Bienalsur began with an exhibition that recovers the ancestral in art

The colors of the earth. Their sounds. Their languages. From this land which seems hidden in the cartography, in the stories, but resists and seeks to be heard. Art not as a commodity, but as life, as a true representation of a primitive, ancestral, indigenous feeling.

With a powerful exhibition that looks towards the north of Argentina, the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of Salta has started the third edition of Bienalsur, with the inauguration of the exhibition Listening and the winds: stories and inscriptions from the Gran Chaco.

Thus begins a new cycle of Southern Contemporary Art Biennale, which will be centered on 5 axes (Ecological awareness, Fluid constellations, Ways of living, Digital worlds Yes Artistic policy) and which will extend, until December, through 23 countries and the Vatican, 50 cities, 124 places, and in which around 400 artists will participate.

As at the start of the previous version in Ushuaia, in 2019 indigenous peoples are the starting point again, with an exhibition that brings together the works of 40 artisans, indigenous peoples activists, artists and filmmakers, spread across four rooms on the ground floor of the space which, tomorrow, Argentina’s Independence Day, will celebrate its 91 years.

“We want to change the map of the art world, the paradigms, we believe that there are cultural and artistic expressions that have always been left out. This is why in Switzerland, at the Opal Foundation, we are working on contemporary art with indigenous peoples, which we will repeat in this edition; or in Amaicha del Valle, with the Quilmes Calchaquíes peoples, who worked on a new type of ceramics with professors from the Tokyo University of Art, with whom they made the walkers, a symbol that represents when the Quilmes were forced to walk from the north of Tucumán to Buenos Aires ”, he explained. Hannibal jozami, general manager of the mega event at Culture Info.

And he added: “The characteristic of Bienalsur is that he can do a sample of a super sophisticated and internationally renowned artist in one of the great museums in the world, but we can also be in Amicha or in the neighborhood. more vulnerable in Lima to make crafts and then that these works be exhibited at the Superior School of Fine Arts and that the European delegations go and see them, as happened ”.

For its part, Diana wechsler, artistic director, added: “It seems very powerful to us to invade the space of fine arts, which tries to have a conventional working repertoire to train artists. This was the logic with which the museum was founded, and with this logic it left aside everything that was regional and ancestral visual culture, something that was and still is alive ”.

Regarding the challenges of building a thread of samples across the world in a time of border closures, he commented to this medium: “It is networking, with intrigues, which depends on a lot of imagination, on complicity and alliances. This scenario shows us certain levels of solidarity that make us feel that the effort is worth it. There is something very typical of Bienalsur, who worked to produce works in situ, in general, site-specific installations. We called on artists to travel and in reality today this is becoming the modality, beyond the fact that artists can or cannot travel, which sometimes has to direct the work from a distance, we work a lot there- above and very little on the transfer of work, in all of this it is very complex, very expensive. It is as if the art scene, or at least in the part that we are helping to build, has been more concerned with symbolic production than with everything that surrounds it. And there I enter what we always say, “to make the space of art, a space of thought”. It’s interesting that he activates social scenes, that he activates heads, that whatever happens, that situations arise ”.

Listening and the winds, organized by Argentina Andrea Fernandez and german Inka Gressel, presents artisanal textiles, ceramics, soundscapes, writings and audiovisual essays, which invite us to reflect on aesthetic productions with messages linked to struggles for memory and territories, their stories and inscriptions.

The exhibition was selected in the international Open Call held in 2020, seeking to provide access to artists and projects of various origins to, in turn, engage other audiences, including those who do not generally feel concerned by this type of event.

In the space that opens the exhibition, the work of the deceased is presented Carlos pajita Garcia Bes, who in the twentieth century investigated the indigenous ancestral knowledge of northwest Argentina, focusing on listening to tales of legends and original rituals and who, on this basis, carried out a zoomorphic recovery in traditional fabrics, which are part of the aservo de la Salta museum.

