese (��) Oct 5 | Nov 30 Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 15:00 – 19:00 *Book your visit a week in advance to the mail mediacion@proyectosaco.cl or to the phones: +56 9 6603 5778 +56 55 269 8568 ❻ Sitio Cero Port of Antofagasta The Memory of Rocks Johannes Pfeiffer (��) Oct 1 | Nov 15 Monday to Friday 11:00 – 14:00 and 15:00 – 20:00 ❺ Casa Azul Cultural Center 1615 Eduardo Orchard St. Dignified Beauty Ángelo Álvarez (��) Curatorship | Sebastián Rojas (��) Oct 2| Nov 15 Monday to Thursday 18:00 – 20:00 *Book your visit to the ormediacion@proyectosaco.clmailtothephones:+5696603 5778 +56 55 269 8568 ❹ Minera Escondida Foundation Art Gallery 1280 Bernardo O´Higgins Avenue The Line of Destiny Óscar Muñoz (��) Oct 3 | Dec 15 Monday to Friday | 10:30 – 13:00 and 15:00 – 18:30 Saturday and Sunday | 11:00 – 14:00 *Admission only with mobility pass MUSEUM WITHOUT MUSEUM EXHIBITION CIRCUIT
museum without museum | 131 ⓬⓫ ❼ ❽ ❾ ❿ ❽Antofagasta Regional Library 2623 Washington St. Mooring Eric Conrad (��) Oct 6 | Nov 30 Tuesday to Saturday 11:00 – 12:30 and 15:00 – 16:30 ❼ AIEP Antofagasta 2351 San Martín St. Pacha-Tikray, Inversion Chamber Nicolás Sáez (��) Oct 6 | Nov 30 Monday to Friday 10:00 – 13:00 and 15:00 – 18:00 ❿ Room Antofagasta13Regional Museum 2786 Balmaceda Ave. The Future is Prehistory Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey (��) Oct 12 oct | Nov 30 Tuesday to Friday | 10:00 – 14:00 ❾ Melbourne Clark Historic Pier Balmaceda Ave. Flood International Call Exhibition The Day After the Flood Carolina Cherubini (��) Media-aguas Martina Mella (��) When the Earth Speaks Julio César Palacio (��) Flood Doesn't Have Borders Rita Doris Ubah (��) Simulated Security Miguel Sifuentes (��) Dominium Aimée Joaristi (��) TILT Marina Liesegang (��) Oct 21 | Dic 15 Monday to Sunday 11:00 – 20:00 ⓫ Gigantographs in public space Intersection of Edmundo Pérez Zujovic Ave. and Oficina Ausonia St., La Chimba The Sea is the Mountain Alexandre Christiaens (��) Oct 25 | Dec 15 Monday to Sunday | All hours ⓬Minera Escondida Foundation Art Gallery Gustavo Le Paige 527 The Language of Stones Sebastián Riffo (��) Oct 8 | Dec 15 Monday to Friday 10:00 – 13:00 and 15:00 – 17:30
school without school | 133 Sebastián Riffo SCHOOL WITHOUT SCHOOL
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Instances such as the SACO Contemporary Art Biennial contribute to change the passive and paternalistic vision of the general public, since it not only contributes to a cultural democratization in terms of contemporary art and the region, but also considers the public as a relevant and active agent in the significance of artistic processes. Most people lack the tools to have, in a free autonomousand way, a positive and genuine experience with art.
WHY MEDIATE ART?
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Rosario Arellano Artistic mediation has become a necessary practice in cultural and educational contexts in recent years, not only because the value of art and art education for human beings is increasingly recognized, but also because it has been identified that the participation of society in cultural spaces is very low since most people do not have the tools to have, in a free and autonomous way, a positive and genuine experience with art.
These factors have created a barrier between art and society. Therefore, it is not enough to open cultural and exhibition spaces, nor is it enough to solve the problems of access, but it is necessary to create horizontal instances that seek not to “teach” but to encourage dialog, reflection and personal interpretation. Instances where bridges are built between the public and art, and even more, where the public is encouraged to create its own connections in order to be able to relate to and enjoy art in a genuine way.
This is due to the fact that, on the one hand, school art education has always been considered as a secondary and often unnecessary subject within the Chilean educational system, and therefore, it has been related more to handicrafts, instead of promoting the aesthetic experience. In other words, we have not been taught to observe, enjoy or relate to art. For a long time, art was considered part of a sphere far from everyday life, as an elitist field for a few and that the rest, if they did not have the knowledge or experience, could not question. Because of this, the ability of the public not specialized in the arts to give an opinion or to enjoy a work or exhibition has been underestimated. And the public has bought it. The phrase “I can’t give an opinion because I don’t know about this” is common.
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This program is not anchored in one place and its territorial expansion encompasses different spaces. In Antofagasta it took over the premises of the Casa Azul Cultural Center, the Regional Library, the roof of the AIEP Professional Institute of the Andrés Bello University (UNAB), the Antofagasta British School, the Gabriela Mistral School, the auditorium of the Licancabur Hall of the Minera Escondida Foundation and the ISLA Center for Artistic Residencies; on the other hand, in Quillagua, the G-15 Ignacio Carrera Pinto School; in San Pedro de Atacama, the La Tintorera Artistic Residence and, finally, the inescapable virtuality of Facebook. This extension and territorial diversity show that it is possible to continue developing face-to-face educational experiences, safely and without risking the health of the participants. It also expresses all the knowledge learned from the most critical moments of the previous year's pandemic, while SACO9 was being carried out. Therefore, it is possible to mention that school without school continues to be a resilient educational program, which values materials and bodies; direct experiences with the territory; the proximity between individuals; their inter and transpersonal contact and dialog. And, also, that it continues to safeguard its ethical and political commitment to the local communities with which it works, because, as Dagmara Wyskiel expressed in SACO9: "The digital enclosure of culture increases the access gap, [and] further eliticizes the already hermetic world of art."
Along with an important presence of national artists, the program brought together creators from Germany, Brazil, Belgium, Colombia, Spain, the United States, and Nigeria. In this way, the educational program was formed by an exceptional heterogeneity of voices, all of them with unique, exclusive stories, memories, and tales; dreams, desires, and interests anchored to territories as diverse as they are surprising, always ready to think and situate their research in relation to the specificities of the territories of the Chilean Norte Grande.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter gives a chronological account of the different activities carried out in the context of school without school, the educational program of this biennial. From May 2021 to January 2022, sixteen formative instances were created, including face-to-face and virtual talks, workshops, pedagogical laboratories and a book presentation. All of them led by artists, curators, theorists, architects and photographers of different nationalities, in close collaboration with SACO's Education, Communication and Production areas, as well as with the different communities in which each of these activities took place.
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All this, in the context of the global pandemic of COVID-19, with its demanding preventive measures and its often-burdensome official protocols of displacement. Between confinements and openings of public space, the formative experiences did not rest. With limited capacity and reduced physical contact, the program was almost entirely face-to-face, except for two virtual activities. Therefore, in one way or another, all these actions highlighted the value of the intimate, the close, the near, and the personal, in direct dialog with the others, the collective, and the communities. In fact, the need to rethink interpersonal ties, beyond mediations and virtualities, constantly emerged.
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Different issues emerged from the dialog with those who joined, from the representation of the intimate and the domestic, to the more documentary aspects linked to the urban, the political and the social.
Those who attended were able to understand the fundamental aspects of his art linked to the production of analog and monochrome images and, above all, his commitment to the landscapes he portrays. After presenting his most representative works, an open dialog was held to address different questions related not only to the construction of his photographs, but also to his ideological positioning as an art professional on a global scale, capable of traveling the world in search of different times, histories and memories, always from a perspective of encounter with the territories he chooses to observe. In one way or another, his eye has never ceased to wonder about the origins, forces and immeasurable scales of nature in constant transformation.
In a context in which artistic and cultural interactions were only developed through virtuality, the SACO1.0 Biennial’s school without school program began on May 19 at 5 p.m. with a talk and subsequent portfolio review led by Belgian photographer Alexandre Christiaens at Casa Azul (a cultural self-managed project in Antofagasta, currently directed by architect Jorge Guerrero and photographer Sebastian Rojas). The artist arrived in the country invited by the International Photography Festival of Valparaíso (FIFV), thanks to the alliances that the festival has sustained with SACO since 2018.
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PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTFOLIOS, TALK AND REVIEW BY ALEXANDRE CHRISTIAENS
His eye has never ceased to wonder about the origins, forces and immeasurable scales of nature in constant transformation.
The objective of the activity was to generate a direct, personal and meaningful dialog between his contemporary artistic practice and that of local photographers. As an introduction to the workshop, Alexander gave a general account of his work.
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Each painting, considered as flags, depicted different features of the town.
PAINTING AND COMMUNITY, WORKSHOP BY SEBASTIÁN RIFFO
The second event of this educational program was the workshop Painting and Community, carried out by the artist in residence of the art&archeology program, Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito. The backyard of La Tintorera, a residence for artists and therapists managed by Verónica Moreno in the Ayllu Solcor of San Pedro de Atacama, hosted the activity on the afternoon of June 5.
