calendario eventi  :: 

X

21/10/2009

X Bienal Internacional de Cuenca

Different Venues, Cuenca

The Cuenca Biennial arrives at its tenth edition, having passed the 20- year mark of its existence in 2007, just when the ninth edition was being held. Along with Sao Paulo, Havana, and now the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, the Cuenca Biennial, with a greater stability in its administra- tion at the present time, belongs to a select group of macro events esta- blished in Latin America and the Caribbean. From an eminently pictorial biennial at its beginning, this event has made progressive strides toward admitting other disciplines, manifestations and media, assuming the challenge that the present imposes on expository programs of its type.

The Biennial competition, located in a country that years ago was obliged to dollarize its economy, now coincides with an era of great complexity, subject to the crisis of the profit-seeking production mode of the free market, to company mergers, to the control exercised by business dealings and speculative financial movements of international scope that force nations on the periphery against the wall, themselves with histories and vulnerable processes of development. The method of production has become enmeshed in the failures of the real estate sector, investment institution and bank failures, necessitating finan- cial rescues by the government to impede even worse consequences – more failures and collapses – the incessant rise of food prices, gold or oil and the risks of an announ- ced recession in the most solvent economies of the planet.

Situated in the lower elevations of the Andean mountain system, in the province of Azuay, Cuenca is a small, almost always pleasant city of colonial background, with a marked religious tradition. In its way, it personifies the destiny of post-modernity in its space-time hybridization, in the lack of definition with which the city juxtaposes postmodern and modern progressions, heritages, structures and social components of different eras; a lower enclave, that proportionately grows without doing violence to the basic functional structures, nor to the surrounding topographic characteristics, that have a particular role in its history, its memories and its current state of affairs – an urban center on the periphery, compared to Quito’s character as a capital city or the economic power of Guayaquil. It is the “tourism showcase” of a region that generates an important volume of the Ecuadorian migratory exodus.

In this sense, the title of the X Biennal of Cuenca, Intersections, functions as a discursive pretext, which articula- tes the different levels of association among the host city, memory, zones of reality, and contemporary artistic productions and processes. For this reason it is unlike events whose role is reduced to being a simple tempo- rary importer of works of art, or a mediator between these works and sectors of the public; on the contrary, it emerges from the depths of the city that embraces the Biennial and invites participation, that coexists with, or nourishes itself from, the Biennial.

Beginning with recognition and respect for the uniqueness of the city as well as the reality of the event, the Biennial strengthens intersections and assemblies among the diverse registers and distinct levels of thematic association. It aspires to consider some of the historical alibis within its identitary fabric, its wagers between past and present life, as a leitmotiv from which invited artists can establish nodes of dialog with those contexts in which they live in different confines of America and other latitudes.

For that reason, this edition emphasizes aspects of a foundational order from the beginning. Cuenca a topography determined by water, with a stable rate of rainfall almost all year round, crossed by four rivers, of which the Tomebamba is the most notable. Water resources were in the ancestral cultures; they have been a symbol of fertility, the source of myths and legends. Water has been a capital asset for the Andean cultures and their heirs, occupying a geographical-cultural space in the early settlement, whose phases of development depended on the control achieved over the use and conservation of the life-sustaining liquid, and its efficient a small, almost always pleasant use in agricultural. For the Andean cultures and their heirs, water not only represents the source of life and is essential for survival of the species, it has become transformed into the symbol of territory and sovereignty.

Thus one could speak of the aesthetic creativity of water as being a local icon with planetary environmental impact as well, of the uses of water in nature, of observable multiple horizons at sea or inland. Blessed by its abundance or damned as the result of “the circumstance of water on all sides,” water generates dramas by its absence; it implies mobility or isolation; it is the object of irresponsible action by human beings against ecosys- tems, against the alternatives of sustainability. Finally, water is considered to be among the future causes of conflict for the need to attain, possess and control it.

On the other hand we want to refer to those constructions of meaning based on exploration of the intertwi- nings of memory. But contrary to the direction of the popular saying, “With the glories one forgets the memo- ries,” it is of interest in this case to underscore the complete opposite; “With the glories one does not forget the memories.” It’s not a question, therefore, of inquiring into the expressions belonging to the family album, into the so-called “mal de archivo” (the desire to possess the moment or its origins), nor the inner workings of individual memory so fashionable in years past, but rather inquiring into the operational use of fields of greater depth for the review of historical and cultural processes, for their archaeological dissection, to a rebellious rather than a nostalgic remembrance that rises above false pedestals and commemorations. From those arguments one constructs texts that erode the traditional categories of space and time, that proceed from an “alternating notion,” a hybrid notion of time and space subordinated to historic matrixes charged with con- tradictions, difficult to understand without the relation between past and present that marks the life of many territories in terms of identity, hegemony and subordination.

