back
Context
In 2002 Trama has a special interest in starting to strengthen
the debates and discussions that favours its inclusion in Rain
for the exchange of ideas, projects and therefore values amongst
the initiatives participating.
"Context" is a chain of collaborations amongst artists
proposed by Rain's initiatives, who are called together by the
subject "context as text". This subject will generate
discussions on mechanisms of artwork construction conditioned
by local circumstances, the function of art practice and the paradigm
of the artist in each context, possible exchange values amongst
initiatives, availability of facilities in each context and its
implications, the social insertion of each initiative in its context
and the challenge to articulate, through these initiatives, a
power of an organising imagination which could generate new structures
for collective work.
The methodology we propose is quite simple:
Two artists will work in each context in collaboration (a foreign
guest and a local artist) and a local theorist. The guest artist
invited through another initiative in Rain will propose a project
in which the context will be protagonist.
The host initiative will propose a local artist to work next to
the guest artist in close collaboration, assisting the realisation
of the project. This project will be accompanied by the theoretical
support of a local intellectual -sociologist, philosopher, art
critic, etc. When the collaboration comes to an end, the local
artist who helped this first guest will travel to another initiative
and develop his/her own project over there, accompanied by a local
artist who assists him/her and a theorist which frames it.
The chain goes on until it closes itself when the last artist
who moves to another context is assisted by the first artist in
the chain.
Even if this method of work is pretty simple, we think it involves
different objectives that matter to Trama. In first place we like
the idea of an artist assisting another artist -especially in
a project that puts the context at the forefront- as an effective
way to confront ideas and exchange values during the process of
making of a project.
Each artist, while assisting another's artist's project, will
be responsible for transferring references of his/her own context,
in several levels at the same time, from the most basic, providing
the necessary structure for the development of the project, to
the most complex, helping the proposed project become conceptually
effective. He/she should get involved in the structure of thinking
of the guest artist, trying to confront it with the logic of his/her
own context. In this way, the traditional concept of authorship
will be challenged in the artistic realisation and the circumstances
under which art occurs would be questioned.
At the same time, when this artist intends to develop his/her
own art piece in another context, he/she would be confronted with
the inverse situation, and therefore with an exercise of openess
to internalise the conditions for artistic thought in the context
he/she is visiting.
At the end of the project, starting in San Miguel de Tucumán,
a catalogue will be published with all the projects and texts
generated in each context, in the original language in which it
was written, and translated into the rest of the languages used
in each participant context.
This catalogue wil be a visual and theoretical representation
of the working energy flowing from one initiative to the other,
and the debates that they will generate for sure. Other cities
involved in the chain are Jakarta (Indonesia), Bamako (Mali),
Belo Horizonte (Brasil), Durban (Sudáfrica) and Mumbai
(India).
As a starting point we chose dutch artist Germaine Kruip's project
"Point of view", a performance which we consider quite
unique, to initiate the chain we propose, as in the project proposed
by Germaine the context identifies completely with the text. The
perfomance takes place in a park, in which actors directed by
Germaine are mixed with regular passers-by to the park: a woman
walking her dog, a man reading the paper, another man jogging,
etc. The tension provoked in this piece between fiction and reality,
between the idea and its realisation conditioned by the context,
writes the text.
We invited Germaine to make this piece in the 9 de Julio Park
in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán.
The artist from Tucumán who will collaborate with Germaine,
to then travel to another initiative is Jorge Gutiérrez,
who will be working with the group La Baulera.
The philosopher from Salta Jorge Lovisolo will witness the work
and will give a frame to reflect on the results.
"Context" project was born as a proposal from Claudia
Fontes to be presented during Rain’s last meeting in Jakarta,
in June 2002.
Its first stage is about beginning.
The collaboration will take place from July 9th to 23rd.
The Performance Point of View is scheduled for July 21st.
Germaine Kruip will debate with public about the project on July
20th at Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Facultad de Artes,
San Miguel de Tucumán.
Jorge Lovisolo will give a lecture at the same place on July 18th.
Trama,
2002.
