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ARS+ NATURA interview by Caridad Botella LORENZO
What are the ethics from the art world.? Curator Jose Roca, founder of FLORA ars+natura, explains what are “dirty� relations between art and nature from a new art center in Colombia. Among the many tendencies, we have been able to spot in contemporary art during the past decade, there is one that has been growing stronger, especially through the creation of specific institutions, dedicated to supporting the everlasting and yet renovated relationship between art and nature. Far, far away and
long gone are the times, when ethics in art conveyed through aesthetic categories. Today, almost halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, many artists are aware of how utterly important it is to look into a - not always very respected - nature. Curator Jose Roca and his wife, Adriana Hurtado, have founded FLORA art+natura, an art center in Bogota, Colombia (and the town of Honda, where residencies take place at Casa Deuxsoleils) for art, artists and education, dedicated to exploring the relationship between art and nature. This is carried out by having artists and
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INTERVIEW
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‘regarding the environment, food and energy supplies, it has become clear that the ways we relate to our natural environment are a pressing issue’
curators in residence to develop projects which are then exhibited at the headquarters in Bogota. Under this model, Roca acts both as an independent and an institutional curator, leaving his own mark and endowing the project with enough continuity to become a meaningful contribution to this specific topic. How and why did the idea of creating FLORA emerge? ‘FLORA comes from the idea of creating an institutional and independent space (institutional in the sense of continuity, which promotes a long term relation with an audience and a community) without the red tape that often institutions have. My personal motivations are in the letter that I wrote to the artistic medium while we were still designing the project and remodeling the home office. See: www.arteflora.org/ en/2012/10/open-letter-to-the-artistic-community’. What is FLORA’s mission? We want to establish ourselves in the medium term as a meeting place for the local arts community. This is the reason why we have put an emphasis on the library, studios and residencies, rather than on the pure exhibition of the results. What are your plans for FLORA in the short and long term? We will have several artists in residence; artists who won the open calls last year or who contact us to develop a project, such as Max Gomez Canle of Argentina , William Engelen (Germany), Lucia
Koch (Brazil), Raura Oblitas (Peru), Matías Duville (Argentina), Victor Gama, a musician from Angola and others that are currently being selected. We will, by the end of the year, a show by Maria Fernanda Cardoso, a Colombian artist, currently living in Australia. Besides this, there will be workshops, exhibitions of artists in residence and a curated show by the curator in residence. Why do you think it is important to investigate the relationship between art and nature today? We believe that due to the crisis regarding the environment, food and energy supplies, it has become clear that the ways we relate to our natural environment are a pressing issue; artists have addressed this issue in a recurrent fashion. Does FLORA respond to an existing trend among artists or does it attempt to create school, regarding the possibilities and the responsibility of art towards to nature? I think we respond to what we see, we do not have a preset political/ecological agenda. We are mostly interested on the ‘dirty’ relations regarding the subject matter, rather than presenting sustainability projects or those related to e.g. ‘tree huggers’,- in a figurative sense. Responding to today’s realities with an open mind, FLORA has taken a clear position within the art world. A new institution absolutely worth following in times of image cacophony and superficial nonsense.
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