SV4 English

SV4

“Nine years of living allows to change our of view, enhance and zoom out, discovering how this chain of actions has been like an avalanche that slowly has gain mass, or as the building of a road in the jungle, where progress is slowly made, but where every inch made despite the in-hospitality of the place, is worth gold”.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Master on fine arts, Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts of Cracow, Poland) Can we speak of a “contemporary arts scene” in the regional context? “Contemporary arts scene” or simply a “scene”, to contextualize: a circuit where diverse artists engage on a critic and experimental work that circulates through galleries, cultural institutions, publications, web sites and mass media: a web where also art critics, curators, collectors, and the public also participate. An ideal picture that, not being fulfilled in Santiago, is on the rest of the country, nonexistent.

Nevertheless, during the last years, certain artist’s movements are changing the landscape, acting from contemporary arts practices where was unthinkable to find them -such as- performance, installations and public space interventions. This are cities -like Talca, Concepción, Temuco and Valdivia- that are centers for economic and cultural development, where authors, groups and art works are making themselves known through the Internet, some exposition spaces and in mass media, even calling for a certain level of introspection.

From Antofagasta, SE VENDE Collective Contemporary Arts Platform, that surfaced in 2004, has have a key roll and today -thanks to the diverse interconnected actionsmanages to outline an active and on expansion scene.

More than merely a group of artists, the initiative is an instance for collective work where authors such as Loreto Bolados, Luis Núñez, Manuel Ossandón, Jorge Wittwer, Paula Quintela, Julio Morales and Claudio Galeno have participated, always with the coordination of Dagmara Wyskiel and Christian Núñez. The couple met exactly ten years ago, when the polish artist had recently arrived and was dictating a contemporary arts workshop in La Casa de la Cultura de Antofagasta. Núñez was the administrator. When the workshop finished, they had already clear that they wanted to do something, to begin presenting contemporary art in the city, and that it needed to be done autonomously. Christian left working for the state and began working as cultural producer, creating the collective.

In the project Avenidas (2007) and mainly all throughout the first three version of SE VENDE (2004, 2006, 2009), the group provoked the confrontation of the public and “traditional” artists with the perplexity of objective, conceptual, experimental or ephemeral practices. These where collective interventions, located on emblematic buildings, architectonic patrimony or in the city streets. All along the inseparable art forums where crucial art matters for the city where discussed. Between 2004 and 2009 also participated special guest, authors and academics from Santiago and Valparaiso, like Pedro Celedón, Gaspar Galaz, Carlos Montes de Oca, Alberto Madrid and Fernando Balcells, even the Chilean artist living in Sweden, Juan Castillo.

On parallel to the actions thought for Antofagasta, SE VENDE realized activities on other cities of the country or at an international level, installing itself from the beginnings the three programmatic coordinates of the collective: Territory work, contemporary arts formation and linking with agents inside and outside of the region.

With two expositions en 2005 and 2007, Otro País congregated local artists in the Extension Center of the Catholic University of Chile, in Santiago, and in the Contemporary Arts Museum of Valdivia. The project was a building platform for networks and experimentation outside of the regional margins, with a free interpretation of the “another country” concept, aiming that the northern part of the country turns out to be another country to Santiago as it is to the rest of the national territory.

After these experiences, the collective achieved to get together a format of linking and associativity that gave it notoriety. In 2009, Dagmara Wyskiel and Christian Núñez participated as field editor and producer for the Triennial of Chile, event with which the country started the commemoration of the Bicentenary and that had as general curator the Paraguayan Ticio Escobar. One of the objectives of the encounter was precisely to empower and give dynamism to regional scenes. Thanks to the collective, Antofagasta was the only zone that profited from the opportunity, transcending the effect of their actions.

To the time, the exposition Otro eje Norte-Norte was the result of a clinic realized by the Argentinian curator Marcos Figueroa, being considered by the collective as a third version of Otro País. Just because the triennial’s board asked it, it wasn’t called the same way. The exhibit got together in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta and in the Culture Council of Antofagasta independent artists from northern Argentina and Chile, and three collectives: LA PUNTA (Tucumán), LA GUARDA (Salta) and SE VENDE (Antofagasta). From there La RED was born, that links them and continues with projects that cross frontiers.

During nine years of work, SE VENDE adds a list of activities: expositions, conferences, workshops, residences and publications, transverse and multidisciplinary activities, national and international collaborations, new members (like Pamela Canales, Francisco Vergara and Izak Mora), and continuous traveling. The actions have placed themselves in such different contexts like Santiago, Concepción, Coliumo, Chiloé, and cities of Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, USA and Poland; and if we add the participation on collective expositions, there are also Beijing (China), Jakarta (Indonesia) and Krasnoyarsk (Russia).

Carolina Lara Journalist, licensed in esthetics Master on Theory and History of Art

SV4 SE VENDE 4 /fourth stage of the SE VENDE collective Contemporary Art Platform/ record of actions

OCTOBER 2011 - MARCH 2013

Editorial Team

English Translation

Carolina Lara Dagmara Wyskiel

Sergio Riquelme

Production Christian Núñez Host Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta Local Media and Communications

Collaborators Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta Journalism School, Catholic University of the North, Chile ADC Contemporary Art & Building Bridges International Art Exchange, L.A. USA Museo del Barrio, Manizales, Colombia La RED, Platform of Independent Art Spaces of the north of Argentina and Chile Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Chile

Helen Simonne Díaz Linked Spaces National Media and Communications Carolina Lara Emerging expositors of the Formation Capsules program Francisco Vergara Fabián Mayta Pamela Canales Cappry Leiva Camila Díaz Izak Guest Expositors Fernando Prats Carolina Lara Guillemo Moscoso Natascha de Cortillas Álvaro Pereda Roa (Alperoa) Luis Almendra Justo Pastor Mellado Marcos Figueroa Luis Fernando Arango La Guarda, Visual Arts Space: Mariano Gusils Anna Benedetti Roxana Ramos Espacio La Punta, Contemporary Art: Pablo Guiot Pablo Córdoba Luis Carrizo Emiliano D’Amato Mateo Luciana Guiot

