HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Fran Ilich, organizer

Fran Ilich

Fran Ilich, organizer

Eduardo Arcos  (Ecuador)
lives and works in Mexico City
Teresa Arozena
lives and works in Tenerife, Canary Islands
Teresa Delgado
lives and works in Germany
Tony DuShane
lives and works in San Francisco, California
Cindy Gabriela Flores
lives and works in Mexico City
Jeroen Gouluze  (Netherlands)
lives and works in Groningen, Netherlands
Pedro Jiménez
lives and works in Sevilla, Spain
Germán Maggiori
lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina
osfavelados
lives and works in Seville, Spain
Pacho
lives and works in Mexico City
DJ Pod
lives and works in San Francisco, California
Luis Humberto Rosales
lives and works in Tijuana, Mexico
Tatiana Wells  (Brazil)
lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

http://bigbother.walkerart.org

Big [b]Other is a text-based reality show and community blog in Spanish and English organized by media activist Fran Ilich with 12 other participants. It runs from February 1 to March 1, 2003.

Fran Ilich
http://delete.tv
Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Ilich is a filmmaker, novelist, screenwriter, new media artist, border activist, and organizer. Ilich serves as the general director of Cinemátik, the 1st cyber-culture festival in Latin America, as well as the editor at large of Sputnik Digital Culture, an online daily news service and monthly print magazine. He also moderates nettime-latino; edits the Mexico City edition of Rhizome; and is the author of the best selling novel metro-pop. His screenplay of Interacción was broadcast on the Discovery Channel in Spanish and Portuguese and took 2nd place at the 1st International Awards of Hispanamerican screenplay by the New York Film Academy & USA Network in 1997. His film Una Ciudad Sin Estilo was screened at the next 5minutes III International Conference in Amsterdam in 1999 and is now part of the database of the Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Ilich's current project Modem Drama is a digital film collaboration with Ciberfeminista.org, a group of young Mexican feminists working with the Internet. His latest film will be shown at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Eduardo Arcos is an Ecuadorian living in in Mexico City. He is the media director of Noiselab, and one of the best known webloggers writing in spanish.
http://alt1040.com

Teresa Arozena lives in Tenerife on the Canary Islands. She works mainly with electronic culture issues and photography.

Tony DuShane lives in San Francisco where he is a writer, radio show host, film festival director and jumps around at local punk bars.
http://cherrybleeds.com

Cindy Gabriela Flores is a is a cyberfeminist living in Mexico City. She currently works at an NGO dealing with youth sexuality issues.
http://ciberfeminista.org

Jeroen Goulooze lives in Groninger, in the Netherlands. He used to be a squatter many years ago, and now works on new narrative schemes for interactive scenarios, and is about to release the design for a program.

Pedro Jiménez is the director of the audiovisual festival Zemos98. He studies audiovosual communication, in Sevilla, Spain.
http://www.zemos98.org

Germán Maggiori lives in Buenos Aires. He is both a dentist and a university teacher, he won an important award sponsored by Editorial Alfaguara with his novel Entre Hombres.

Osfavelados, aka Jose Perez de Lama lives in Seville, Spain. He is a teacher and architect specializing in hackitecture and zapatismo.
http://home.earthlink.net/~osfavela2002

Pacho lives in Mexico City. He is the drummer of la Maldita Vecindad, one of the best know rock bands in México since the early 90s. He is also a columnist of alternative culture for the Reforma newspaper.

DJ Pod lives in San Francisco where he works re-assembling world music into a tactical media / culture jamming form he calls "Pan Optic Radio."
http://cellspace.org

Luis Humberto Rosales (aka cybercholito) lives in Tijuana, where he works as a medical doctor. He was the founder of Indymedia Tijuana and is part of the Borderhack collective.
http://delete.tv/floppy

Tatiana Wells is from Rio de Janeiro. She works and plays on the Web. She is organizing a Tactical Media Lab in Brazil.
http://www.lionlounge.com

Cabelo

launch interview with Cabelo

Cabelo is a cultural seismographer, creating public performances and sculptural environments that chart the fault lines and energy flows of the physical, psychic, and geographic spaces of his life in Brazil. After studying, and abandoning, engineering and then vermiculture (earthworm farming), Cabelo undertook the study of poetry and performance at the Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. It is the merging of these two very different backgrounds--the scientific and the aesthetic--that gives Cabelo's work its particular power.

Poetry is central to Cabelo's work and he speaks about his performances and environments as manifestations of the poetic in the physical world. By referring to himself as a cabello, or horse, he invokes the use of this word to describe a medium that embodies a spirit in certain Afro-Brazilian rituals. In this sense the artist suggests that he is himself a "horse of the world" or "poetry's vehicle." Like the earthworms he previously raised, which process waste into nurturing fertilizer by consuming it, Cabelo thinks of the artist as a conduit through which poetry can enter the world and in so doing transform it.

For Cabelo, the human body is very much like a radio receiver--bombarded with invisible lines connecting it to the invisible transmissions of energy sources emanating from the world around us. As the artist has stated, "I'm possessed by entities, energies, acting jointly or separately. Like one or two soccer teams. The combination of forces guides the body." His performances seek to channel these transmissions into the visible world by con-cretizing them into both plastic and poetic forms. In his performance Cefalópode/Heptópode (1996), for example, the artist and his cohorts transformed themselves into human worms, crawling through the streets of Rio de Janeiro at dusk with their legs and heads bound in black plastic. At the conclusion of this intervention, they crawled into an abandoned cinema where an ambient rock band theatrically performed a rap song with lyrics appropriated by the artist from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Les Fleurs du mal." Works such as this can be read in a number of different ways: as a critique of urban homelessness or an alchemical invocation of the poetic.

