Nevertheless, while travelling throughout the region, parallel questions arise with artists of different countries. A growing number of artists have started to transfer their pictorial research into media which will allow them to develop a more complex language adapted to a greater conscience of context and belonging. Qne can sense the concern with repairing, remaking, restoring. Instead of expressing a nostalgia of times past and depicting ideal scenes of years gone by as many former artists did, and which corresponds to a particular politicaI scheme, the present-day artists are departing from the various experiences of fragmentation and dispersion and re-creating another reality through their personal perception. The accelerated transformation of our cities is a strong element in the work of many artists. There is also a greater liberty in swallowing the other, in appropriating elements from wherever they please and using a mixture of languages. The pre-Columbian civilisations gathered around the object, but the European painting tradition gradually displaced these objects from the fine arts classification. While painting is still a very strong current in most of the area, three-dimensionallanguages are used more and more, incorporating installation work with traditional media like drawing and printmaking. Artists are also interrogating the traditional artistic discourse and values set by most of the schools and gradually acquiring a greater conscience of their own history, past and presento The group selected for the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, as in any curatorial project, is a partial vision ofthe present in Central America and the Caribbean. When we speak of artistic practices, without the regulations or expectations of any particular biennial, it would seem more appropriate to incorporate various disciplines in order to grasp the artistic reality. As I mentioned before, literature is a strong expression in the whole region, filmmaking is important in places like Cuba and Trinidad and has traditionally not only been present in everyday life but has developed an international recognition for years. The gradual inclusion oflocal vernacular elements, the liberty with which the younger artists consciously practice a properly cannibalistic attitude towards Western art history, plus a professional formal training acquired in various parts of the world, have created changes in the artistic panorama. Strengthening our regionallinks, documenting the present, and knowing ourselves better; creating the awareness for the need oflocal support is a major issue if we aspire to participate in an international arena without becoming once more just a derivation of the central system. Qur time and space is different, it is one among many others, and artists are trying to define it, to find the elements of their "appartenance" and to work in this particular time and space, which is at the sarne time local and global. Virginia Pérez-Ratton 1. Glissant, Edouard. Pour une poétique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1996. 2.lbid. 3. "They had somehow alI been to the islands-by that they meant the place where 1was fram-and had fun there. 1 decided not to like them just on that basis; 1 wished once again that 1 carne from a place where no one wanted to go, a place that was filled with slag and unexpectedly erupting volcanoes, or where a visitor turned into a pebble on setting foot there; somehow it made me ashamed to come fram a place where the only thing to be said about it was 'I had fun when 1 was there,' " in Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, New York: Penguin Books, 1991. 4. Virginia Pérez-Ratton, Mesótica II: Centroamérica/re-generación, San Jose: MADC, 1997. 5. Sandra Eleta, "Portobelo," Fotografía de Panamá, ed. CoI. Del SoL, Argentina: La Azotea, 1991. 6. Porfirio García Romano. EI sueno de [a ración produce monstuos, Managua, 1998.
7. Virginia Pérez-Ratton, Prisci!!a Monge: victima/victimizador, catalogue for Medellín Bienal, 1997. 8. Gerardo Mosquera, Martin Lopez, obra y artista,fotobiografía de un destino inconc!uso, Santo Domingo: Casa deI Muerto Editores, 1994. 9. Christopher Cozier. 10. Cited in "Sandra Eleta or the search for a cultural identity," by Maria Cristina Orive. Sandra Eleta, "Portobelo," Fotografía de Panamá, ed. CoI. DeI Sol., Argentina, La Azotea, 1991, p+ 11. Edgar Soberón Torchía, Portobelo, op. cit., P.9. 12. Bonifacio Pereira, EI Chagres. 13. Carlos Garaicoa, Artist Statement, 1997. 14.lbid. ls.lbid. 16. Gerardo Mosquera, Carlos Garaicoa: [as marcas y e! silencio, 1998. 17. Marimar Benítez, Zeitgeist: Charcoa[ dancejloor, San Juan, April 199 8 .
páginas seguintes [following pages] Mario Benjamin Voices of memory Vozes da memória 1997 séries modulares de caixas com imagens retroprojetadas [modular series of foam light boxes with retroprojected images] 110x110x35cm cada [each]
105 Abigail Albert Allora e Calzadilla Carlos Ernest Luis Mario Martín Moisés Priscilla Raul Regina Sandra América Central e Caribe