In room 2, the cooperative work of Chaistulus (Juan de Dios López), a wichí from a peri-urban community of Tartagal, with Daniel Zelko, artist from Buenos Aires around orality, which alerts on political emergency situations, occurring in different contexts.

On the other hand, in the 3, they are placed to dialogue with two propositions. On the one hand, the large artisanal textiles made by women of the Wichí people of the collective Thani / Comes from the mountain, created collectively from dialogues with the artist from Salta, Guido Yannitto, accompanied by an audiovisual by the anthropologist and visual essayist Carlos Masotta. Work with the group craftsmen It was created in the Environment cycle of the project Untie to tie of the Ifa-Galerie in Berlin and with the support of the German Institute for Foreign Relations.

Here too, an installation by the filmmaker from Salta Daniela Seggiaro seeks to make us think about the translation and forms of the language of the Wichí people and, in turn, their connection to the contemporary fabrics that people wear in yicas (woven bags).

In the fourth space, the works of the collective of women potters of the Chané Orembiapo people are presented. Maepora / Our work is beautiful, which reveal the animals with which they live, as well as those which they remember, since they disappeared next to the overgrown mountain and those which seem to reappear from folk imaginaries, in collaboration with the artist and the teacher Florence califano.

In the midst of this lost fauna, the documentary essay emerges Territory, by the director of San Juan Brayan sticks, which is linked to an investigation by the Ethnic Memory Workshop of the women’s organization ARETEDE of Tartagal on the leader of the Toba / Qom people Taikolic, leader of the last resistance to the occupation of the area of ​​the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers, in which the anthropologist also participates Leda office.

“The importance of this first exhibition, which unites poetic gestures of resistance, collective creativity and future projections, supports one of the fundamental objectives of the new platform for contemporary art and culture that Bienalsur is to bring down walls to cross not only geographical borders but, in particular, social and cultural distances repeating the convergence in the community ”, expressed the organizers.

Events to come

Bienalsur continues this month, as other exhibitions are inaugurated, such as TOGETHER – SEPARATED, July 15 at the National Museum of Colombia, curated by Alex brahim. TUR tea ceremony, by the artist and curator Katsuhiko Hibino on 25 at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan.

July 27 will be the launch in Spain and Brazil. In the European country, South of south, in La Térmica, Málaga, organized by Wechsler and works of Chilean Voluspa Jarpa, the Argentines Graciela Sacco, Agustina Woodgate and Uruguayan Paola Monzillo. For its part, in the American country, the Oscar Niemeyer museum in Curitiba, will house the artist Geraldo Zamproni, with Vital threads, an intervention on the facade of the building.

The cycle of inaugurations will continue until December, traveling across five continents, a unique feature of Bienalsur, an active project that has changed the north-south concept by tracing a cartography without borders with the aim of going beyond the limits of artistic events.

The Vatican Museums are among the venues of the third edition as well as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain, National Museum (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), National Art Museum (La Paz, Bolivia), Museum of Modern Art, Mambo (Bogotá, Colombia), National Museum of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires, Argentina), José Antonio Terry Regional Museum of Painting (Tilcara, Jujuy, Argentina), Museum of Contemporary Art of the Province of Buenos Aires ( Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, ARG), among others.

Artists like Korean Kimsooja, the Japaneses Nelo Akamatsu Yes Hibino, French Christian Boltanski, Austrian Gernot Wieland, the German resident in the United Kingdom Mariele Neudecker, the Chilean Voluspa Jarpa, the Argentines Tomás Saraceno, Jorge Macchi, Matilde Marín, Mariana Tellería Yes Agustina woodgate and Uruguayan Paola Monzillo are some of the participants in Bienalsur which also incorporates the work of deceased artists such as Argentina Graciela Sacco and Cuban Belkis Ayon. In addition to traditional headquarters activities, special projects are included such as virtual headquarters, audiovisual headquarters, green node, digital open-air museum and public programs.

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