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José Ardiles, a musician from Atacama, friend of Verónica, played while Sebastián gave instructions. The purpose of this activity was to generate a community dialog about the Lickan-Antay culture through painting. Painting was considered a free, sincere, and spontaneous language, directly related to the emotional and collaborative commitment of the participants, assuming that the results would not be evaluated or questioned. On the contrary, they would be the dialog and conversation openers in a cross-cutting and non-hierarchical Tomanner.break the ice, the attendants were encouraged to paint with their less skilled hand so they could experience the activity with the same conditions. They were asked to mix a base color that could be linked to the daily life of San Pedro, covering the entire canvas they had been assigned. It had to be done evenly, from edge to edge and without any tonal jumps, which turned out to be an exercise of concentration and motor skills. Then, they had to take a second piece of cloth and, now, with their skillful hand, depict in the center something particular and figurative also related to San Pedro. This last painting, after drying, was sewn by Sebastian into the center of the first piece of cloth, to give it the formal qualities of a flag. The results were remarkable, because of their diversity as well as their quality and delicacy. Each painting, considered as flags, depicted different features of the town, such as the prominence and majesty of the Licancabur volcano, the magnificent sun as a protagonist of the Atacama Desert, a wide diversity of silent and eternal rocks, endemic cactus, corn cultivation as an ancestral community practice, wild animals and urban iconographies.
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THE WEIGHT OF THE WORK, TALK BY JOHANNES PFEIFFER
As Pedro Donoso anticipated in the section school without school, the work consists of an intervention of different stone molds situated at Sitio Cero in the Port of Antofagasta, with their matrices anchored miles away, in the middle of the ancestral solitude of the Atacama Desert. The main materials used for the making of this work were metallic mesh and red fabrics, promoting the significant contrast between volume and weight, anchorage and displacement, mooring and suture, mimicry and radiance, desert and accumulation, presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, amongst various other issues.
Another issue addressed in the talk was the possibility of understanding the strategies of intervention in public space so as to value local territories with their particularities, opportunities, needs and difficulties. In a territory such as Antofagasta, devoid of gallery and museum infrastructure, but with an exuberant territorial platform where experimental artistic works of diverse natures can be investigated and exhibited, this becomes especially relevant. The physical weight of bodies in space and the symbolic value by which artworks fluctuate and are resignified.
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On September 28 at 6 p.m, German artist Johannes Pfeiffer offered the talk The Weight of the Work at the Licancabur Hall of Minera Escondida Foundation. About 30 people attended the presentation. Pfeiffer’s provocative title had a dual purpose: on the one hand, to reflect on the physical weight of bodies in space and, on the other, to reflect on the symbolic value by which artworks fluctuate and are resignified, from the perspective of his artistic practice, primarily linked to sculpture, volumetric exploration, installation, land art and site-specific work. Thus, elements such as strength and tension were essential to understand, in general terms, his work and, in particular, the piece he produced in the context of the biennial, called The Memory of Rocks
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school without school | 149 Eric Conrad’s co-production workshop at the Antofagasta Regional Library, located in Plaza Colón, was a cross between the museum without museum and the school without school programs of this biennial. Mooring was the title of the work, the post, pillar or ring where something is moored, where boats are tied. Like all great moorings, this work required many particular energies and was thus a significant and enriching encounter between the artist and those who came to be part of the process between September 27 and October 1.
One of the participants of the workshop, Jordán Plaza (28 years old), mentioned that it wasn’t a process of passively assisting the American artist, but rather a collaboration in which his own traces, marks and personal impulses coexisted with those of the participants, something that Conrad himself details in the Territory section of this book.
MOORING, CO-PRODUCTION WORKSHOP BY ERIC CONRAD
This work aimed to upset the iconic building’s identity, twisting its neoclassical verticality, disturbing its scholastic maturity and dismantling its instructivesplendor.
A total of eight people participated and set up a genuine carpentry workshop in the library’s auditorium, a place completely unrelated to this purpose. There they cut and sewed multicolored fabrics, sawed and hammered wood, sewed and filled with felt large extensions of fabric, all to the sound of an installation work that, step by step, was conquering the entire library, from the auditorium to the central hall, going up to the third floor and reaching through a window that overlooked the exterior façade of the library. As a whole and as an actual flood, this work aimed to upset the iconic building’s identity, twisting its neoclassical verticality, disturbing its scholastic maturity and dismantling its instructive splendor with disruptive and shapeless objects, even displaying elements of the domestic world, such as, for example, giant socks or a pair of oversized underpants hanging out of the window.
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Rosario Arellano, a graduate in Art Theory and History from the University of Chile with a Master’s degree in Art Education in Social and Cultural Institutions from the Complutense University of Madrid and a doctorate in Art Education from the same university, conducted a workshop for mediators at the Regional Library of Antofagasta from September 30 to October 1, related to the execution and understanding of Eric Conrad’s work Mooring.
Rosario’s workshop focused on the work of Eric Conrad, creating a mediation model designed for children with some fun and playful questions to arouse the curiosity of girls, boys and young people, such as: Where did the oversized underwear in the Regional Library come from? Is it possible that there is someone big enough to wear it? Did a giant perhaps misplace it? Rosario told us that her experience as a teacher was very enriching. The participants were highly motivated by the practice of mediation, even though not all of them had previous experience in this field.
About twenty people attended the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the work of mediation as a place for dialog and resignification of art problems, directly related to the contexts of their involvement and development. They focused on how to mediate, assuming there is no one single or exclusive formula. In the process, the personal assessments and perspectives of each one of the critical and reflective agents who assume the role of artistic or cultural mediation inevitably end up permeating the process. Therefore, it became essential to recognize these elements and consider the different audiences and their traits in order to identify the distinctive clues of the potential mediations, with the greatest possible passion, creativity and flexibility.
Where did the oversized underwear in the Regional Library come from?
152 | school without school MEDIATION IN CONTEMPORARY ART, WORKSHOP BY ROSARIO ARELLANO
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Another crossover between the museum without museum and school without school programs was generated with the workshop for the construction of the piece Pacha-Tikray, Inversion Chamber by the architect and photographer from Concepción, Nicolás Sáez, conducted with his assistants Ismael Sandoval and Patricio Valderrama (former students of the artist) on the rooftop of the AIEP Professional Institute in Antofagasta from October 2nd to the 5th. This piece was also made with the collaboration and enthusiasm of four students of the Technician in Art career of the Institute who, after the opening, became mediators of the work.
Nicolás’ work is a large-scale dark chamber, whose particularities are its habitability, design, manufacture, and interactivity. Going into it alone, sitting down, and watching an upside-down image of the world in the dark is a key part of this artwork. The triangular shape is directly linked to the ancestral representations of the Andean mountains. Through its rigorous manufacture, the spatial coordinates of the world disappear, while projecting it upside down. Hence its expressive potential, a transposed point of view with a blurred horizon, which exhibited an indeterminate image of eastern Antofagasta, between veiled hills and endless urban buildings. The outside was a block of planed wood, in which visitors could freely leave their impressions of the experience. One of these writings read: “It was a special experience, although it made me a bit claustrophobic, it was an opportunity to reflect.”
school without school | 157 PACHA-TIKRAY, INVERSION CHAMBER, CO-PRODUCTION WORKSHOP BY NICOLÁS SÁEZ
Once the work was finished, the artist was invited by AIEP to give a virtual talk to its students.
A large-scale dark chamber, whose particularities are its design,habitability,manufacture, and interactivity.
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To allow a better understanding of their work, they presented the conceptual idea which they called Polluting Structures. It was related to the different ways of interrupting the habitats where life develops collectively, and how they generate dialogs, reflections and resignifications of the mundane universe. Adrien approaches it particularly from the sudden irruption of architecture, while Elodie focuses on the parasitic contamination of works that cohabit with architecture and spaces.
Belgian artists Adrien Tirtiaux and Elodie Antoine held a workshop on October 7, between 11 am and 1 pm, in the studio of Drina Orchard Sepúlveda, teacher of Visual Arts at the Antofagasta British School. The guests shared their previous works and, particularly, those prepared for the biennial.
POLLUTING STRUCTURES, WORKSHOP BY ADRIEN TIRTIAUX AND ELODIE ANTOINE
The artists encouraged the students to reflect on and propose a creative work around this particular idea of contaminating structures. They were required to get together in groups and come up with collaborative ideas. This process resulted in impressive works that questioned the environmental impact of human development on nature, and how nature is capable of reclaiming its exploited spaces; in addition to other works that reflected on corruption in politics as well as in religion. Adrien approaches it from the sudden irruption of architecture, while Elodie focuses on the parasitic contamination of works that cohabit with architecture and spaces.
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To the sound of drums and dancing, jumping, and arms raised, Rita encouraged the creation of territorial symbols, which were turned into stencils, to be engraved on a large yellow canvas, along with African symbols, all this while the artist painted the faces of those present. Different types of iconographies emerged from this process. On the one hand, universal symbols such as the sun, water and some spirals; on the other hand, symbols of the Andes such as the Chacana cross, hills and cactus, also pictograms of the Changos culture, even the Antofagasta monument of the inverted anchor. The artist also motivated inquiries aimed at understanding African symbols such as the lion’s claws, the lizard as friendship and the spiral of concentric circles representing the python snake –agwolagwo–, characteristic of vital energy.