Contemporary Arts Museum, Santiago, Chile Laagencia, Bogotá, Colombia Casa Tres Patios, Medellín, Colombia Contemporary Arts Gallery, Opole, Poland Casa Poli Residences, Coliumo, Chile Mesa 8, Concepción, Chile Móvil, Concepción, Chile Artistas del Acero Cultural Corporation, Concepción, Chile Caja Negra Visual Arts, Santiago, Chile Autonomous Contemporary Arts Management, Latin America La Casona Solariega, Villa Alegre, Chile edicionanimita.cl Almagico Films Productions, Valparaiso, Chile Neighbors Association Manuel Rodriguez, Quillagua, Chile Aymaran Society, Quillagua, Chile Elementary School G-15, Quillagua, Chile

Index GENERAL PICTURE > 7 Inventory, Dagmara Wyskiel > 8 A scene is born, Carolina Lara > 12 New Languages in Biblioteca Viva, Mauricio Monardes > 14 SHIFT CHANGE > 17 Formation Capsules, Dagmara Wyskiel > 18 The Imaginary Academy, Pamela Canales > 19 Nude Scheme, Francisco Vergara > 22 Sweet Land, Fabián Mayta > 24 Through the Veins, Pamela Canales > 26 The Illusion of Being, Cappry Leiva > 28 To be food, Camila Díaz > 30 The sweet right to mutilate, Izak > 32 Anchor, Francisco Vergara > 34 To be-come orphan, Pamela Canales & Francisco Vergara > 36 THE DRIEST PLACE ON EARTH > 39 How to resist an announced death, Dagmara Wyskiel > 40 Quillagua Highlight, Fernando Prats, interview Carolina Lara > 44 NN Night and Fog, Luis Fernando Arango > 46 Up the hill, Roxana Ramos > 48 Minimalistic Ritual, Mariano Gusils > 49 An eye looking at another, Rodrigo Cepeda > 50 Bodies in the Womb, Marisa Caichiolo > 52 HEAVY MACHINERY > 57 Thought Cranes, Dagmara Wyskiel > 58 Concepción on a tour, Carolina Lara > 60 Residences to the limit, Justo Pastor Mellado > 62 Not every road leads to Rome, Marcos Figueroa > 64 Shades and possibilities, Nicole Barrios > 66 OUT OF PLACE > 69 Scene in expansion, Carolina Lara > 70 Time export, Dagmara Wyskiel > 72 War or Peace?, Carolina Lara > 74 (Des)orden, Dagmara Wyskiel > 76 Collective knitting, Dagmara Wyskiel > 78 PRESS > 81 Cultural Journalism on the art’s trench, Helen Simmone Díaz > 82 OFF > 101

GENERAL PICTURE

Inventory

BUILD UP

SITE

This book deals with the periods comprehended between October 2011 (beginning of the curatorial work with

SE VENDE Collective, Mobile Contemporary art Platform, has

Francisco Vergara for his individual project Esquema Desnudo

worked in Antofagasta (Chile) since 2004, developing projects

inaugurated January 18 2012) and March 31 2013, with the

on three branches: Formation, Linking (circulation, visibility

closure of Izak’s exposition El dulce derecho a mutilar.

and networks) and Territory (residences, performances in cities and the desert). Constantly we look for new platforms

The year 2012 was particularly intense for the SE VENDE

to promote, professionalize and invigorate the local core,

Collective, Mobile Contemporary art Platform, since it dealt

setting instances of dialogue and reflection through

with previously developed lines of work and with new formats,

exposition, conferences, workshops, residences, editorial

spaces and strategies. The book SE VENDE 4 constitutes the

projects and the constant arrival and departure of artists,

record of this group of actions, which provoked diversification

curators and critics. We articulate our strategies through

what was developed so far, expanding the collective’s reach

autonomous and collaborative negotiations, with the mean

towards new territory, always under the three columns of

of strengthening the evidence of the local scene and to insert

work: formation, territory and networks.

the Atacama Desert as a national and international focus point for artists and investigators. Step by step, we rose and activate a territory that did not exist previously in the Chilean contemporary arts map.

We believe that the work in web promotes the accessibility and diversification of culture and diminishes the earthquake effect that maintains the centralized structures in LatinAmerican countries. We apply another paradigm, more inclusive, collaborative and transverse.

We comprehend territory not as a landscape, but as the origin and background of each idea.

We are aware that there is much to be done, because, until now, nothing has been done here in the contemporary arts field. And it is this scenario that appeal to us more than the one of a big city, where the cultural mapping has been already structured, and there is nothing left but to try to sign into it. This nothingness with capital N, commits us to act from the autonomy of an arts collective and with the freedom on decision making that only an independent platform can provide. At the same time we are also aware of the inherent responsibility of taking care of the work from the very base, without references, being self demanding in front to the critical mass and the small local scene, and expecting to contribute as much to the invigoration, as to the professionalization of the production in and from our area.

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SE VENDE 4 actions scheme

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Rebelled Bodies, Performance in Three edges of Concepción, exposition + Curatories and curators beauty, H.Chmielarz & D. Wyskiel, in the current art scene, conference, Carolina Lara Casa Poli Residences Curatory and production of six expositions In Situ Actions L. F. Arango, Conference of local emergent artists R.Ramos & M. Gusils Fernando Prats and Justo Pastor Mellado Imagined Territories Debate The non-existence of documentary series Acción Quillagua and Gran Sur limits for expression in public spaces and the Acción Quillagua exposition, Investigation, archive recompilation, Collective action i-legitimacy of Formation Capsules, Fernando Prats Fetus press and scientific data citizen’s work methodologies workshop on the oasis, collaboration from the Antofagasta international residence, censorship with the support of artists, journalists Archeologist Guild of Chile four artists, curator and museographer and guest curators and 1st Contemporary Art Week conferences and workshop Linking with the Neighbors Association Manuel Rodriguez of Quillagua and the Publishing of the Booklet Aymaran Native Organization Participation of Pamela Canales Artistic teaching in Chile, two visions and Francisco Vergara in the Fernando Prats’ residence in Quillagua Distribution and production of residences Workshop Memoria for artistic high record and documentation of interventions school students, C. Lara & D. Wyskiel, Participation of Fido in Contemporary Arts Museum, Santiago the preproduction of Imagined Territories Workshop Cultural Journalism-new challenges and ways of educating, Carolina Lara Evaluation of the viability of installing h t a documentation and archive center in the settlement, r Ea mapping of management (in progress)

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La RED encounter: Exposition Applied Utopias a pocket Participation in the manual and conference Latent Territories 3rd Biennale Ars Polonia – independent initiatives in the local art scene.

