From Contemporary Art Week to Biennial

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.

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 (2020).

Thirty-five 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.

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.

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

years later, 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.

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.

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.

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+.

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:

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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242 | SACO

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.