On October 18 at 5 p.m., Nigerian artist Rita Doris Ubah offered a workshop at Casa Azul Cultural Center. Sixteen people between the ages of 9 and 39 were enrolled, in addition to some of the passionate artists and judges of the Flood exhibition. The purpose of the meeting was the exchange of experiences between the culture of the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria –to which Rita belongs– and the Antofagasta´s group Afro Union, which highlights the Afro-descendant roots through expressions of Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Chilean music and dance, especially in the area of Arica. In the opportunity, the artist taught a traditional ritual technique of textile painting developed by Igbo women, which also used it to mark the walls of huts and houses. The workshop included the generation of paper patterns and uli-style body painting. This kind of design comprises figurative and abstract elements based on the color blue or indigo, plus earth pigments.
AFRICAN BODY PAINTING, WORKSHOP BY RITA DORIS UBAH
Gratitude was the general emotion of the workshop, sharing the Igbo mystique at the hands of the joy, simplicity and warmth of Rita, a person who, with her advice and presence, transforms the spaces. It was widely commented among the attendees that by the way in which energies, reciprocity and collective gratitude flowed, this workshop was a celebration of ritual character. As Dagmara Wyskiel mentioned, “we felt a deep fraternity energy, in which we drew by dancing and danced by drawing.” This is the first time that an African artist participates in SACO, consolidating the efforts of international dialog from a critical and post-colonial perspective, thought from the margins.
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The workshop helped to highlight the artistic expressions of Afro peoples both national and international, who have historically been oppressed and excluded from official narratives. The emotional and collective work helped to lessen the previous tensions due to the demonstrations and police deployment related to the commemoration of the second year of the social uprising in Chile on October 18, 2019. Filled with moving bodies, laughter and color, the shelter allowed two persecuted cultures to embrace each other. Perhaps the most touching was the culmination, as the dialog from south to south, bypassing the value judgments of ancient empires, ended with Rita saying a prayer that also avoided colonial languages. Spanish and English, the languages that allow us to communicate, lost their protagonism to remind us that languages are not just meant to inform. Everyone seemed to understand what her words in Igbo summoned, as when reading some expressions of the now famous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with whom Rita shares that origin.
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The workshop was split into two parts, the first was a theoretical introduction to working with clay, as well as the structural understanding of the whistle. Mella explained how the wind turns into sound as it flows and turns within the cavities of the instrument. The second part was the creation of the whistles. The attendees were able to shape their sound objects, test them and share their work. The creative process involved the participation of students in the classroom as well as students connected remotely. The wind turns into sound as it flows and turns within the cavities of the instrument.
THE TANGIBLE OF SOUND, WORKSHOP BY MARTINA MELLA
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The Chilean artist selected in the Flood call offered this pedagogical experience to eighthgrade students of the Gabriela Mistral School in Antofagasta. On October 19, they made clay and then clay whistles to learn the basic principles of manual work and experimentation with the materials. From there, the activity motivated their appreciation of sound and music in the framework of significant linkage with the sound traditions of pre-Columbian ancestral cultures.
EXPERIENCING OUR ENVIRONMENT THROUGH KNITTING, WORKSHOP BY CAROLINA CHERUBINI
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To capture the imagination of each one, the artist asked them to draw on the fabric different elements they identified with, which were then outlined and filled in with basic knitting stitches. While the younger children found it difficult to draw, the symbols and ideas they were able to capture about their closest ties were very clear, with references to their families, landscapes and even to themselves. On the other hand, the older children wrote their names, drew their houses, some cartoons, among other graphic elements of greater complexity that required a remarkable collectiveconcentration.Cherubini’s pedagogical approach had as fundamental elements the valuing of creative freedom, manual work and the acceptance of error as part of the process.
Cherubini’s pedagogical approach had as fundamental elements the valuing of creative freedom, manual work and the acceptance of error as part of the process. She also emphasized the importance of working with patience, dedication and affection for the results. Twenty-five students between the ages of 4 and 13 participated in this meeting.
In Quillagua, the most arid town on the planet, where life is only possible thanks to the waters of the Loa River, on the border between the regions of Tarapacá and Antofagasta, and more precisely in the beautiful multi-court of the G-15 Ignacio Carrera Pinto School, the workshop guided by the Brazilian artist, who was also part of the official selection of Flood, took place.
The purpose of this event was for the children, mostly of Aymara descent, to gather on the 22nd of October and expand their imagination through needlework.
The collaborative spirit among the educational community of Quillagua, the SACO team and the international artists and judges has redefined for the past eight years the history of abandonment and sacrifice that the place still carries.
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The Venezuelan-born sound artist and experimental composer from Barcelona discussed the different references and inspirations that led him to build his work When the Earth Talks, the piece for which he was selected in Flood. It is a sound installation that recalls the sensation of instability of the incessant seismic movements of the planet by means of vibrations produced by hidden speakers, located under a bench for public use in the Historic Pier of Antofagasta.
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THE SOUND OF EARTH, VIRTUAL TALK BY JULIO CÉSAR PALACIO
On October 28, the artist shared with Claudia Leon, coordinator of the biennial pedagogical programs, the biographical episode that led to the creation of his work on the pier: his experience with the 7.3 earthquake, as well as with the subsequent aftershocks, that occurred three years ago on the northern coast of Venezuela. From this experience, he was strongly impressed by the sound made by the earth in each frictional movement.
Noises, oscillations, undulations, reflections, and refactions of perceptible and imperceptible waves are all factors involved in the sound universe of the world around us, decisive components in Julio’s research, who has specialized in recording electromagnetic waves, in the universe of ultrasound and echolocation. From our dialog, it is clear that the artist has a deep sense of awareness of the current sound pollution and its impact on natural ecosystems. Hence his sound activism, as the artist believes that in its desire for technological development mankind has not taken adequate measures to regulate excessive noise pollution that is imperceptible to us, but that does affect the animals around us, both terrestrial and marine.
November 18’s talk addressed the theoretical and reflexive considerations established between objects and culture. Consuegra, among multiple quotes to Heidegger’s philosophy, art criticism, and the voice of contemporary artists, presented the different considerations and theoretical, practical, and symbolic fluctuations of the universe of objects in the world. He perceives them as a conceptual and referential basis for the understanding of his own work, specifically, the way in which the curatorial committee suggested adjustments that were later executed by the production team. The artist revealed the modifications his work went through, as a result of the difficulties resulting from the physical distances of the production site, as well as by the elusive environmental considerations of the place chosen for its location.
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OBJECTS IN CULTURE ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR TO BE, VIRTUAL TALK BY NICOLÁS CONSUEGRA
The Colombian artist presented his work The Window Becomes Wind in the museum without museum program at the Huanchaca Ruins Cultural Park court in Antofagasta. A three rectangular sculptural volumes installation whose formal and constructive qualities suggest openings with revolving windows, as a way of reflecting on the processes of ventilation, flow and displacements between the interior or intimate world and the exterior or public, in contexts of pandemic and confinement by the COVID-19.
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This book presents an extended research related to SACO´s curatorial proposal. It shows 35 works by different contemporary artists, whose ecological, political, social, and spatial motivations enable us to draw a more diverse cartography full of contrasts. Donoso offers a panoramic vision of possible intuitions and ways of thinking about the relationships, correspondences, and responsibilities between human beings and their natural environment, in a context of a profound climate crisis.
The researcher highlighted some important works made in the northern territory and that are part of his research, such as Neither Pain Nor Fear (1993) by Raúl Zurita, Rites of passage (2013-2014) by Juan Castillo, Foolish (2017) by Juana Guerrero, Water Cities (2016-2018) by Catalina González and Mixed Game by Dagmara Wyskiel (2013-2016). To conclude he shared some fragments of the documentary Earth Movements. Art and Nature (2018) directed by Matías Cardone, which complements his book.
As a link to the theme of the Flood, the book by the Chilean researcher, theorist and curator was presented at the SLA Center for Artistic Residencies on November 16 at 7:30 pm. The publication stems from an exhibition of the same name at the National Museum of Fine Arts during 2017 that brought together works by national and international artists, including Cecilia Vicuña, Catalina Correa, Patrick Steeger, Cristián Velasco, José Délano and Hamish Fulton, who performed different exercises and artistic interventions in the natural environment.
EARTH MOVEMENTS, PEDRO DONOSO’S BOOK RELEASE
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Among the different artistic and conceptual references that influenced his practice, he mentioned American sociologist Richard Sennett (Chicago, 1943) in his 2008 book The Craftsman, a work that values making as a way of thinking. The Colombian artist makes a special mention of the chapter dedicated to repairs, highlighting that all repairing always implies a previous understanding. The craftsman can restore, repair or reconfigure old objects with new and original functions. The artist finds this innovative character regarding an apparently known or limited knowledge deeply significant since his own artwork has turned out to be the reconfiguration of the usual uses of photography as a time-fixing device. The first photograph in history that captured the presence of the human being is another important reference for the Colombian artist.
