But,
if other biennials have dealt with the subject of the city, its
architecture, its urban-environmental dimension, its role as a background
for art actions, as a setting, or as a site evoked in representations,
in Havana it becomes a topography to be traveled, detec-ting nodes,
penetrating crevices and discovering dynamics of interaction transcending
the privileged re-ferent of the artistic object without excluding
it. Those horizons aim at emphasizing mobility and the element of
the public in art in its everyday interactions. It is not about
an affected urban typicality, found and sublimated by art. Neither
is it the energy emanating from the nexus art-city-life praxis.
It isn’t even the pretense to find an ideal – albeit
in perennial movement – model of the city. It is above all
about an exploration in terms of contributions to and of confrontation
with the lived cultural space. Dynamics of Urban Cultures as the
central subject of this Havana Biennial 2006, showed expressions
of life and culture related to urban contexts, their processes of
confluence, hybri-dization, multiculturalism and transformation,
and it was accompanied as every year by a theoretical forum, the
Idea 2006 Forum, which took place March, 30th , 31th and April 1st
2006 at the theater of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana,
with morning and afternoon sessions. With the participation of a
prestigious group of thinkers, artists, curators and experts of
the world of contemporary art, and their interventions were published
in the volume Forum Idea 2006, 9na Bienal de la Habana.
If
the Biennial, its body of exhibitions and workshops, focused on
the aspect and construction of the visual in its urban dynamics,
Forum Idea 2006 inserted itself into the historical, sociological,
critical and productive mechanisms, as well as the new ideological
models generated by them – a number of interconnected subjects
pertaining to the relationship between today’s art with phenomenon
such as cultural anthropology, the construction and de-construction
of the urbanism and the environmen, its relationship with the institution
of artistic culture, the new technologies and the new media, etcetera.
If
on one side, the (post-colonial and postmodern) cities have left
their original processes of configuration exposed linked to historical
processes of internalization of culture and to internal demographic
flows as well as their conflicts, contradictions, derangements and
unsolved utopias within a conventional urban and architectonic structure
with little possibility of change, new needs and emergencies; on
the other, art has been increasingly preoccupying itself for them,
as if reclai-ming not only a necessary gaze, but emphasizing its
links of belonging. A city (or cities) in historical and political
decline; other, reinvented cities of the future conformed from within
experience.
With
reference to the city, the Ecuadorian Rodolfo Kronfle, in his analysis
of the art of Guayaquil commented processes of urban regeneration
in the face of which art assumed various critical perspectives,
outstanding his critical focus on a deficient infrastructure incapable
of offering any answers to the questioning propositions of art,
as well as its paradoxical isolation from a social mesh inserted
in the spatial participation of the city. Carlos Ossa, in his vision
of Santiago de Chile questioned both modernization as a process
of extermination of memory or elimination of barbary, characteristic
as well as the dictatorial processes of the democratic administrations
in Chile. Also with reference to the Latin American space, Joaquín
Barriendos makes reference to the existence of a new public, post-citizen
space emerging from extreme conditions, limit sceneries of habitability
and political emergence. Barrendos exposition used the installation
Paracaidista. Av. Revolución No. 1608 bis, as a referent
to the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora (also invited to the
Biennial) in his parody of the parasitic processes of construction
of the poorest urban imaginary of Mexico City, whose parasitic spirit
becomes even more extreme by its incorporation to the service structures
of the city’s own Carrillo Gil Museum. The criticism of the
institutions becomes thus twice as incisive. At the same time, the
situation in Dominica was presented by Amparo Chantada through the
reaction of Dominican intellectuals towards an urban project for
an artificial island in front of the city’s embankment destined
to cruiser tourism, which affected the socio-ecological sustainability
of the city and turning the local population into victims of a privatizing
and exclusionary real-state project. The project of the artificial
island Novo Mundo XXI was aborted thanks to the efforts and legal
struggles sustained by a civic movement composed of activist city
dwellers, intellectuals and artists.