This inter-textuality between memories and men’s lives influences human and social relations; it underlies the employment of symbols that allude to the economy, to the fallacies of progress, voyages, migrations, to the cultural diasporas: it alludes to the uprooting or simple passage of man on earth and is frequently sustained in the strategies of recycling and assembly of objects and of spiritually significant environments, constituents of intangible heritage, in the allegorical density stored in the tangible, in the epistemological connections between territories experienced that hold emotive transcendence for artists.
At the same time, a not inconsiderable segment of contemporary visual production, without distinction of origins or sources, develops readings and processes motivated by the international circumstances described earlier, and their implications in daily, human, family, collective, community and social life. One of the aspects we wish then to strengthen is the connection with the labyrinths of reality and their rhizomes (from the philosophical concept of multiplicities), rethinking those multiple realities in the midst of a very complex universe, articulating meanings about the nature of what is everyday, its symbolic codes, its shades of representation, the existing images and new icons that condition the nature of the everyday or its prevailing areas of conflict.

Like a sensitive scanner, it performs explorations in the surroundings, in their historical, anthropological and cultural bases, in popular religiosity, without forgetting that the peripheries still exist, shaping a space that connects frontiers and territories that in one way or another permits a better understanding of secondary contexts, but also establishes visibility for its intercultural gains, in which the existential experience of the individual and his knowledge have a part.

We do not refer to forms of “critical” interpretation in the extreme, but of favoring those artistic practices that register those realities, the interpre- tation, and configuration of daily development, from an open perspective, not exempt from ambiguities at times, applying propositive, problematizing methodologies, in favor of political and social reflexivity.

To conclude, it will be necessary to emphasize imagining new spaces and aesthetics with regard to Cuenca (los imaginarios sobre Cuenca), a World Heritage City, from the proposals for public and urban spaces. As we know, and some authors reaffirm, art in this context is no longer conceived as proceeding from commemorative transcendentalism of the type that includes statues, obelisks, and monuments, nor is it satisfied with the romantic formula of taking works of art out of museums for the purpose of attributing “quality” to the urban context.

On the contrary, the idea is to strengthen active views about Cuenca, its history, its present, through site-spe- cific works of art, that during their process of creation, interact with the publics, or simply are interpretations resulting from that interaction. Beginning with a concept that corresponds to the will to expand the frontiers of art outside the sacrosanct enclosures of museum and gallery by means of alternatives, whose interest is in activating relations with the street and with the public more than with the physical surroundings, this con- cept would emphasize day to day rituals, create intersections between the existential, social maps and urban structure, considering the leadership of new social actors, the voice of its inhabitants, the appropriation and use that these anonymous beings make of public space – that has a direct bearing on the image that identifies the city – the expanded expressions of the concept of what is popular, or the experiences of strong identitary impact that have a social, cultural and very volatile political reason for being, that construct themselves in daily occurrences.

Once again the Cuenca Biennial will recognize the diversity of expressions, disciplines and me- diums inserted between the fissures that post modernity left, by the over-flow, the contamination of mediums and hybrid notions of language, that stimulate the coexistence between painting, which was the founding manifestation of the Biennial, and photography, installations with a docu- mentary or photographic base, object-based art, assembly, graphics, actions and performance, video and new artistic practices; considering levels of development with the capacity to translate what is contemporary and legitimate, its insertion in the symbolic circuits of international plastic art.

From the diversities we hope proposals will come that implicitly contain a reflexive will through resources, vocabularies and dissimilar methods, challenges that the beginning of the century and the millennium impose, that discourse from a spiritual dynamic opened on the themes of time, reality, territory, water and space, imagining intersections, leading to the possible nation drea- med of by Edouard Glissant, the place where the transmutational memories of men meet to blend and establish themselves.

From the diversities we hope proposals will come that implicitly contain a reflexive will through resources, vocabularies and dissimilar methods, challenges that the beginning of the century and the millennium impose, that discourse from a spiritual dynamic opened on the themes of time, reality, territory, water and space, imagining intersections, leading to the possible nation drea- med of by Edouard Glissant, the place where the transmutational memories of men meet to blend and establish themselves.

The Tenth Biennial of Cuenca will be a propitious moment for revitalizing parallel expositional actions, both national and foreign, as well as forums for reflection that permit return visits to the event, and its history, for evaluating how the Biennial has influenced artistic practices of Latin America, how it has had a relevant influence on Ecuadorian art, and finally, an analysis of the place that the Biennial occupies in the system of regional and international events.

Jose Manuel Noceda
General Curator of the X Biennial of Cuenca

Bienal Internacional de Cuenca
Bolívar 12-60 y Juan Montalvo Cuenca, Ecuador

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