Muñoz’s third reference has to do with the first photographic self-portrait in history, taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839 in Philadelphia, United States. Due to his knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy, he was able to perfect the daguerreotype and build his own photographic device. The resulting image of this machine showed him his own reflection as if it were a mirror, only now it was fixed, stable, immortal, and perpetual to the vicissitudes of time and the decomposition of the flesh. This historical piece and its respective symbolic repercussions linked to transcendence would be the basis of his work Before the Image (2009), 50 editions of ten engravings each, in common mirrors mounted on aluminum with the self-portrait of Cornelius. For the contemplation of this piece, the viewer must intervene, observing the self-portrait while observing the superimposition
The Licancabur Hall of the Minera Escondida Foundation hosted the only master lecture in Chile by one of the most important and world-renowned contemporary Latin American creators. The meeting on November 25 at 6 p.m. generated a first-person approach to the exhibition displayed in the Art Gallery of the foundation in Antofagasta. Through honest and slow, but also profound and transcendental dialog, the artist unfolded the different aspects of his most intimate memories related to the rigorous and systematic production for more than forty years.
school without school | 175 THE LINE OF DESTINY, MASTER LECTURE BY ÓSCAR MUÑOZ
It is a daguerreotype from 1838, taken by Louis Daguerre in a building on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France. The peculiarity of this piece is that it represents buildings, streets, sidewalks, and trees in an apparent state of abandonment, however, nothing in it reveals the hundreds of people who were certainly passing through this place at the time of the photographic capture. At that time, captures required a long exposure time, so the slight and hurried movement of passers-by was not recorded on the copper plate, except for a single person who was having their shoes polished. This piece allows him to reflect on the conquest of the instant and, at the same time, on the abysmal distances between reality and its representation.
The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (2008), the first photograph with human presence by Louis Daguerre (1838), and the first photographic self-portrait in history by Robert Cornelius (1839) are important references to him.
176 | school without school of his own reflection. In the same way, the viewer perceives the slow but inevitable disappearance of Cornelius’ image, since this work is made to disappear, age, and even die, as mentioned by the artist. The manipulation and the action of the air intervene in the image of Cornelius, generating patina and deterioration, a clear material metaphor of the passing of life, a symbolic closure to the initial fixation. In Muñoz’s words, “a portrait more akin to life itself, to the possibility of being affected by changes.”
Among them, Narciso (1994-2011), a series of impressions of his face with charcoal powder on water surfaces contained in buckets, stood out. The fragility of this work is radical, as any movement and even the evaporation of the water itself alters the configuration of these images.
From here on, the artist shared different works related to the fixation of images and their subsequent dematerialization, works that explore memory and the passage of time with ephemeral materialities.
Breath (1995) was another work he presented, a series of portraits printed in grease photo serigraph on circular metallic mirrors, arranged at the height of the viewer. At first glance, the mirrors appear empty; however, they conceal photographs of faces of different people previously exhibited in obituaries, which are revealed only when the viewer exhales on their surface. In this brief instant, the viewer’s reflection is replaced by the face of someone who has already passed away, which symbolically comes back to life thanks to the vital breath of whoever observes and participates in the work. As in the previous series, the revealed image is transitory, its activation itself deteriorates it, making it disappear. Then he shared Re/trato (2003), a video of a hand insistently drawing a face with water on a piece of ceramic exposed to the sun. Given the heat, the face never ends up being seen and it is the retinal persistence that completes the countenance in the viewer’s memory. Constancy, perseverance and tenacity are part of a significant process that highlights the transience of existence, between reminiscence and oblivion.
Lastly, he showed Fade to White (2010), a record that the artist made of his father when he was very ill, shortly before his death. Therefore, it is a deeply personal work, autobiographical in nature, a true family portrait, and consequently, a moving memorial that not only recalls the corporeality and gestures of his father, but also updates his image in the present, facing his irrevocable departure. He then opened a closing space for questions from the audience, which, in one way or another, summarized everything that was presented, a perfect opportunity to share an unprecedented and generous journey with the artist through his exhibition, dialoging with the audience, impacted by the four works of Muñoz commented in the interview and in the analysis that opens the section museum without museum of this book.
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SENSITIVE DISCONTINUITIES, WORKSHOP BY JAVIER GONZÁLEZ PESCE
reality.Everything can motivate creation if a sharp, playful and unprejudiced sensibility has been cultivated, one that appreciates the fragile, the mobile and the ephemeral of the surrounding reality.
The visual artist and independent curator held a workshop at the ISLA Center for Artistic Residencies that sought to stress the significant, latent, and manifest dimensions of public space. The meeting on Tuesday, the 7th of December at 5 p.m, took place in two sessions. During the first, the main research, works, and exhibitions of the artist were shared; in the second, a tour of the surroundings of ISLA was suggested, so that the participants could propose interventions or experiences linked to the territory, which culminated in the production of fleeting works on the coast of the southern sector of the city of Antofagasta.
In the first block, the artist presented the common interests of his work, linked to sculpture, objects, volume, installation, and public space, crossed by a critical and reflective conscience, capable of feeling, reviewing and dialoging with the different social, historical and political realities in which his work is inserted or interferes. In this regard, Gonzalez Pesce highlighted the potential dialog promoted by the intrusion of a contemporary work of art in a given environment, even if it is subtle or ephemeral, abrupt or permanent. From his point of view, everything, in one way or another, can motivate creation, even more so, a sculptural piece, if a sharp, playful and unprejudiced sensibility has been cultivated, one that appreciates the fragile, the mobile and the ephemeral of the surrounding
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182 | school without school DO IT: FROM THE VISUAL TO THE STAGE, WORKSHOP BY ESTEBAN PINTO
The initiatives trigger the unsuspected generation of artworks from the creative execution of different instructions.
The instruction given by Pinto was related to being inspired and then creating a short audiovisual piece based on the monologue of the fairy Ariel, a fragment of the play The Tempest (1611) by William Shakespeare, a piece that presents different vicissitudes and conflicts between humans, gods, and magical beings, crossed by feelings of guilt, atonement, and punishment. To allow the audience to concentrate and pick up the different nuances of the story, the monitor suggested sensory exercises to stimulate their receptiveness. Once the story was exposed and after having commented on it collectively, they went into the public space to make their audiovisual or photographic proposals. Among the results obtained, the presence of nature stands out, its force expressed in the coastline of Antofagasta, which reminds us of the victim that can punish as much as the future of an ecosystem in danger.
The last educational activity of the SACO1.0 Biennial’s school without school program, the creative laboratory guided by artist and teacher Esteban Pinto, was held at the ISLA Center for Artistic Residencies on January 27, 2022, at 6 p.m. The workshop sought to motivate creativity through the significant crossing between the visual and performing arts. Under the methodological inspiration of the project Do It, by Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist along with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier (1993), the initiative triggers the unsuspected generation of artworks from the creative execution of different instructions or “notes” delivered in turn by other artists as a way to challenge the traditional modes of production, as well as the usual conditions of circulation and exhibition of art.
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territory | 187 TERRITORY
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IN ANTOFAGASTA
Many ways of making art mean that the once exhibited becomes debris.
Bruno Latour
territory | 189 MATERIAL FLOWS, SENSITIVE FLOWS : THREE CASES OF SUBSTANCE TRANSFER
Javier González Pesce
It seems to me that in our minds we want to conceive art as pristine, we imagine its existence and that of (most) works of art in a state of integrity, never becoming a remnant. There is an agreement that art pieces are written about as we conceive them in exhibition conditions, in the controlled material and symbolic state that the artist designed. Critic considers art as its object of analysis in the period that the artist or some institution determines as its exhibition time. Some works become historical and continue to be reviewed by critics even decades after their material disappearance. In these cases, we imagine them pristine, in a fictitious temporality that reproduces “suitable” conditions for these remembered (imagined) works to preserve their artistic status as if dust, darkness, insects or biological activity were never present. Some collections provide space and care that allow some works to continue without deterioration. There is a sort of ceremony that those of us who work with works of art collectively activate, a plot of a dimension where there is no temperature or time. Yet many ways of making art mean that the once exhibited becomes debris. Some works have a material and symbolic history and energy that transcends the time of the exhibition. In my visits to ISLA during November and December 2021, I did not only encounter the exhibitions that make up the latest version of the SACO Biennial, but also traced the material becoming of pieces (or parts of pieces) that, after their existence as works on display, that now belong to other categories. Life or energy does not need a description to exist, it is independent of rationality. How many elements of archaeological value will remain underground even after our disappearance, in complete oblivion to human life today and in the future. In a way I think it is good that we leave their existence without a thought to describe it, I just find it curious that we make such an effort to think about the material and symbolic history of art and exhibitions in such short stretches of the existence of the objects of research (the works themselves). “Storytelling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active.”