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9

The Visual Arts project Agenda for the Multiuse Room of

On The Driest Place on Earth we focused the zoom on

Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta, financed by the National Fund

Quillagua, a settlement on the Atacama Desert, human lab

of Cultural and Arts Development (FONDART), constituted

of extremely vivid experiences, overloaded with a history

the vertebral spine of most of the activities presented on this

of looting, abuse and abandon. We presented creators that

book. Others are added; several managed and produced by

participated on the residences program on The Driest Place

the collective:

on Earth or that visited the oasis with the clear objective of performing a specific action. The journalist and arts critic

- Exposition Arts+Politic+Environment, with the curatorial

Carolina Lara interviews Fernando Prats (Chile/Spain) about

work of Marisa Caichiolo, with the 1st Contemporary

Acción Quillagua on the context of the extreme geographies

Arts Week, both exhibited in the Centro Cultural Estación

that the artist exploits on his projects. Luis Fernando Arango

Antofagasta, funded by Antofagasta Railway thanks to the Law

(Colombia), Roxana Ramos y Mariano Gusils (Argentina) show

of Cultural Founding and ADC & Building Bridges International

us the individual actions executed on the settlement, near

Art Exchange.

the meteorite crater. Rodrigo Cepeda (Chile), documentalist, reflexes his empiric experience of the oasis, with and without

- Recording of an episode of the documentary series Imagined

a lens. Finally, Marisa Caichiolo (Argentina/USA), narrates

Territories: 6 Cities from the View of the Artists of Almagico

the action Feto, shared with Arcángel Constantini, Karen

Films Productions, project funded by the National Council of

Perry (Mexico) and Dagmara Wyskiel (Poland/Chile) which

Television (Consejo Nacional de Televisión).

was conceived induced by the environment y and that slowly blended with the overwhelming landscape.

- Lecture of the curator and theorist Justo Pastor Mellado about the work of Fernando Prats, Gran Sur. Part of the

We found hard and slow to digest elements on the Heavy

retribution in Chile for the funding that the Cultural Affairs

Machinery chapter, which contains actions destined to

Direction of the Chancellery for the participation of the artist

networks creation, audience connection and contemporary

in the 54th Venice Biennale 2011.

art formation. Carolina Lara explains why she brought an exposition about performance from Concepción to the north

- Residence of the Colombian artist Luis Fernando Arango,

of the country and evaluates the impact of workshop with

with the grant fund of the Colombian Ministry of Culture.

local art journalists. The lecture of Justo Pastor Mellado & Fernando Prats, done after the residence of Prats on The Driest

- Actions funded by the collective and founded by the artists

Place on Earth, leaves open the question about beyond of the

(individual and collective interventions on the Quillagua

evident geographic oppositions contained on his works: Gran

crater, Ancla action, Dulce derecho a mutilar graffiti, among

Sur and Acción Quillagua. From this encounter with the local

others).

audiences, Mellado shares his view on the evidence of the local critical mass. Of the north-south vertical axis we go to

USER’S MANUAL

the horizontality, limited by the two sides of the Andes; and to the creation of La RED (La Guarda - Salta, La Punta - Tucumán

The chapter Shift Change is designed as a trial, to measure the

and SE VENDE - Antofagasta), collectives platform that has

pulse of the local newcomer youth in the Formation Capsules,

being working since 2009. Marcos Figueroa (Tucumán,

emerging initiatives workshop that functioned during 2012

Argentina) founder of La RED writes about the imminent

and that gave birth to six individual exposition, a participation

need for overcome fences, not only on the landscape.

on collective exposition, a debate and an intervention on public space, presented here on chronological order. Pamela

Journalist Nicole Barrios closes the machinery with a

Canales, one of the participants, shares her critic view on

critical reflection on the formative relevance and the

the demand for an artistic formation in the local context and

real impact of the Art+Politics+Environment exposition

evaluates the contribution of this initiative.

and the 1st Contemporary Arts Week in Antofagasta.

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During 2012 SE VENDE collective fulfilled the role of host on many events, frequently mixing the work of creator or curator with the one of a turistic-cultural operator, hybrid phenomenon that we consider natural for our doing, empathized on the territory. But we also left the region and country with creation projects, work circulation, and networks creation. On the Out of Place chapter we present the Time Crops action on public spaces corresponding to three Colombian cities. Then we dive in on the Polonus Populus maze, which occupied the main hall of the Contemporary Arts Museum of the University of Chile, to stop for an instant under the watering cans of Take care of your Garden on the Biennale Ars Polonia. When we comeback to the international events circuit, we focus on local actions, Starting on Casa Poli (Bio-Bio region), where the Tres bordes de la belleza interventions and registers were made, along the polish artist Halina Chmielarz, continuing with our participation on the Local+Visita encounter of independent spaces on Concepci贸n, visits to the Casona Solariega de Villa Alegre and to Caja Negra de Santiago, including several instances for dialog and interchange of editorial material.

Journalist Helen Simonne D铆az, communications counselor of the collective, analyzes the state of local media and narrates his experience on the practice as a communicator, key on the machinery that conforms the local artistic scene, offering us a tour through Press, with a selection of what was published on different media, mainly written and on the internet, that made visible our actions.