The
city as a space of representation was selected by Teresa de Arruda
who talked about a group of artists from Brasilia, a city that,
however well-planned and meticulously built, has to breach its own
norms under the influence of human needs, and where art has reflected
the organic quality of those streams. She puts forward a similar
point of view when, in reference to Havana, she says that the city
gives a first impression of staying still in time, when the city
and its inhabi-tants in the last years actually have developed an
unmatched agility in their way of life and their solutions to their
problems. Or, when she talks about a city such as Berlin, in which
art’s behavioral codes, although stemming from the dynamics
of everyday life, develop in a random fashion without detailed foreseeing.
The author’s hypothesis seems to be grounded on the idea that
cities, once projected, acquire a life of their own, derived from
their own internal movements; hence that beyond the analogies of
a simultaneous and globalized existence, it is their fluxes, emanations
and contingencies what qualify and differen-tiate contemporary orbs,
and that is why studies of this kind owe more to a registry of their
becoming than of that of their original condition. Likewise, the
Uruguayan artist guest of the Biennial, Jacqueline Lacasa, offered
her work-conference-performance Para una ciudad sin nombre where
she, after a de-construction of the contemporary city, offered the
perspectives, horizons and dreams of various social sectors in their
transformation. Hard facts, surveys and graphics were the representational
instruments of this new and – why not? - future city.
In
the same direction, although more oriented towards global problems
than those of representation, works such as those by Raúl
Frerrera Balanquet (Cuba-Mexico), and Mary Jane Carrol (Canada)
were presented which penetrated into the charting of habitational
flows. For Raúl Ferrera, it had to do with the analysis of
the new kinds of physical and virtual movements, and the spatial
transformations of orbs such as Mérida and Los Angeles, and
of showing the trans-local connexions between those two cities.
Besides common colonial origins, trans-migratory metropolis such
as Mérida-MX and Los Angeles-Aztlán have developed
psychosocial and functional resources that make them once again
to subsist as reciprocal mirages of each other. Mary Jane Carrol’s
lecture considered the processes of migration and population density
between the cities of the first world and those in the periphery,
and the way in which they interfere and diversify the sphere of
the artistic. In her analysis, the author compared the origins of
certain migratory states in function of their economies and the
symbolic exchange with later levels of development of those local
productions ( in the case of Cuba and Argentina ) putting the ambiguity
of an exchange in the spotlight situation that, if giving positive
results in terms of cultural survival, or of that international
exchange between the cultures, places in a disadvantageous position
certain practices which – still today – appear as debtors
to the developed First World. When and how could we see a history
of art appear from this other side? When and how would the art of
developing countries be acknowledged as a pioneering place in the
development of some aesthetic tendencies promoted by the West? Those
were some of the questions raised by the author.
The
dissertation of the French curator Nicolás Bourriaud showed,
however, a possible answer to the question of migrations and displacements
by posi-ting that “the time has come to re-compose the mo-dern
in the present, of re-configuring it in the specific context we
live in, without by it experimenting a feeling of going backwards.”
In that direction, he introduced the idea of the radiant artist
– an artist who traverses a new modernity which means, passion
for the present, risk-taking to seize the occasion, relativism of
concepts, and fluidity of action. The modern parting from globalization
and its economic, political and cultural aspects says the author,
allows us to acknowledge that, the more contemporary art integrates
the heterogeneous plastic vocabularies from various non-western
visual traditions, the more visible result the distinctive traits
of a globalized culture.
Likewise,
other three dissertations were made at the Forum on symbolic productions
associated with the subject by the U.K. based Argentinean Gabriela
Salgado, the Cuban Magali Espinoza and the Spa-niard Santiago Olmo.
The first one was focused on the results of today’s artistic
practices and their relationship with contemporary migrations that
produce elements of convergence, divergence or friction between
cultures, and the socio-cultural circuits where they are produced,
and the “non-original” condition of the “radicant”
artist (to use Bourriaud’s term). In the case of the Mad for
Real duo composed since the 80’s U.K. resident Chinese Artists
Cai Yuan and JJ Xi. The author tells us that “the strategies
of insertion of the content into the public sphere of such a paradoxically
conservative society as the U.K., with its irreverently humoristic
content and its dry criticism of all systems, provides expectations
that critical thinking will continue to tend bridges for the communication
between cultures”. For Magali Espinoza, who analyzes a group
of young contemporary Cuban artists, we are facing a dynamic that
problematizes the interstices of the relationships between the global
and the local as a dialog between totality and fragmentation which,
with the predominance of the electronic communication media, migratory
movements and the existence of new social forces without a defined
geographical location, a new social mesh emerges full of hybrid
cosmo-visions and varied articulations. The project shown by the
artist and critic Santiago Olmo about photographic workshops carried
out in several African cities dealing, among others, with the issue
of globalization, and particularly with the differences in the access
to technologies at the root of many inequalities and communicational
and expressive handicaps. This dissertation did also call the attention
upon the physiognomies of the urban spaces as profiles from which
the symbolic imaginaries of each region are constructed.