Antofagasta is located. A fisherman with a nomad spirit traveled the coasts of the region and lived with the original inhabitants of the area. A sculpture commemorating him was unveiled in 1974. The work of the Antofagasta artist Osvaldo Ventura is an abstraction in geometric code of the character, portrayed as a walker willing to advance and discover, who covers himself from the sun with one hand and in the other carries a tool similar to a hammer (the visionary perspective and the capacity for transformative action). The growth of the city led to the widening of the street next to which Juan López’s sculpture stood for three decades. The work considered that the monument would be relocated, however, the construction company ended up breaking it down, turning it into a failed project. In 2018, and on the occasion of SACO7, the artist Valeria Fahrenkrog, proposed to make a replica of the original sculpture (with other materials) to install it in the Melbourne Clark Historic Pier. Fahrenkrog is a Chilean artist based in Germany who lived in Antofagasta during her childhood.
In a way, she proposes to materially return to the city an element that is part of its past, a sculptural figure that for years has only inhabited the space of local memory and the occasional photograph. The sculpture then returns like a solid ghost to the place where it lived, generating a nostalgic reunion with the inhabitants who remember it as a missing landmark, but this reunion would not be with the original form (whose whereabouts I do not know), but with a figure equivalent to the original. A new sculpture that imitates and reproduces its form in another time. The artist’s approach considers a sculpture that dialogs with the space, and also with a recent past in a gesture of emotive appropriation, as if bringing back to life something that is no longer there. This sculpture brings us back to when Antofagasta was different, to that point of encounter and friction between the city and real estate expansion. Cities are built of rigid materials, which in turn allow human (and other) activity as a soft flow. Demographic growths demand the anatomical readjustment of the rigid parts to sustain the growth and expansion of their soft and moving parts. This process is often crossed by real estate interests that operate in the cities, renewing them without any kindness or respect for the original structure of the places. Changing the anatomy of a neighborhood (from one-story houses to a series of vertical ghettos, for example) implies transforming the possible ways of life. When a neighborhood is structurally intervened, the structure of human life is also modified. Valeria’s work (among other things) goes to the point at which the city modifies part of its anatomy in the name of real estate progress, which offers us a future, but deprives us of a past ( that maybe wasn’t so bad).
The sculpture unveiled in the 70s returns as a work of Valeria Fahrenkrog passing through SACO7 exhibition, to be installed later in the Juan López School of Antofagasta, finding a definitive home.
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Valeria’s sculpture referring Osvaldo’s had a specific duration, which was also the duration of the CASE 1 Juan López, affectionately called “el Chango,” is a sort of discoverer of the territory where
CASE 2 In the southern area of the city (not far from ISLA) there is a place called Bosque Escondido (Hidden Forest). At the bottom of a creek runs a line of water and CONAF has donated several trees, each growing from a wheel, forming a sort of forest that has just emerged in the desert. Ramón Zabala started this project in 2017, which now has libraries, thousands of books, and some rooms that are available to people. Everything is built with waste and recycled material, eco-bricks, wooden pallets, fabrics, and bottles, among others. Each construction is a shelter, but apart from the functional ones, there are many material situations whose objective is the simple existence, configurations, compositions, situations, and characters made of wood and waste. Anonymous sculptures that stage situations and characters, but which are also a trace of a loving and creative human activity.
territory | 191 went up to the neighborhood where the school is located. It was an empty campus, the students have been having remote classes since the pandemic started. The only residents of the school seemed to be the caretaker and Juan Lopez’s geometric figure, which was installed, like a guardian, next to the teachers’ lounge. It was a pleasant surprise to find it in such good condition. The figure designed and installed in the city in the 70s, once disappeared, now returns as a work of Valeria Fahrenkrog, passing through the exhibition Origin and Myth of SACO7, to be installed definitively in the Juan Lopez School. A school is like a small city for people in training. The original intentions of the sculptor were that his great geometric character would become a silent inhabitant of a city, now its replica is the witness of the recesses of a school in the high altitudes. I pictured myself as a child, small before the character, I imagined my feelings and my possible experiences, and I thought of the number of children that will be formed before this character. I think Osvaldo Ventura would be very happy with the way his work found a chance to ensure the continuity of his existence, he would be very happy with this work in collaboration with Valeria Fahrenkrog.
Among these spontaneous pieces and without an author who claims them, we find some remnants, parts of works (or even complete works) that were once exhibited at SACO. Today they compose this unexpected scenario of situations offered and entangled to life itself, and to the desert. Those pieces that were once attached to a card, today are covered with dust and fade under the sun to live in this neighborhood of cheerfully anonymous things. I was moved by the place. Entering these precarious rooms has a strong effect. Each space has an intimate feeling, offered to whoever wants to use it, without distinction. Like a small village where intimacy is built collectively, in complicity, an intimacy made of many. The materials administered for conceptual or constructive artistic purposes, found a new destination in Bosque Escondido to give continuity to its existence, configuring an area for gathering and contemplation. SACO7 exhibition. Thus the act of material memory had an end date, like an apparition in sculptural code, but the Juan López School of Antofagasta showed interest in transferring it to its premises in order to preserve it and give it a second (or third) life. Together with part of the ISLA team, we
192 | territory Center for Artistic Residencies Latin American Superior Art Institute ISLA Bosque Escondido
territory | 193 Casa Quebrada Platform Juan López School
Dagmara, Sebastián, Javier (SACO’s audiovisual), and I went through the upper part of the city to the Miramar Central neighborhood, one of the neighborhoods heavily affected by the flood of 1991. Sebastián showed me the ravine through which the mud pushed through, taking neighborhoods with it down the lower part of the city. Today this place is full of houses again, a new settlement is dangerously located in the place that the flood cleared of houses. Sebastián tells us that he grew up there and now returns to create a new headquarters for his project. Next to his grandmother’s house he shows us part of Nicolás Consuegra’s work, recently removed from the exhibition that took place at the Ruinas de Huanchaca Cultural Park. Lying against a wall, the structures waited to be reused. We walked down the hill to the house they plan to turn into Casa Azul 2. The materials that once shaped the work of an artist will now be the partitions between spaces. The work is returned to its previous material condition, its state as an artistic piece was only a momentary transit of materials that perform for the second time, now without symbolic pretensions. Both identities embodied by the woods act in the same field, art. The new headquarters is being built collectively with the help of friends, a community that Casa Azul has built. The project is expected to be up and running in the coming months.
A PROCESS, NOT AN EVENT
On the occasion of the seventh Athens Biennial (2021), Greek curator Poka-Yio asked himself the following question: “What is a biennial? Is it an event or a process? Is it a process that culminates in an event, or is it a process with the condition of an event?” It seems clear to me when visiting these spaces that SACO is a process. It could be said that each exhibition, talk, or residency connects contents that filter into the city and local communities in different ways. There is an impact, a transmission, and an extension of the energy of an event to others, but also, and as I have dedicated myself to exemplify in this text, some materials and even some works, re-circulate, forming parts (sensitive, material) of a larger system that does not stop or end with the end of the event.
CASE 3
194 | territory Casa Azul Cultural Center is an independent space, dedicated to the exhibition and display of the work of local artists. It is a place to meet, dialog, and celebrate the work of authors in a wide variety of disciplines such as music, dance, painting, and photography, among many others. On my first trip to the city, I visited the place. It was late and we called Sebastián Rojas, one of the directors. A group of people was having a barbecue while he was dismantling the exhibition for SACO Dignified Beauty by the local artist Ángelo Álvarez. I believe that Casa Azul has drawn much of its energy and determination from a close relationship with that team. These invisible matters are fundamental for artistic projects and the shaping of discourses and scenes. The creation of flows, the production of complicities, and creative relationships provide vitality to local scenes. There was a willingness to engage in friendly conversation. The Casa Azul team had just arrived from Santiago on the occasion of their participation in the ChACO fair. Someone mentioned the need to repair a new venue. I feel very interested since I formed myself within the independent space I have been co-directing for more than ten years.
SACO is a project that is installed in a difficult territory (where universities do not consider the arts) but that little by little and after years of work and management, has disseminated subjects and content, infecting many people, inserting and contributing to the network of transfers and sensitive collaborations in northern Chile. I thought of the mining people as idealistic and broadly unionized, a community with social and class consciousness, as romantically portrayed on the old 500 escudos bill.
territory | 195 A few days ago I saw a video where a person shouted to Gabriel Boric at the airport: “Get out of Antofagasta communist, we like money here.” So many times I saw trains loaded with copper sheets, Dagmara told me the obscene figure of the value of each sheet, it was so exorbitant that I soon forgot it. I remember conversations with proud cab drivers telling me that there were ships at sea ready to receive millions of those sheets. I thought of the mining people as idealistic and broadly unionized, a community with social and class consciousness, as romantically portrayed on the old 500 escudos bill. Art, as well as the practices of reflection and sensibility, are opposed to the very functional, reasonable, profitable, and selfish ways of human activity and understanding of the world offered to us by neoliberal economics. Every time I wonder about the necessity of the arts I come across this function of great relevance, that of cooling the human actions that atrophy the sensitive and critical faculties. Art takes its time, celebrates the simple, and confronts the complex. Art opens spaces for contemplation and thought, and seeks instances of encounter and transference from what is not necessarily useful, of experimentation and movement for human activity. I once heard a left-wing politician say that his project always meant moving away from the market system; that if it was located to the north, he suggested moving to the south; that if it went up, then it would be necessary to go down. I think that the market system is not in a specific place, but everywhere. Not only our material life happens under its domination, but also our emotional and spiritual life. But there are certain situations that manifest resistance to its voracity: popular creativity, poetry, music, love, rebellion, as well as some visual arts exhibitions, are small beacons of sensitivity that give us hope that we can continue to generate authentic and sensitive ways of occupying the world.