We close with the In Off chapter. Because the off, that space shared behind the staging, lecture or art action, is to many participants as or more important and emotive than the in or the events per se. I would dare to say that the off is a legitimate motor of the management of all the in. The off is the generating space, where most of the future projects are born, an instance of intellectual training for diverse configurations, with some prolonged episodes until dawn, almost impossible to finish. It is the backstage of the encounters, exhibitions and field work where the discussions and affections flourished, triggering new resonance to the activities that now we invite you to meet.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

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A scene is born The last ten to fifteen years have made themselves noticed from regional poles and a diversity of artists that work on synchrony in contemporary practices. Despite the lack of exhibition places and the precarious artistic system in general, a movement of artist has been able to create their own spaces of creation, divulging and analysis. In the south we can identify scenes emerging with their own strength in Valdivia, Temuco, Concepción and Talca. And in the north in Iquique and Antofagasta.

A particularity of these cities is the confluence of collective work platforms that - besides generating a group of works available for context collaboration, criticism and experimentation- implement independent management strategies where the key is the generation of networks and association. This are connected groups, even internationally, that have tried to go beyond the virtual relationships that they maintain with artists and curators from other cities and countries, developing conjoined projects.

From the regions, a scene has risen; reactionary to the centralism, lack of opportunity, market criteria, audience distance and the tensions that dominate Santiago. These are recent circuits, with works rarely recorded on catalogs and publications, dispersed on paper and websites. So SE VENDE 4 is an unheard of contribution to writing about local arts and to the understanding of the processes hidden on the contemporary arts outside of Santiago; it is a publication that records a specific fruitful period for one of the emblematic collectives on the area: SE VENDE. From October 2011 to March 2013, it includes works and actions that constantly aimed to local situations, photographs and text that reflect on the state of art in the city.

SE VENDE Collective Contemporary Arts Platform is a work group that emerged in 2004 with a kind of work that introduced the contemporary to Antofagasta. The first project, SE VENDE 1, linked creative production with architectonic patrimony, installing itself in a mansion that was on sale at the moment. In the series of installations participated the artists Dagmara Wyskiel, Loreto Bolados, Luis Núñez, Manuel Ossandón, Jorge Wittwer, producer Christian Núñez and Alejandro García as a special guest. Parallel to the exhibition,

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a contemporary arts forum was held: by the first time crucial subjects were discussed, proving the need to star talking about it. En la misma linea, SE VENDE 2 followed, occupying a building downtown, incorporating to the Wyskiel, Wittwer, Luis and Christian Núñez the authors Paula Quintanela, Julio Morales and Claudio Galeno. To this second event, special guests arrived from Santiago, artist Carlos Montes de Oca, plus the academics Pedro Celedón and Gaspar Galaz, that participated on highly attended forums. So the three programmatic coordinates of the collective were installed, related to territory work, contemporary art formation and to the vinculation with agents in and out the region.

In 2009 the third edition of SE VENDE occupied public spaces and emblematic sites of the city. It also counted with the participation of a key artist in the recent Chilean art history: Juan Castillo, who continued here the itinerant project Minimal Barroco, with a truck that roamed the streets presenting videos with people from Antofagasta narrating their dreams. The author also headed special encounters with young artists of the zone. In the context of forums, form Valparaiso arrived the academics Alberto Madrid and Fernando Balcells.

At the moment, collective intervention was a poster with the scripture FOR SALE (SE VENDE) that was installed ironically in several places of the city, activating a very special situation in Plaza Colón, where the ad was repeated 400 times all along the perimeter of the square. The act was considered by local media as an act of protest from anonymous artists against the project of subterranean parking lots that divided public opinion. The artist surfaced in the fabric, attracting the attention of the local mass media.

SE VENDE 4 is a different size project. Its proposed as a compilation that registers an intense year for the collective where the variety of activities involved diverse actors and special guests, adding actions developed in other scenarios, nationally and internationally.

The book counts with a big amount of photographs and unedited texts of author from places such as curators, journalists, cultural producers and contemporary creation: Justo Pastor Mellado, Carolina Lara, Dagmara Wyskiel, Nicole Barrios, Helen Simmone, Mauricio Monardes, Pamela Canales, Rodrigo Cepeda, Marcos Figueroa (Argentina) Maria Guslis (Argentina), Roxana Ramos (Argentina), Marisa Caichiolo (USA) and Luis Fernando Arango (Colombia).

The activities have been organized in chapters that also deal with local situations, of poorness and value of the scene, of certain problematic areas, for what the book presents -as we said- an x-ray of the current artistic medium. The axis for all this activities is the National Arts Grant supported project Visuals Arts Agenda for the Multiuse Room in Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta.

In the Shift change chapter, the focus is the formation capsules, alternative program of professionalization of artists that made evident a particular situation of all the northern area: the lack of university careers on art. In the record it’s configure a new generation, visualizing the pieces generated in an activity that conjugated creation with investigation, reflection and constant dialogue. The diversity of supports and context related questioning, are characteristic of a repertoire that did not pass unnoticed, calling the attention of the press and even raising polemic, as it happened with the photographs painted with blood of Pamela Canales, or with the graffiti of Izak showing the mutilated body of a woman and that was erased by angered neighbors.

In The Driest Place on Earth the aim is towards a program of residences placed in Quillagua and inaugurated in July 2012 by the Chilean artist living in Spain, Fernando Prats. Through the Aymaran settlement several artists passed, such as the ones from the La RED encounter (Marcos Figueroa, Mariano Gusils, Roxana Ramos, Luciana Guiot and Luis F. Arango) and of the exposition Art+Politics+Environment (Karen Perry, Marisa Caichiolo, Arcángel Constantini and Andrea Juan). The residences allowed the work of the artists with a displaced population, making visible a geographic point where natural and ancient processes are tensioned, activating at the same time context reflection, social, historical and cultural. One of the relevant aspects is how a place in the middle of the desert presents itself as a territory of interest for contemporary art; the region as an open center for research, creation and cross of disciplines.

