desertar
habitar
Artist Bio Pablo Méndez (b. 1988, Buenos Aires). He studied at the Escuela Argentina de Fotografía and at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France, where he specialized in performance, video, sound art and relational work. He trained both theoretically and artistically with, among others, Jean Christophe-Bailly, Till Roeskens, Gary Hill, Frank Hircsh, Georges Dupin, Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint, Valeria González, Arnaud Class. His visit to the documenta 13 was a radical change in his way of conceiving sensitive links with significant otherness. He began to investigate ways of making works for non-human entities, and then the possible poetic-political entanglements involved in each territory. In France, he participated in a collaborative exchange on poetry and linguistics with the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, regarding the learning of a foreign language, always considering interspecies communications. He was selected as an outstanding artist by ENSP, and his work was exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles (2015). He has also presented installations of South American plant breeding and video poetry in Les Brasseurs, Liège, Belgium, as well as in Stocq 72, (Bruxelles) a series of videos with Albane Lamorile and Numa Benyayer. In Paris, he was co-organizer and curator of an exhibition called “intemperie” of selected Argentinean contemporary art, presented at the Vitrerie. He also exhibited Chez Agnès b., and at the Oberkampff gallery. Back in Argentina, he worked for the National Ministry of Culture, teaching courses on contemporary art and (what we used to call) nature, as well as critical views on photojournalism, and participated in exhibitions such as Casa Tomada, at the Casa Nacional del Bicentenario, where he directed the public programmes for a while. In 2017 he started working at the Instituto de Vivienda de la Ciudad, an entity that depends on the government of the city of Buenos Aires, which is in charge of the redevelopment of the shanty towns, to articulate the socio-economic integration of the inhabitants of the shanty towns, with a cultural integration. He was in charge of the artistic pedagogical programmes, in which he actively participated in the co-creation of works and relational and social devices. He was a scholarship holder of the Metropolitan Fund for the Arts and Sciences (FMAyC) to research on the policies of reception and expulsion of “introduced species”, both human and non-human. In 2019 he was a member of the First Latin American School of Urban Anthropocene and the First Cultural and Artistic Cycle of Urban Anthropocene (University of San Martin - École urbaine de Lyon), developing two works especially related to compost and fires in the Amazon. As a cultura agent and presenter, he was a panelist with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, invited by the National University of Cordoba (2019), as well as with Vinciane Despret at the Bicentennial National House (2017). That same year, he began working with the Laboratory of Experimental Entomology of the University of Buenos Aires, to develop a firefly farm, and was also the beneficiary of two grants FMAyC and National Arts Fund. He was also granted sponsorship for the development of a mobile greenhouse together with Romina Orazi and the creation of an archive of dreams of the inhabitants of the Rodrigo Bueno shanty town, which would be immediately donated to the National General Archive, in order to integrate transdisciplinary subjective views on urban transformations. In 2020, he continued with the development of a desktop-documentary called Algoritmo Firefly, together with Candela Sotos, linking situations of confinement for fireflies and for humans in relation to health and safety measures by the COVID-19. Together with Alan Talgham (psychoanalyst), they also developed the Jakob von Gunten Department, in honour of Robert Walser’s character, where talks are given to empty meanings on significants imposed by the modernism. Together they presented the department at the Casa Nacional del Bicentenario, and at the Museo de la Inmunología. At present, he is in charge of the curatorship (within a team) of an exhibition on the links between humans and non-humans and other representable cosmogonies, as well as the right of sentient beings, among other issues, which will take place in 2021 at the Kirchner Cultural Center, one of the largest public exhibition spaces in the country, with more than 120 artists and more than 200 works by Argentinean artists. At present, it is developing a project for the Secretariat of Cultural Heritage, of the Ministry of Culture of Argentina, about the existence of paranormal activity in the Historical House of Independence in Tucumán, Argentina.
-:... ¿y tu bosque?
perder
amputar
criar
intemperar
colapsar
lo infinitamente pequeĂąo