The
recuperation of the ritual and performatic cha-racter the quotidian,
are analyzed and re-formulated by Gui Sioui Durand and Richard Martell,
when they put forward a “relational”, “situationist”
and “contextual” art, be it in the analysis of its historical
aspects, or in the particular situation of artistic projects in
Quebec. Both authors propose a de-mystifying view of the artistic
world, closer to the urban liturgy, more occupied with its own inner
movements than with an effort in order to be regarded as museum-
or official works. Art still wants to continue being a self-ma-naged
space and at the same time to pay tribute to its sources, talking
not only in terms of languages, but also amidst social praxis. This
perspective is crossed with a differential and comparative study
of the communitarian art of the past and the present collaboration
art in the voice of the Panamanian artist Humberto Vélez
– also living in the U.K. - and with the philosophical and
sociological links that the study of subaltern identities makes
of art and politics a common territory, as it was formulated in
the dissertation of the Brazilian Vera Palamín. Or with originally
marginal – or margined – expressions such as graffiti,
underground music, tattoo art, and the social dynamic of groups
such as juvenile gangs, also dealt with in the dissertations of
Celia Maria Antonacci (Brazil) and Zuleiva Vivas (Venezuela).
In
this same sense of urban aesthetic radicalism, we sense a militant
stream in a network of actions engaged in a renewal of the very
Institution of Art, be it from its questioning, subversion and transformation,
from its use in its traditional model and conception, or from the
new Information Technologies, the new networks for production and
consumption, or the new perspectives of social insertion. There
were various examples of this new orientation. Zuleiva Vivas herself
presented the project Como en la Tele which, organized by two Venezuelan
artists, was shown at the Caracas Museum of Fine Arts – a
form of transgression of the limits imposed by the traditional art
circuits, particularly museums. It is an attempt to act amidst the
reorganization of global society and the symbolic markets, inserting
varying and non-traditional forms of articulation of the aesthetic
and the artistic. The Argentinean artist Fernando Farina, director
of the Primera Semana de Arte de Rosario,points in the same direction
at a space for confronting the widest audiences in the most unusual
places, since the show is about the city museum’s own art
collection. Likewise, Jorge Albán from Costa Rica and Lucrecia
Cippitelli from Italy, talked about projects of technological character,
the one dealing with video- and electronic games, and the other
audiovisual media, also known as live media and v-jing, a sort of
synesthetics produced between performance, public, ambient and machine,
a practice of combinations and symbiosis that creates a meta-narrative
of the contemporary world and involves the city, the pop culture,
the new media and the visual culture. These projects triggered debates
about the functionalities of the practices offered by those media,
and their real possibilities to become proposals of an aesthetic
dimension. Sussan Lord and Jeanine Marchesault talked about a kind
of “cultural flux” in which artistic collectives function
as global civic practices in order to generate projects, exchange
resources and create a universal mobility.
This
level of connectivity uses as its base a technological information
network through which it is intended to reactivate the meaning of
certain collective utopias that appropriate the cities and make
them transcend beyond their limits.
Last
but not least, it is important to mention the master dissertations
of Hervé Fischer and José Luis Brea. Fischer’s
excellent text analyzes, on the one hand, the big cities as super-centers
generating electronic media for communication and information transmission;
and on the other hand, the web as a virtual urban metaphor, as well
as the advantages and disadvantages of the processes and dynamics
determining those two similar mega-developments. José Luis
Brea on his part introduces us to an advanced phase of the cultural
exchange – the present – having as a base the e-image,
tending not to stay identical to itself and generating, not only
an electronic imaginary, but also new ideas about the economy, distribution
and exchange of knowledge, as well as the image’s social and
communitarian sense.