Heavy Machinery is a chapter that boards diverse attempts to found instances for actualization and reflection: conferences, workshops, the 1st Contemporary Arts Week in the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, international exhibits of art, the visit of expositors and curators like Marisa Caichiolo and Justo Pastor Mellado, plus a show that gathered performance artists from Concepción and included art actions in the city of Natascha de Cortillas and Guillermo Moscoso. It was a series of dynamic activities that strengthen already existent bonds and the contact with diverse actors and the audience, with

participants that showed great interest in crucial matters of current art.

In Out of Place is possible to recognize project developed beyond regional and national borders, establishing the presence of SE VENDE in spaces in Santiago, Concepción, Chiloe, Colombia and Poland, being as well a work surrounding the building of networks and links, developing from self management and the synchronization of peers through the frontiers.

Finally, a chapter devoted to the registry of publications in newspapers, magazines and websites, shows how different experiences caught the attention of media, discovering many sensationalist point of views and errors in documentation. No doubtlessly a hard census of the difficult relation of the press with contemporary art and reveals a transverse problematic of the country.

In the rows of the collective, recognized artists have been.

Entering during the last time a new generation, authors like Pamela Canales, Francisco Vergara e Izak Mora. Who have been at the head of the collective have played and important part in the formation of a contemporary art scene, still drawing itself, still to be strengthened. They are the producers and cultural manager Christian Núñez along an artist as active as unreachable: Dagmara Wyskiel. Both prove how contemporary art in regions is getting stronger thanks to the will of a fist full of actors that have learned to link in a more effective way with cultural institutionalism and private sector, being crucial a generous attitude, of aperture and dynamism, that always include the participation of other actors and the links with the community.

SE VENDE 4 is the sum of experiences that allow to point out key places and names in the impulse of regional contemporary art, in the construction of new platforms of work circulation, which encloses Antofagasta and places distant to the epicenters, in and out of the country.

Carolina Lara B. (Concepción-Chile)

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Nude Scheme, Francisco Vergara

Sweet Land, Fabi谩n Mayta

Through the Veins, Pamela Canales

Rebelled Bodies, Performance in Concepci贸n, curatory Carolina Lara

Quillagua Action, Fernando Prats

AGENDA INAUGURATIONS

Applied Utopias, a Pocket Manual, La RED

La ilusi贸n de ser, Cappry Leiva

The Sweet Right to Mutilate, Izak

To be Food, Camila D铆az

New Languages in Biblioteca Viva We people from Antofagasta got the luck of receiving this little space, this living library, to foment reading in a different, effective and innovative way, with the aim of enchanting kids and youngsters with the act of reading. On this mission we count with different tools to develop, besides a cultural center built with the community’s concerns in mind.

Among this tools there is our Multiuse Room a space where all types of cultural activities converge, derived from the concerns of our friends and users. It is then when a concepts metamorphosis happens that turns the room into an art gallery.

It all started during an exhibit of the artist Izak, his first one in our “old” room, when we where still handling with the inexperience of two professionals (director and sub director, Denisse Zaffiri), without the slightest notion on how to implement a timetable for an art gallery. There, in that situation we met Dagmara. We could initiate a conversation and we realized that her experience was far greater, and thanks to that, the interest to extend the invitation, first, for an exhibit of her own. But her project and ideas were bigger, mixing with our interest to give a turn on the exhibits cycle in the library. Firstly, we met her as a curator with the exhibit and visit of the Cuban artist Juan Carlos Sanchez, where we could prove the level of the montage, complex, attractive and utterly interesting. We were able to open our eyes and comprehend that this small space that was the Multiuse Room could be turn into something else, on a display for an unexploited format on our city, that would position us in the vanguard of current art thank to the counseling of an expert.

One day, after an interchange of ideas and conversations, a very attractive idea was born: to turn the space into a proper art gallery. We would get rid of the previously mentioned inexperience, with the goal of creating a niche for contemporary and experimental arts in the city.

space on the mall in which we are located, impregnating the cultural scene with unexploited or unknown by most people, with activities like performances, installations, interventions and works in progress. This project also comprehended formation capsules on contemporary art for emerging artists of Antofagasta. It is how we met a new breed of creators with strong, well structured and with particularly neat and careful of detail montages. So through this galley young artists exposed their works, such as Pamela Canales, Francisco Vergara, Cappry Leiva, Fabián Mayta, Camila Díaz and Izak.

There is no doubt that they will continue to grow and develop their performance on visual art on all its formats. Among the exhibits we had we highlight this artists, because they had the will to be here, to expose themselves for the first time to an unused audience and for showing that young people have a strong creative force. In the experimented artists case the performance from Concepción gathered under the curator Carolina Lara works made in a city similar to Antofagasta, with unexploited languages and no even explored by the local artists. In this sense a seed was planted so the performance can start to grow in the region of Antofagasta. We highlight also the collective work of the people form Argentina, with La RED collective and Fernando Prats with a different format.

For the cultural an artistic environment of Antofagasta, the Agenda project demonstrated to be a contribution, because the visual arts circuit was established where the exhibits change every month, and where many people with talent are eager to show their talent to the community. There are more spaces of exhibition for this outstanding art. The proof is the media covering that this gallery has locally and nationally, which proves that this room in the Library can become a platform, a showcase and a space for debate and of reunion for several artists.

Mauricio Monardes (Head of Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta)

The emphasis was put on young and emerging artists from the city for several reasons. The youth of the Biblioteca Viva’s staff, the new formats and supports and the lack of spaces for the expression of new proposals. This aim was accompanied by the visits of experimented and notable national and international artists.

