calendario eventi  :: 

X

24/4/2007

IX Biennial of Cuenca

Different Venues, Cuenca

The Cuenca Biennial celebrates twenty years of existence, and the city commemorates four hundred fifty years from its founding by the Spanish - an auspicious moment to celebrate, and to bring to mind the city's space-time, a commemorative act to amplify the urban feeling of the city.

Together we will collectively commemorate, (in the profound sense of celebration), with all the participants in the Biennial, pledging ourselves to carry out the same act for each of our cities: to look at our historical space-time process in order to develop new urban meanings, not constructed solely on the logic of the homogenization of the society and culture along models of western life, but showing the other face of globalization: localization, which expresses answers being constructed as a reaction to worldness, that face which expresses the "glocal."

Let's commemorate together and begin the search for space-time identitaries, constructing glocalities as an answer to homogenizing globalization; lets commemorate together, collectively constructing "policies of memory" through which we question each other about identities.

In the contemporary city, the globalized city, that is conditioned and that depends upon the new paradigms of communication, based on technological development, determined by the economic phenomenon of internationalization of the economy, where city, time and space tend to become universal: time is the time of communicative flows, the time of velocity and the instantaneous; space is increasingly the virtual space of the media, of technology, and of the market. The urban experience is that of a space trapped in time.

In the globalized city, the urban experience is expressed in despatialization, decentering, and deurbanization. In this way it eventually becomes a city without memory. Thus the city steadily changes to an enormous "no place," that is, a space not defined as an identitary, relational, nor historical space. The no place only creates loneliness and sameness, and does not create even the possibility of history; in the no place, only the present is experienced, and the news of the day is the only history.

In our daily life, the weight of the city, understanding that to be what has been constructed, the physical, the material, has replaced what is urban, the site of cultural events, the anthropological site that is constituted by social interaction. In the city of today, time gains value at the expense of space; the city gradually loses substance (space), it begins to decorporalize (despatializing itself).

These processes of globalization, however, also encounter local answers that express themselves in combinations of special and complex weavings. These local answers express themselves as the memory of personal experience, the presence of the community, of other temporalities of everyday life, although only partially in force, of mythical and ritual temporalities that escape the logic of accumulating capital.

In an identitary experience, it thus becomes necessary to search out-of-the-way places of our cities for those expressions of what has been termed "glocal" - to investigate what is concretely "glocal" in urban space-time.

Regarding the availability of urban space for immediate experience, it is always present, is always the now; regarding it as an historical product, a product of other times, it establishes relations, links of meaning that join past and present. Clearly time and space cannot be lived nor perceived separately as two isolated experiences. One necessarily presupposes the presence of the other.

In the preparation of the literary text, the term CHRONOTOPE was given to this unique perception of space and time, as a fundamental notion for the construction of the meaning of any narrative. Here we are not referring to narrated events, but events that have been lived, experiences in which the coexistence of times occur in only one point in space, the fullness of time perceived in a space.

In a series of places, we city dwellers condense the most important contents of our existence: identity and temporality, we construct chronotopes; spaces of semantic intensity that make possible the differentiation and hierarchization of the spaces of the city lived; spaces differentiated by an intensity of meaning arising from the condensation of time. Its not just one time nor one history; on the contrary, it is a question of multiple temporalities and velocities depending upon the participating socio-cultural groups.

Chronotopes constitute the temporal-spatial meaning of the city, by which the histories of each city are differentiated: a differentiation that is produced to the degree that its citizens live time (past, present and future) and the change-permanence relation in different ways.

Thus, the chronotope is the city created: a complex of spaces by means of which city dwellers identify themselves with the city, the city that the inhabitants make their own by giving it identity. The chronotope is then a construct, a cultural construction, something existing in imagination, to the degree that city dwellers discover the city as their own in those spaces. Therefore, in a temporal space sense, the chronotope is in permanent construction, always endless.

Spaces of expression of urban difference differ for the social subjects that live in and interpret (LEER?) the city, as well as for the historical moment in which that experience occurs. It is the expression of the plurality of independent and unmistakable voices -- polyphonic spaces of voices irreducible to one center, to a homogenized world, to just one idea and experience of city.

It is polyphony in regard to the plurality of ways of expressing the chronotopes. If the visual arts are constructed from special forms of conception, perception and expression of space-time, then it is a question of artists exploring, original and unheard of ways to construct that relation in the world of visualities.