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territory | 199 I arrived in Antofagasta with a giant sock and a huge pair of underwear. Everything else would be built on-site at the Antofagasta Regional Library. I developed a daily routine over the coming weeks. I would wake to familiar voices drifting up from the kitchen below, then walk downstairs and greet SACO staff and fellow artists from around the world. “Good morning Bartek, Kinga, Elodie. Hey Carole. Hola Miguel!” We had all gathered here in the Southern Hemisphere, on the South American continent, in the country of Chile, in the coastal desert city of Antofagasta, in this artist residency kitchen, to eat, drink, chat, and begin our day. Then, I’m off to the library with a purpose. I pet the neighborhood dogs on the way, grab an empanada, take a collective taxi to the city center, and sit on a bench in Plaza Colón. These 15 minutes before the library opened each morning were precious to me. I would point my index finger at the library’s facade and draw in space, imagining and planning the day’s work as I ate my breakfast.
Within a week, a gigantic pair of underwear had appeared, propped precariously out a third floor window. In the mornings that followed, I watched many people walk by, look up at the tighty whities billowing in the wind, elbow their friend, smile, and take photos before moving on with their day. Soon after, someone showed me a picture of the underpants posted on Instagram. To my amazement it had received over 4000 likes by people in Antofagasta. Many people posted comments speculating on the back-story of this intimate garment hanging off of this important public building. I came to this project with vague goals relating to vulnerability, contradictions, and the apocalyptic theme of Flood. But each day as I added, adjusted, and looked, more was revealed to me. I was responding to these discoveries and to the people and environment I was interacting with.
“Note to self: Must add sparkly sequin covered flags to catch the morning sunlight. Celebrate this humiliating, underpants-up-flagpole moment. Turn this negative into a positive.” As the inside structure took form, I began working with students in a workshop. During the last hours of each day we would meet in a back room, blast loud music, cut, sew, braid, and plan together. Student: “I like the flags going up to the window better.” Me: “OK, well… I’m considering it.” I can be stubborn. A few minutes later, me: “OK, yeah, let’s do it!” And so, it went that way, a back and forth of talking and making that led to a result that was both as-planned and betterthan-planned because it was done together. I finished the work on the last day and took a taxi back to the residency before departing. The driver asked why I was in Antofagasta. “Big-clothes-front-library-building-art,” I said in broken Spanish. He beamed with excitement having already seen it himself, pulled at his own underwear, and we laughed together. We talked about family and work, then said our goodbyes.
BRIEF MEETINGS AND FAREWELLS Eric Conrad
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202 | territory QUALITY IN THE ARTISTIC INDUSTRY Bartek Buczek As a guest of SACO Biennial I worked with the other invited artists as a technician/art handler, which is actually also my regular job. I’ve been working this way for 12 years, it started simultaneously with my artistic career. As my artistic persona is starting to fade away, my practice as an art handler is coming to the bright light. Instead of doing my own mediocre artworks, I have chosen to contribute to the works of more interesting artists.
I called my project Art Industry Standard since what I’m trying to do is to reach those standards or to develop them in the fields where they are not established yet. It is a long term performative exploration. The art industry doesn’t have many standards, which can bring some anxiety to us, art world participants. For a curious ex-artist/artworker this Terra Incognita is a great opportunity to set some new rules and cheerfully play with them. It’s a very niche game. I’m not going to pretend that it’s a meaningful piece of art or some critically important research project, but this transition from artist to art handler simply gives me more attention and appreciation from the art world than my entire artistic career has ever done. Working on the new international ground was an opportunity for me to verify my methods, tools, skills and beliefs which I had developed so far. It was also a chance to take different points of view on approach to creation and to track how artists deal with stress, artworld dramas and catastrophes. A tender, conscious art handler shall carefully handle his artists. During SACO1.0 I had the pleasure to work with a diverse group of artists. I was trying to contribute to their artworks the best I could. This included lots of shoveling for Carole Louis to sink a couple of old refrigerators in the dirt, supported by being very talkative to help Carole keep her idea as unbound as possible (then I learnt how open minded an artist can be). Eric Conrad, the most charming person in the whole known art world, needed my two efficient hands and my corner cutting, A-to-B mindset. In return he showed me how his seeming indecisiveness goes very well with his joyfull creativity. Elodie Antoine surprised me by revealing herself as an author of one of my all time favorite artworks. For her I forced myself to beat my vertigo (which I actually share with Elodie) to hang her textile sculptures. Ángelo Álvarez’s paintings blended with the space of Casa Azul Cultural Center. Working on his overwhelming exhibition let me immerse a little in the local environment. Adrien Tirtiaux gave me a hard time with his demanding artwork and persona. He was my great critic but also a great comrade. For me the magic of art appears in experiences that happen between the artists which I’m taking care of and me as a caretaker. In the worst case scenario –a complete failure of my art project– I could still become the most competent art handler that I could be. In my honest opinion: not bad at all.
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The secret of a site-specific installation resides in accepting the environment by its essence. This means I need to get involved with the character of the place to access an unconscious knowledge. My intuition guides me. In this particular place, the light and the apparent void take an important role. My spontaneous idea was to highlight this for a brief moment. I covered the rocks that had fallen from the mountains with a wire mesh and put a red fabric over them. The process was as if I was charging the chosen rocks with energy. I gave them a special meaning with the red cloth. A bright red in the desert landscape, beautiful but also dramatic. The red color implies both pain and love. The red spots in the desert are like lighthouses in the sea. They help us with a sense of direction. They help us to look inwards. Like a mirror, they reflect themselves in our spiritual inner. Desert and “void ‘’ bring infinite diversity and abundance.
I took the empty molds of the rocks on a trip to the Port of Antofagasta. The heavy stones transform, becoming lighter so they can appear with a new character. Even in the harbor, their shapes rest heavily at the Sitio Cero. But its essence has changed. The port is the departing and arriving point for a trip. The red shell of the rocks lies next to the containers, waiting to be shipped to a new and unknown destiny. That uncertainty remains.
The invitation to SACO1.0 Biennial implied a major challenge: creating artwork for Sitio Cero, an exhibition area of 4500 square meters in the Port of Antofagasta, and making an installation in the desert. My great passion in art is the dialog with spaces –both indoor and outdoor. At this moment, I’m especially interested in dealing with the desert. It is often used as a synonym for infinite or “void” space, which is by no means certain. The desert is alive but is too inhospitable for human beings, so it is a landscape without them. Dialoging with the desert and changing its face for a brief time was a fascinating experience for me.
Johannes Pfeiffer
The good thing about artworks is that there is no need for everything to be clear or legible. The unexplained persists. Art gives a secret to the audience that each one´s essence fills. There is a transformation through art, and transformation also means comprehension. The spectator cannot avoid keeping the impression of having won something that is innerly processed. Nothing remains as it was, and that’s why the ephemeral character of the installation in the desert is a precious metaphor for nature, people, and its history.
territory | 205 ANTOFAGASTA AND THE ARTISTIC CHALLENGE OF THE ATACAMA DESERT
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I worked at ISLA Artistic Residency Center in Antofagasta from April 17 to 20, 2021, looking to know the biennial main theoric and methodologic lines. Then I traveled to San Pedro de Atacama, specifically to the art residency La Tintorera, directed by artist and social worker Verónica Moreno, in Solcor Ayllu, a few steps from the historic downtown of San Pedro.
Between April 20 and May 7, I learned about the ancient and delicate art of dyeing with natural pigments. At the same time, I was introduced to the ancestral knowledge of Los Andes, meeting people from Lickan-Antay and Atacameña cultures. In La Tintorera my main workshop spaces were the kitchen and the bonfire in the backyard. Verónica and I boiled almost 10 meters of fabric with different dye materials, including turmeric, eucalyptus leaves, cochineal, and white and red onion. The rhythm of the work was related to the slow but systematic process of firing, drying and ironing the fabrics. With the yellows, purples and greens that resulted, I created multicolor geometric patterns and molds with an undeniable Andean influence. I also worked on different paintings with direct and figurative references to the rupestrian art in the rocky eave of Taira. The collection of pictographs and petroglyphs is located 75 kilometers northeast of the city of Calama, in Alto Loa, at about 3,150 meters above sea level and dating from approximately 800 to 400 BC. I was interested in studying these expressions related to their natural, geographic, stellar, and cosmic environment beyond their communicative potential. For me, thinking in this old world is re-imagining the sacred and magic space and, above all, the possible harmony between human beings and nature. At the same time, it is an opportunity to reflect on its disappearance since it is well documented how the Taira eave has been affected by the destruction and the robbery of its components.