It is like this that in 2012 renowned national artists visited us: Fernando Prats, Natascha de Cortillas and Guillermo Moscoso; and the internationals Roxana Ramos, Luciana Guiot, Marcos Figueroa and Luis Fernando Arango. An honor and, until a few years unthinkable for us as heads of this library. That is how we enlarged our and our users language; we took advantage of the platform of the highly visited

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SHIFT CHANGE

Formation Capsules Between the most extreme regions of Chile there are 5061 kilometers, between Valdivia and Valparaiso, 958. In less than a fifth part of the stretch of Chile all of the art schools are concentrated, around thirteen currently. The inequalities in the access to college education reaches its peak in the areas that promote reflection, creation and critical thought. It is unquestionable the oligarchic political interest of keeping the status quo rather than promoting arts, because even with the free market’s logic this situation turns out to be sustainable.

The professional vacuum deepens the intellectual gap, leaving on the margin most of the creative potential of the extreme north and south of the country, just because of a lack of resources and distance.

Formation Capsules emerge as an autonomous proposal of SE VENDE collective to debunk this situation in a regional scale, offering an urgent alternative solution, limited to mere first aid. In the late 2011, young people are invited to participate in a research, analysis and work production workshop with the objective of stimulate a vocational maturation and to evaluate the production dynamics within the emerging local spectrum. The workshop is mainly attended by students of design, architecture and journalism, besides to the people of Antofagasta already involved in the visual arts scene: Fabián Mayta, graduated from the Catholic University of Temuco, and Camila Díaz, student in the Arts Faculty of the Mayor University of Santiago. The capsules happened weekly in the Multiuse Room of Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta, with a total of 10 participants to conclude theirs processes in six individual exhibits. To this exhibitions schedule were added, the intervention on urban landscape Ancla by Francisco Vergara, the debate La (in)existencia de los límites de expresión en espacios públicos y la (i)legitimidad de la censura ciudadana (The non-existence of limits for expression in public spaces and the i-legitimacy of citizen’s censorship), brought up because of the polemic graffiti made by Izak and the participation of Pamela Canales and Francisco Vergara on the La RED exhibits Utopías Aplicadas. Un manual de bolsillo (Applied utopias, pocket manual), with which both of them are incorporated officially to SE VENDE collective.

The program did not pretend to replace a professional career, but to hand basic tools and offer a complete exercise of work

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production, from conceptualization to project exhibition, fomenting research, reflection, team work and dialogue with each artist, following the processes on every case.

Aware of the risks that constitute installing a formative workshop with a single teacher as reference, we look as a collective for all opportunities to widen the point of view, sharing the capsules with guest artists, curators, critics and directors. The accumulation of projects during 2012 and the Agenda for the Multiuse Room allowed us to cross the objectives of each initiative, joining the local participants with important figures of performance from Concepción, with the collectives of La RED, with the international exponents of the show Art+Politics+Environment, plus the team from the TV series Imagined Territories: 6 cities from the view of its artists. Besides, two young artists worked as assistants in the Fernando Prats’ residence in Quillagua, important formative experience, an opportunity not given by the curricula of formal careers.

Finally, we realized once again that working from the absence of mediums, against the mainstream and with cultural obstacles, stimulates and speeds the determination to turn the wastelands into the perfect scenario to search for alternative solutions, applicable and needed in the context.

The conviction and commitment of the assistants made the project possible.

Today we dare to define some common axis in the process of search of local creators, in form and content. Because there are relationships and perhaps generational coincidences. It’s about young people with an intransigent and critic view stand, that evoke the reality of the contemporary global system to dismantle and open it as if in surgery, showing it’s sate of decay. Growing in global connection they are neither naive nor lacking information. Maybe the only thing they need to continue the already started process is to have a joining of the local scene with all its actors.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

The Imaginary Academy In the beginning of 2012, I knew thanks to a friend that a polish artist was going to lecture some kind of workshop on contemporary art. I suppose that the rest that arrived to the first meeting knew of it in the same way. That day we knew that we were on what Dagmara called “formation capsules”, and we received information that most were glad to take.

More or less than eight students from different careers, backgrounds and motivations arrived to the Multiuse Room in Biblioteca Viva without knowing we were in the presence of an incubator.

Being this one of the most important regions of the country there are alternatives for artistic development in workshops, but there is no formal college that imparts careers directly related to arts and even less with contemporary art. We are not really clear why this lack of initiatives and state funds, but no doubtlessly this scarcity of professional local schools, confronted with the fundamental logic of humanity, being cultural and sensitive, may give room to three situations: 1. People with an artistic motivation in Antofagasta can’t develop it because of the high cost of studying in other cities (the “closest” professional art schools are in Valparaiso and Santiago).

2. Them who can pay it have to leave the region.

3. There are some that will never know they had an interest or motivation for art.

As we can see, then, in Antofagasta we encounter wit this three categories of “emerging artists”, from which the capsules acquire great value. If the capsules did not give pure and formal theory, as in a traditional arts career, they allowed us to work in our own production, and to develop analysis on other artists’ work and biennials. This gave us the chance to understand the importance of an image and to discover it’s dynamic potential, the capability to wake up and to construct projections, interactions or narrative frames, and finally apply them as artifacts in the moment of wanting to structure reality, as it is said by Franco Berardi, contemporary philosopher.

The visit of Carolina Lara and the performers from Concepción, the arrival of the artists of the Art+Politics+Environment exhibit with Marisa Caichiolo as curator, the residence in Quillagua with Fernando Prats and finally the meeting with La RED, strengthen the reunions with analysis from the esthetic and expositive order of what already existed, with the documentation of processes, artistic/social actions and interventions performed on different moments and context.

All of this processes did not just let us to meet, talk and learn in situ and from other artists, but also made us discover that “spiritual atmosphere” of the work, made up from the attitude and thoughts of the artist, according to Kandinsky.

With the passing of time this experiences marked a before and after, achieving to get from us an artistic calling that laid anxious waiting to be discovered and, the ones who already had it, strengthen it. In this sense, the fact of having an individual exhibit meant establishing a project and also to talk of a new generation of young artists with huge desires to potentate art in the region and mostly with the interest of keep developing in it.