Cabelo has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at venues such as Galeria Paulo Fernandes, Rio de Janeiro (2002), and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (1999). His work has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including Violência e Paixão at Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo (2002); Côte à Côte: Art Contemporain du Brésil at CAPC Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997).

--Douglas Fogle

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

ask if this language is the "language to be transformed" that Hall describes. The key idea of Szeemann's exhibition was without a doubt liberation. Indeed, the exhibition and the artists designed forms that in a nondidactic, nonillustrative way were echoing the liberation movements that emerged across the world at the end of the 1960s. The methods and the results were in many ways exceptional, though one may regret that the protagonists were exclusively European or American.[21]

The current exhibition acknowledges the importance of this predecessor, but at the same time points out that the model it represented is not an exclusive one. If our history is one of "permanent changes," looking back at a tradition started in 1969 allows us to free ourselves from it and to project ourselves in a different direction. This idea parallels the definition that Paulo Herkenhoff provides for the relationship between Brazilian culture and modernity: "Modernism in Brazil reconstitutes the past as a possibility of projecting itself in the future ... Brazilian culture reformulated rather than refused the relationship with tradition and past."[22]

Are we, today, facing comparable shifts in terms of politics, history, and aesthetics? Do those shifts define what could be called the global age? Our research for How Latitudes Become Forms took us once again to Brazil, and to a text by Hélio Oiticica, who was not in the Szeemann exhibition but might be seen as a point of departure for many of the practices we have encountered in our travels.[23] In 1966, in an essay in which he articulated what seems to be the nucleus of his activities, Oiticica wrote:

I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience.[24] This short excerpt contains within it many of the elements that are feeding our reflection today: the notion of proximity and locality; the idea of in-betweenness symbolized by wasteland; the outline of an aesthetic of the slightest gesture; the performativity of audiences and artists across disciplines, which is a possible lead toward multidisciplinarity; the critique of museum authority; the increasing importance of the everyday; and the subversive potential of art. These different concepts might serve as the constitutive elements of a specific aesthetic of "thirdness." The term "third" here does not designate an aesthetic geographically located in the so-called Third World. Rather, its meaning derives from the Third Cinema, a body of film theory that explore show cultural practices driven by political and cultural emancipation can equally commit to aesthetic strategies.[25] Because the aesthetic of Third Cinema does not limit itself to a geographical meaning, it can be extended across disciplines and applied to other disciplines, such as performing arts and visual arts.

The works of Japanese artist Tabaimo--anime films that are bittersweet and seductive, yet repulsive--belong to such an aesthetic (pp. 241-243). Colorful, naive, clumsy, and fragile at first sight, these narrative and poetic playlets achieve a sharp deconstruction of Japanese social systems. Her critique relies on a manipulation of Japanese stereotypes (images of the "salary man," the "Japanese woman," public baths, sumo fighters, and commuter trains) using the form of yet another Japanese stereotype: the underground anime aesthetic. The critique that results from the problematization of these stereotypes focuses on nationalism and its relationship to economic achievement or failure, reflecting a period of deep crisis of values (work, patriarchy) that alters the hierarchical construct of Japanese society. As a result, gender politics (in Japan as elsewhere) come under the gun in Tabaimo's work, though it may appear cute and girlish on a superficial viewing. The complexity of her work is that it reconciles the terms of political struggle with an attention to form and to aesthetic strategies.

21 One exception was Philippine artist David Medalla.

22 Paulo Herkenhoff, introduction to Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos, exh. cat. (São Paulo: XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), p. 42.

23 "We" includes the Walker Art Center curators who joined me in organizing this exhibition: Douglas Fogle, for Brazil and India, and Olukemi Ilesanmi for South Africa.

24 Hélio Oiticica, "Position and Program," in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), pp. 103-104.

25 See Michael Wayne, "The Critical Practice and Dialectics of Third Cinema," Third Text, no. 52 (summer 2000). In this article Wayne uses Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers as a primary case study for his reflections on the aesthetics of the Third Cinema.

Anita Dube

launch interview with Anita Dube

Initially trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube creates works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomeno-logical experience. Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the realms of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), the body (dentures, bone), and the readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a very human concern with both personal and societal loss and regeneration. Dube came to her sculptural practice through her involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of young artists formed in the 1980s in Baroda whose self-styled critical social and political consciousness contrasted with the more established, self-conscious narrative painting of the so-called Baroda School.

In 1997, Dube began working with a new material, the industrially manufactured ceramic eyes that are affixed to Hindu religious statues commonly found in Indian temples. She initially used these variably sized eyes in site-specific ways, attaching them to the spot in a room where the ceiling meets two walls to form a corner, as in Intimations of Mortality (1997). In works such as Disease (River) (1999), the ceramic eyes began to move, branching out across the wall like a virus or a flooding river. Although her work evokes a number of meanings, one can think about these wall pieces in terms of the various modes of human migration in the contemporary world. As Dube suggests, "The eyes are like people for me and this could speak of large migrations in history." In this light, the eyes take on less of a horror-film quality and instead stand in metonymically for the mass of humanity that has been forced to relocate due to political persecution, economic deprivation, or the relentless effects of global development that push people from the countryside into the city. This use of the sculptural fragment to subtly invoke a humanist critical agenda speaks to her uncompromising desire to tangentially address the social through metaphorical means.

Dube's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Nature Morte in New Delhi (2000), and Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, India (1999). Her work has appeared in a number of group exhibitions, including Alchemy at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, England (2002); ARS 01 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2001); the Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2001); and the VII Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2000-2001).

--Douglas Fogle

Fran Ilich, organizer

Cabelo is a cultural seismographer, creating public performances and sculptural environments that chart the fault lines and energy flows of the physical, psychic, and geographic spaces of his life in Brazil.

"I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience."

Anita Dube creates works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomeno-logical experience.