Sebastián Riffo
Thanks to the links between the biennial and Helena Horta Tricallotis from the Institute for Archaeological Research and the Museum of the Catholic University of the North (IIAM), I got to know deeply the scientific research that has systematized some of the wisdoms and knowledges expressed in Taira. However, my main learning and emotional gain were going there to see it onsite, on June 8th of 2021, through the biennial arrangements, guided by professor Silvia Lisoni from the tourist agency Sol del Desierto. We arrived at the eave, bordering and crossing bare-footed the zigzagging Loa River, framed by its monumental canyon of more than 60 meters high. It was a touching spectacle; colossal rock walls, hills, and volcanoes embraced us between water springs and bushy foxtails. Watching it directly and without mediators was understanding all the things that photographs or scientific I did a video that slowly explores the Taira eave´s surface, and also a largeformat painting that gives an account of its panoramic view.
territory | 209 THE LANGUAGE OF STONES
The result of my residency was a video that slowly explores the Taira eave´s surface. I also did a large-format painting that gives an account of its panoramic view. The size and immersive potential aimed to boost a sensitive experience involving the gaze and the body. I presented smaller canvases inspired by Taira´s art fragments with geometric shapes alluding to the Andean textile culture. This residency experience vindicated different ways of making and understanding Andean art as a live, multiform, transhistorical and no-linear language, which questions our contemporaneity from its indications and rearrangements, together with its formal and symbolic transfiguration.
210 | territory illustrations couldn´t express. The pilgrimage and trek as the first sensitive experiences; the eave size and its appeal to our own body as a measure of the space; its vast volumetric extension, and the effort that its contemplation demanded. The multiple forms of the stones´ dimensions; their textures, the thickness and depth of the pierced lines, the pigments and their interaction with the traces of the stones where they were drawn, among many other factors.
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Middle of the night. I cannot conceive driving without looking at the landscapes I cross by. The distance to my meeting tomorrow morning in Antofagasta allows me a pause. By instinct, I´m distrustful, so I look for a place where nobody can see me, even those I cannot see. Immersed in my sleeping bag, with my baggage as a pillow, my gaze fixed on the multitude of stars of the Milky Way: the constellations, the guessed nebulae. I cannot stop thinking about the past two weeks at San Pedro with unexpected and fruitful meetings: in Verónica, who organizes an artist residency; in José, talented musician and astronomer teacher, chaman in body and soul; in Robin Son, a horseman with whom we share some hours between Mars Valley and Valley of Death. The furtive and rare encounter with a young tattooist who wanted a portrait of his painted body also comes to mind. I think in the volcanoes I could see again, in the sea´s geology and the lava. The ocean makes an unbearable noise. ¿May I lie too close to the sea? I turn to calculate the distance between us again: some 20 meters, the waves might not reach me. * At dawn, I took the coastal highway from Tocopilla to Iquique, 230 km at once. The white light of daybreak carves the mountain relief that borders the ocean. My enthusiasm increases with the morning: I know it is an ephemeral moment; I would like to pause it to keep going, accompanied by the beauty of dawn. Later, in a landscape flattened by the brightness, shaped by strong contrast, I persist in arriving at a salt mine that seems to emerge from hell. I ask myself if the memory of the traveled places and territories was revealed to me by photography.
*
On the screen, I see the image that has made me come once again to these places, standing over the same crag as two years ago. I don´t shoot. Instead, I take a seat. Maybe I need to feel that I am part of the earth, the mountain and the seas I have traveled through. My photographic trips take meaning from the unceasing encounter with the landscape, the wildlife, the minerals and the oceans. Damn it! The silver salts are part of my photographic work. ¿Would they come from Chilean mines? ¿Should every practice need to be reconsidered for the Earth’s sake?
212 | territory SEAS AND MOUNTAINS: FRAGMENTS OF A TRIP Alexandre Christiaens
Two years ago, I traveled with my wife Dominique through the North of Chile, from Lauca Desert to Atacama. Since then, I couldn´t stop thinking about returning to those places to continue gathering images and sounds.
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March 2020: facing the outbreak of this microscopic virus that has humanity and the whole world in suspense. The trip to Valparaíso and my participation in the International Photography Festival of Valparaiso, FIFV, were postponed. Beyond our frustration in front of this pandemic, another failure, even more devastating, comes to light: our superiority over other living beings is broken. We must try different routes, be attentive, and listen to what we have forgotten, neglected, or repressed.
* After my re-encounter with this renowned plateau and its crust of salt, I return to the coastal highway. I cross the departmental and sanitary control again, but in the opposite way. I travel alone. The day quiets down; life calms itself on the night’s eve. I stop, get out of the car with my cameras, come back to the car, and stop again. A great experience unfolds to my gaze. The live world fuses with one´s perceptions. I have no age, enraptured with the nature that flows through me. ¿Could I sit here? For now, I prefer to accompany the movement and fix the numerous pelicans flying over a battle line in the sensitive side of my withe and black films. Like bullets, they pierce the hunting horizon with the arctic terns; they submerge while the sea lions and dolphins emerge: the fishes get trapped. The ocean is churning –from outside-in. The wild and pure life takes and gives; the alive is sealed with essential pacts. Also the sun penetrates the curved veil of the horizon before disappearing. ¿Is my enthusiasm provoked by the landscape? I´m a galloping horse; I shoot with the eyes and the joy of a kid.
* The great power movements of the tidal wave acquire shape on the horizon. It is an oceanic rib cage, a giant among breathing giants.
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* Middle of March 2021. Following a road implies listening to our instinct, involving our hearts and fears. I pick up my travel bag and leave for Valparaíso. Casa Espacio. Some days after my arrival, the borders close: Chile is once again a red zone. Hesitation: Despite the few contacts, should I try to forge links with the fishers, or should I travel inland, from Magallanes to San Pedro de Atacama?
territory | 215 I watch the heavy sea. The sound of the waves keeps me awake. Far away, the great power movements of the tidal wave acquire shape on the horizon. It is an oceanic rib cage, a giant among breathing giants. I no longer feel like a galloping horse, but like phytoplankton, no more, no less.
All the relationships are reciprocal. Looking around, I confirm the infinite unity and multiplicity of life Maybeaxioms.itis2or
3 in the morning, and my sleeping bag is wet: I take refuge in my car to end the night. Suddenly, a shout from outside wakes me up: the light of a lantern illuminates the waves and me for a moment with an uncertain intention. Awkward, stuck, I rub the steam from the window, and I catch sight of two people walking by the sea shore. A man and a woman, I think. They kick out a big dog with bad words and stones. Then, like a divine apparition more real than in Félicien Rops´ paintings, an enormous pig as giant as two full wheelbarrows reach them. In one minute, they disappear the same way they arrived, switching off the lantern that made them come up in my visual field. Amazed, between doubts and laziness, I didn’t capture the memorable scene. At dawn, confused, I wander through a seemingly abandoned village not far from there. I must arrive in Antofagasta: I have a meeting in SACO. They have organized a talk with photographers, but the vision of the night before obsesses me like a burning bush.
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territory | 219 THE KID AND THE FRIDGE Carole Louis
The focus of the 2021 SACO Contemporary Art Biennial was Flood –in memory of the 1991 flood that devastated Antofagasta, located in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest deserts in the world. An invitation to evoke and reflect upon the permanent possibility of imminent catastrophe, and how humanity would overcome it –if at all. Thanks to the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels, I was invited to propose a project. While browsing through Wikipedia, I discovered Tapu, an ancient ritual from Rapa Nui - I also didn’t realize that the Easter Islands were part of Chile; geography was never my forte. Tapu was a way to prevent the depletion of natural resources, by means of local and temporary prohibition of their use. In a contemporary reflection on this ritual, I imagined burying several refrigerators in the Afterdesert.my project proposal had been selected, the organizers of SACO shared an urban legend with me, according to which a child survives the floods by hiding in a fridge. Again: I obviously knew nothing about it, but was pleasantly surprised by the overlap between this tale and my initial idea. The location I chose for my intervention is the site of the Ruins of Huanchaca, a former silver foundry. I put myself in the skin of the protagonist of the legend: the child, sole survivor, plays to ward off death by disguising himself as a skeleton. He was forced to bury his relatives - or rather the values that eventually caused them to perish. What’s buried in the fridges are seemingly outdated parental values: creative poetic romanticism, the direct and
-an overall in white leather, a piece of workman’s clothing that I found at the flea market.
-low-value coins, and chocolate coins wrapped in bad imitations of euros.
-artificial flowers: they are widely found in Chinese shops, and they are used to decorate the graves of animals, and animitas - small temples to honor the victims of road accidents.
220 | territory linear link between work and wage, the idea of keeping domestic animals (which in case of famine might quickly feed on us), the blind and thoughtless tourism.
The surviving child gathers in front of the graves and offers them a drink from the precious few bottles of soda that are left. He’s sowing what seems to be the remains of the economy, hoping to bring back abundance: he’s throwing chocolate coins around. The slightest noise or movement makes him run away and hide in his fridge.