Sadly, just now, when we discover that artistic calling, we find ourselves in a situation were the lack of an institution that promotes and professionalizes this labor, forces us to go outside to find the tools we need to continue our learning.

In my case, this year I begging my studies on photography in Buenos Aires, and I pretend to continue submerging in the art world. The will exists, and that is the most important.

I wish to thank the support of the Regional Arts And Culture Council to the Agenda 2012 project, for it fills an empty space in Antofagasta, giving the chance to men and women like me, that have an interest on art. This project is key to the development of new artists for the region.

Finally, I thank Dagmara Wyskiel for giving us her knowledge, time and above all her dedication to the noble labor of teaching art in a region that is beginning to give baby steps on more contemporary tendencies and to generate a local scene.

Pamela Canales (Antofagasta- Chile)

The process of work maturation was lived unsynchronized form one another, due to the fact that in this capsules we weren’t submitted to time schedules or evaluations. In this sense, we were lucky compared to the students from traditional university schools. The capsules fomented our creativity and gave us the freedom of time to develop our artistic skills, connecting with our soul.

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Capsules, March 2012

Guides tutoring, Art+Politics+Environment, Centro Cultural EstaciĂłn Antofagasta

Pamela Canales, assistant in the Fernando Prats’ residence

Fido in the Anthropological Museum of Quillagua

Photographic record of Quillagua, Fido

Capsules with Carolina Lara, June 2012

Montage Art+Politics+Environment, Izak and Jaime Delfín

Local+Visita, Pamela Canales representing Se VENDE collective, on the collectives encounter in Artistas de Acero, Concepción

Guides tutoring, Art+Politics+Environment, Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta

Francisco Vergara, assistant in the Fernando Prats’ residence

Pamela Canales and Francisco Vergara, realizing audiovisual records in Quillagua

Quillagua, field work

Nude Scheme

Francisco Vergara The analysis of the photographic images of Francisco Vergara, emerging artist that incursions to the visual world from the career of journalism, conduces a critic to the western models that define behavior. The monochromatic series Esquema Desnudo constitutes a rehearsal of society in a stretcher, without filters, no make-up, no retouches, just like it is.

The gesture that Francisco makes through the lens of the camera corresponds to un-cover, un-clothe, to demystify the subject submitted to contemporary society, along their power, fear and love relationships. What Francisco looks for, obviously, is not just the nudity that pays tribute to the renascence beauty of the human body, not that evokes the dark carnal reflection of live in a memento mori. What he looks for belongs even less to the images market where the body is used and abused as an erotic object. Then, why use nudity? Because it is probably a way to expose the main problems of the system in which we coexist.

With clothing we don’t only protect and cover ourselves; above all we communicate and build our external image, we disguise ourselves of what we want to be perceived as socially, economically and ideologically. Without it everyday tasks seem to be grotesque, the power images evidence absurdity. Because, naked, we are all the same.

The symbolic nudity proposed by Francisco, achieved through it’s literal use, achieves a denounce posture; it is intransigent and moving. Esquema desnudo is an anthropological that unchains views on our society, stopping on supposedly meaningless moments. Every image comes from a small story, as basic and universal, that belongs to us, every day, all of us.

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Sweet Land Fabián Mayta

Fabián Mayta, born in Chuquicamata and with a school background from the Experimental Arts School, graduates from the Visual Arts school of the Catholic University of Temuco in 2010 and comes back to the north to perform in the very institution where he learned to translate the empiric observation into a pictorial format. But the focus point has been transported from the barren hills of the city towards current society, with its political fetishes, the omnipresent innuendos, advertisement -mother of the collective imaginary- and the codes of the TV shows.

Now we only got left to disguise ourselves of the globalization proposals and believe we are part of it. Facing the cultures that have achieved to expand their frontiers towards neighboring nations such as ours, the only we have got left is to sit down and observe (as I have done so far) the phenomenon. Because globalization it’s no more than a product, and our beloved land is rather a consumer than a producer.

Fabián works Chile, taking care of this sweet land through his language, its current manifestations and what it really is.

With a conceptually mature work and a solely contemporary content, filled with irony and with the possibility of multiple reading, proposes a counterpoint to everything that has been painted in Antofagasta.

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Your End

Coalition for the Change

The chilean dream

Don’t play the fool, I know you are awake

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Through the veins Pamela Canales

The use of bodily fluids in the production of a work turns out to be an increasingly common practice, and yet, it has not lost its transgressive character, provoking resistance on certain parts of the audience, not used to, so to speak, to this kind of extravagance. The headline Incredible: girl paints with his blood, odd exhibit takes over Antofa, on the local newspaper, shows the artist’s risk of being theatrical at making this choice. Probably there are works that do not need the use of this weapon for the construction of the speech, but this is not one of those cases. The work of Regina Galindo (Guatemala, 1974) ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (2003) for example, denounces the suffering of the people of Guatemala, a trail made of human blood footprints from the Guatemalan house of government, results impossible to conceive it in any other way. Blood revels the pain and commitment with what we consider our own. And it is there where we find the relation between the Centro American artist and Pamela Canales.

This series constitutes a break down as much in her previous production with the image of herself. Bringing up taking care of what hurts us, moves us, we question and criticizes... the emerging artist takes a literally committed position, through the revealing of the picture: intervening the photographs with her own blood. This poetic action compels to an eternal anthropological union through pain. Pamela communicates with this world and reality, and at the same time makes a sharp criticism with personal traits that installs in socially sensitive spaces.

“Por las venas” is the here and now applied to any moment in history...It is the blood that runs through my veins and through the veins of whole vulnerable society, that makes itself shown in this series of composition that aims to reveal a contingency so full of differences, prejudices and questioning based on lies, on the artificial.

Pamela graduated in 2012 from the Journalism school of the Catholic University of the North and since March 2013 studies photography in Buenos Aires.

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The Illusion of being Cappry Leiva

Few are the ones that stop to look around and notice the existence of these beings that carry some sort of “curse”. A “curse” that do not chooses on social status, sex nor race. We all can be victims.