The chronotope as a notion of identitary space-time leads us in a search for identitary ways to construct artistic space-time. This is the centrality of the convocation to this IX Biennial of Cuenca: IDENTITARY SPACES-TIMES.

In a context in which the temporal-spatial conditions of the city increasingly tend to become homogenized, their identitary features will have to be sought, not in their physical structure, but in the imaginations of their cities that the inhabitants construct and in their special ways of expressing them.

The Convocation of the IX Biennial of Cuenca is an invitation to become moles, to use their strategy, to make this time the time of the mole: to create-search for those spaces called chronotopes, not to represent them, but to capture their intensity, the power residing there, and to express it, to unfold it. We are invited to inhabit the city as moles, to construct multiple and deep galleries in search of meanings, that like viruses disemminated on the surface, in the squares, streets, and parks of our cities, would produce unheard of and identitary meanings of what is urban, today dominated by the space-time of globalization.

We are invited to create images that express the intensity of the temporal-spatial power of certain urban sites, the power that invests them with a sense of identity; images that express an urban experience as an intimate, living experience, a condensation of collective memory with personal and present actions; therefore, performatic, realizative, installative images of a new world, of a new way of inhabiting the urban.

Diego Jaramillo Paredes is an architect by profession, Master in Cultural Studies, and an artist. He is a professor of the University of Cuenca and the University of Azuay; ex-president of the Ecuadorian House of Culture, Azuay Chapter, and a member of the Management Committee of the Cuenca Biennial in several editions.

Opening april 25, h 20.00
Teatro Sucre

Opening of ufficial exhibitions

AGENTINA
Mariano Molina
Flavia Da Rin
BOLIVIA
Raquel Schwarts
Erika Ewel
BRASIL
Albano Afonso
Paulo Almeida
COLOMBIA
Natalia Castañeda
Gloria Bulla
Mateo López
COSTA RICA
Esteban Piedra
Ana de Vicente
Lucía Madriz
CUBA
Kelvin López
Ibrahim Miranda
Luis E. Camejo
CHILE I
Ismael Frigerio
Lorenzo Moya
Eugenio Téllez
ECUADOR
Marcelo Aguirre
Roberto Noboa
Juan Pablo Ordóñez
María Teresa Ponce / Fabiano Kueva
Carlos Rosero
Jorge Velarde Cevallos
Jaime Zapata
COLECTIVO DE ARTE:
Francisco Zapata
Edwin Peñaherrera
COLECTIVO LA LIMPIA:
Ricardo Coello Gilbert
Fernando Falconí Erazo
Stefano Rubira Nieto
Oscar Santillán Fiallo
EEUU
Colectivo Caraballo - Farman
Carlos Fajardo
GUATEMALA
Norman Morales
Josué Romero
MÉXICO
Marco Arce
Rubén Gutiérres
NICARAGUA
Patricia Villalobos
PANAMÁ
Donna Colon
Rachelle Mozman
PARAGUAY
Claudia Casarino
Enrique Careaga
PERÚ
Ishmael Randall-Weeks
Philippe Gruenberg
PUERTO RICO
Néstor Otero
Nayda Collazo
Migdalia Barens
REPÚBLICA DOMINICANA
Fausto Ortíz
Gerard Ellis
URUGUAY
Gerardo Goldwasser
Mario Sagradini
VENEZUELA
Aureliano Parra
Luis Salazar

Parallel exhibitions

CHILE
Bruna Truffa
CHIPRE
Klitsa Antoniou
ECUADOR
-“Recoleta, Visiones de un Santuario” del artista Arsenio García.
-Centro de Investigaciones Fantásticas de la U. San Francisco.
-“Topos Urbanos: Laboratorio” de la artista Sara Roitman.
-“Operativo: Enunciado 0” de los artistas Isabel Ullauri, Shirma Guayasamín, Corporación Full Dólar y Samuel Tituaña.
-“Cuenca a ojo de pájaro” del artista Jorge Juan Anhalzer, LibriMundi.
EEUU
-Fran Siegel
-Christy Hengst
ITALIA
Mauro Manzini y Maximiliano Boschini
NUEVA ZELANDA
Paul Amlehn

Info:
Bienal Internacional de Cuenca
Calle Bolivar 12-60 y Juan Montalvo Cuenca Equador

stampa

permanent link