-a piece of fichas - a rubber coin that was used to pay miners, and was an effective way to enslave them through a restricted circuit of the economy. They can still be found at the small port of Antofagasta for 3.000 pesos each.
In working towards my performance, I integrated the following objects:
-3-liter bottles of soda that are cheaper than water. In the shops, you can contract localized credit. Everything is privatized in Chile, and hence debt is omnipresent.
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LICHENS Elodie Antoine
Fortunately, the encounters I made on site, the incredible SACO team, and the emulation created with the other artists quickly allowed me to regain a little hope.
My first encounter with the Ruins of Huanchaca, on a gray day, alone, with the vultures flying overhead, gave me the feeling of a prophecy.
My installation evoking the rebirth of nature starting with lichens, mushrooms in the ruins and metals seeping from the walls of the Museo del Desierto was born from this residency. I keep strong memories and beautiful images.
After the Apocalypse was the chosen theme, and it proved to be very accurate. By coincidence, our stay took place in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, surrounded by much uncertainty.
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PossibledroughtSaltedfreezeHotdesertbelow,above.atday,atnight.waterbelow,above.tsunamisto
COVID-19
stay in Antofagasta started and moved on. Experiencing aesthetic and material contradictions while walking through the city. I came searching for the migration path in Chile and found many contradictions and complexities. Immigrants from yesterday, immigrants from today, immigrants in transit, and transients. I watched, described, and considered. I came bringing an ethnographic and artistic method. I gathered local stories within the city, I gathered life stories from brave women. I walked, heard, and looked.
224 | territory ANOTHER SKY IN THE NORTH Melanie Garland I Sea
Thatsimilarities.Contradictions,washowmy
the coast, possible flood to the hill. South zone heading to Santiago, North zone heading to Iquique. Mansions to the south, shantytowns to the north. Mining work inland, street work downtown. of government nationwide pandemic worldwide
Change
territory | 225 II Global migrations, local migrations. Rethinking and rewriting our Chilean history. Post-social uprising times Migration and post-migration times New coexistences, new reflections on the others. Rethinking our Chilean identity, rethinking our future. New Watching,learnings.describing, and respecting mobility. Sliding our gaze, looking to one side, looking up. Meeting our new neighbor. Crossing the border.
226 | territory Since my first residency at ISLA in 2016, I got to know deeper the Northern camps’ complexities, especially those of immigrants in the north of the city. Since then until now, I have witnessed the urban, social and economic development of Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian communities´ mobility in Chilean territory, and in recent years of Venezuelan people. That pushed me to start a path of anthropological, ethnographic and artistic observation and reflection around the current dynamics of immigrant societies in the context of post-Chilean social uprising. Antofagasta is a place of new residencies, transit and a strategic location in the Latin American migration route; that’s why my interest in its dynamics of territorial coexistence.
My residency in January 2022 at ISLA took place at a critical time when an active civil society fighting for the future was capable of rethinking and rewriting this history. The immigrant camps mirrored the political atmosphere. The active fight for a dignified living and a new constitution has extended an atmosphere of hope that also reaches the more vulnerable people of the north. That pushes us to visit and discover other visions, stories and dreams over a shared territory. I reflect on these other gazes over the same territorial sky from an ethnographic method and artistic practices like sound, poetic writing, and cartography.
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SACO | 229 SACO CORPORATION
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Ever since its first interventions in 2004, SE VENDE Collective has aimed to promote artistic dialog between artists, curators, contributors, and the public who visited its interventions in emblematic sites of Antofagasta in the following years. The exhibitions Other Country in 2005 and 2007 brought works by local artists to the Catholic University Extension Center in Santiago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Valdivia. In 2009, SE VENDE was part of the Triennial of Chile, an event that commemorated the Chilean bicentenary. Its founders built networks in South America and Europe with similar projects that invited them to give conferences, talks, and make exhibitions. In coherence with the growth of its activities, the legal personality changed to SACO Cultural Corporation, giving organic continuity to an initiative that this year is reaching adulthood.
Another of its pillars is school without school, a series of informal art education programs focused on training teachers and students that have been carried out in more than ten educational centers in different communities throughout the region. This experience led to the development of the art camp Between the Form and the Mold during SACO4. More than eighty students from all over the country participated, working under the guidance of different Latin American artists. Four
FROM CONTEMPORARY ART WEEK TO BIENNIAL
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One of the main concepts developed by SACO is museum without museum, a circuit of exhibitions in Antofagasta and San Pedro de Atacama. Beyond merely showing their work, the artists offer workshops and discussions with the idea of creating a local audience. Among the guest artists who have left their traces in the North of Chile are the Uruguayan artists, Luis Camnitzer and Fernando Foglino; Teresa Solar from Spain; Elliot Tupac, Adriana Ciudad, Gustavo Buntinx and Roberto Huarcaya from Peru; Heráclito Ayrson from Brazil; Lucía Warck-Meister and Marisa Caichiolo from Argentina; Remo Schnyder from Switzerland; Yuga Hatta and Kotoaki Asano from Japan; Arcángel Constantini from Mexico; Lucía Querejazu and Juan Fabbri from Bolivia; the Chilean artists Rodolfo Andaur, Paz Errázuriz and León & Cociña; and Óscar Pabón from Venezuela.
SACO After five years, the Contemporary Art Week started in 2012 became an international festival that invites artists to propose site-specific works for exhibition on the Melbourne Clark Historic Pier and other spaces of Antofagasta. The last three editions were focused on the topic of time and the different ways in which it is perceived: Origin and Myth (2018), Destiny (2019) and Now or Never Thirty-five(2020).artists have shown their on-site works and participated in immersion trips throughout the desert, becoming ambassadors for subsequent editions of the event. The field trips to the depths of Atacama acknowledge communities located far from the city. For example, in the Aymara village of Quillagua, the program The Driest Place on Earth takes place, a lab of ideas that aims to reveal the resistance of this small community against the depredation, corruption, and sale of the water, as well as emigration and the state’s abandonment. In other locations like Chiu Chiu, this work makes a direct connection with the inhabitants, their cultural heritage and their specific situation.
The third area that the Corporation is involved in is the research of the territory, whose characteristics influence our ideas and activities. Aiming to break free from the traditional tendency to isolate different fields of knowledge, we have put in dialog the depth of images with archaeology and astronomy and existential reflections with mining, geology, anthropology, and environmental studies. In this way, it has been possible to solidify residencies that combine art and science, understood as a multidirectional production, accompanied by academics from each field. One of its main projects was Desert Interventions, a lab series on contemporary art in 2016 and 2018.
232 | yearsSACOlater, the project Burying Flags in the Sea by Venezuelan artist Miguel Braceli included the participation of high school students from the Complejo Educativo Juan José Latorre Benavente in Mejillones, making them co-authors of international artwork.
The Latin American Superior Art Institute ISLA was founded to optimize workflow and create an atmosphere favorable to the delivery of resources and educational tools. Artists, teachers, curators and scholars have passed by its venue. There is also run ISLALibro, the only library specializing in visual arts and territory in the North of Chile, and the space for exhibitions ISLA+.
During 2022, SACO achieved three new projects: Biennial in the Trunk (presentation of the exhibitions mediated with virtual reality lens); Interstellar Stroll (experience that immerse the audience in the Andean worldview and pareidolia; and the Micro-Curating Diploma, curatorships from the margins for the Highlands macrozone.
NODO Artes Vivas. Associative project of various spaces to boost the international circulation of living art from Chile; Al otro lado. Network of visual art residencies, including different spaces throughout Chile; To-Gather. Project sponsored by Pro Helvetia that connects SACO with two crucial Swiss institutions for the development of artistic interchanges, Atelier Mondial and School of Commons, and Low-cost residencies. Promoted by SACO to give continuity to the interchange between residencies´ organizers through programs based on guest-host reciprocity, allowing for an accurate, first-hand understanding of another artist’s context and work method. The program has been held with spaces in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, Bolivia, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, and Sweden.
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NETWORKS The Biennial of Contemporary Art pushes the limits of both material and art, with activities throughout and from the desert, seeking to contribute to the autonomy of individuals to feel, think, and act independently from learned structures and inherited disparities. Some of the networks that SACO works with aiming to reach those goals are:
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Flood inundated museums and squares, professional institutes, and vacant lots. The city was fertilized with metallic drops, underwear, mountains merged with the sea, animitas made from fridges. Intimate boxes to turn the horizon upside down, red rocks in a parking lot, paintings of the Chilean social revolt, telluric vibrations, fragile petroglyphs´ contours, bodies of male miners, masks as havens, and the vanishing of the artist´s image.
Some thirty artists and curators from fourteen countries offered exhibitions to the community for two months and a half during pandemic times. The transformative power of art showed up in more than thirty thousand on-site visits in a society that supposedly is not habituated to participating in cultural activities.
This publication offers an account of residencies, exhibitions, as well as educational and research activities during a year of crucial changes in Chile. The Constitution about to be born emerged from a white sheet. Parallel to the change of government, we witnessed the official acknowledgment of the importance of art for the people. At the same time, we planted the seed of new expectations for the upcoming biennial.