Cappry Leiva (School of design, Santo Tomas University) directs her view to the individual lost in the crowd and destined to oblivion. That classmate we forgot his name, that commuter we never saw, that un-leader and un-winner, that shares with us their mapping of roads, but that fails to make an impression on our lives. The success and visibility dictatorship narrows our view, leaving out everything that supposedly is unimportant. In this limb of insignificance are the ones that did not align to the tendencies, whether by chose or fate.

Cappry Leiva stops to observe and portrait them. Her proposal keeps a deeply transcendent human background. Even when her characters are imaginary, were born on the street, bus, supermarket. The chorus of whispers that we heard everyday is made up by the crying and sobbing of the blurred or erased; by ourselves, by looking from the other side.

The proposal of Leiva is inscribed into what we could call a tendency, the wake up call to inter-human relationships within society and the disagreement towards the establishment.

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To be food Camila Díaz

Camila Díaz (fourth year on the Arts School of the Mayor University, Santiago) experiments with diverse supports on the same subject, as if in a quintet where every musician makes their own variation of the same chords. It may be why Camila juggles with visuals and sounds from her time in the Experimental Arts School, Antofagasta, when she used to divide her time between the guitar and canvas.

To go into a butcher’s to look for formal inspiration takes the author from the brutally realistic (photographs) to the de-contextualization through pixilation (painting), towards an elevation and evaporation of the carnal (gofrado). The color red runs through the montage from wall to screen.

The museum-graphic proposal ends (or commences) with a reference of classic montage, passepartout, glass and golden framing, constructing the tension between the sophisticated form and the slaughter house content.

Ser-alimento is not a single lecture exhibit from a vegetarian young woman ideologically committed to save the world.

The distance that Camila takes in front of the subject she is boarding and the decision to apply such a polyphony of techniques, shows a game strategies with the bone and flesh object, the need to investigate how language or the way of representation are the constitutive elements. An even more understandable act if you take on account that this exercise comes from the classroom of an art school.

The imperious need to have a more realistic version of the carnal, the dripping of life, of mutilation, makes me take the decision of working on the very place of successes, packaging different kinds of meat, being part of this ritual where (to be) food is ornamented. (…) My intention is to re-contextualize the object, generating a clash between the grotesque and neat, transforming the esthetically disgusting turn into art work.

Besides the question of the author on the edge of the grotesque and neat, Ser-alimento investigates on the dignity of the object itself and the possibility to become art, through the application of simple and diverse operations of the visual field that slowly de-contextualize. The exhibit gives the impression of rehearsing the accumulation of diverse variations on the same subject, offering an unusual tour, from the bodily to the ephemeral and the other way around.

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The sweet right to mutilate Izak

For many people of Antofagasta the figure of Izak turn out to be known thanks to the figurative and sensual of his interventions, that during the years has incorporated in the urban landscape. The artist and architect (he graduated from the Catholic University of the North just three weeks after opening the exhibit) started as a graffiti author when he was 12 and today his work can be seen on the streets of Santiago, Valparaiso, Iquique, Concepción, Buenos Aires, (Argentina) and Florianopolis (Brazil). He co-founded the duet “HGC crew” in 1998 in Iquique and founder of “Stiffingerz crew”, active since 2002.

From it’s beginnings, the exhibitions project for the Multiuse Room had as an objective to make visible the investigation process and conceptual work previous to the exhibition of an art piece on the street, using as support the sketches, photo montage, videos, texts, etc. The decision on the location of graffiti was related to the history of the wall, with the premise of the author: The concept is the mutilation of the graffiti in the hands of society (as a communication way) and the other way around.

In my point of view, it is how society imposes censorship and rejects certain languages and subjects (including graffiti); and how graffiti mutilates the veil that covers society, exhibiting social themes in the very stage: the city, generating discussion, and controversy in public opinion.

“El dulce derecho a mutilar” emerges from the need of provoking reflection on the castration executed by society to expressions that makes it uncomfortable and images that look into subjects considered as imprudent. Paradoxically, the work provoked rejection of certain members of the audience, setting up a polemic that showed up on the press. Six days after the execution of the piece, this was annihilated (erased from the wall), attacked by the very evil that it wanted to reveal, which confirms the real and violent character of the problem boarded by the author.

The unexpected destruction of the graffiti, based upon the moral defense of a president of a board of neighbors, forced us to rethink the exposition in the room. The staging of the creative process as main objective had to give to the contingency of the mutilation of the already existing piece. The final and post mortem montage of the original intervention

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included a stop motion of the creation of the piece, record of the destruction taped by a bystander, intervened by Izak, along a reproduction of the piece exposed just to be erased once again by white paint, including fragmented pictures of the work in the neighboring walls, quotes on art censorship and destruction, and a complete revue of the resonance that El Dulce Derecho a Mutilar in the social networks, printed and digital press. The literal incorporation of the wide polemic about what happened seem relevant as a mirror operation, to put on evidence the diversity of speeches and the unbearable lightness of the stating an opinion on screen.

DEBATE Parallel to the exhibit, February 23th 2013 in Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta. The debate: La (in)existencia de los límites de expresión en espacios públicos y la (i)legitimidad de la censura ciudadana (The non-existence of limits for expression in public spaces and the i-legitimacy of citizen’s censorship).

Open to the community, had as an objective to install a platform for opinion on this particular case, which turned out to be unacceptable for the neighbors, even when it appealed against the castration of the reflective process on the streets.

Among the shared conclusions the most prominent was the idea of that fear to the unknown triggered the destruction and that society is not ready to reflect about it’s reality, will always choose the known thing, even when this implies being insensitive towards the esthetic decay of the city and to reject a visually potent piece.

Nevertheless, graffiti is not open to democratic dialogue even within the community. Acting as urban guerrilla and on the edge of illegality, this strategies turn out to be opposed. Appeal to legitimize it through vox populi, that some kindly spirited propose not only in Antofagasta, is not understanding the core dynamics of graffiti. Independent, rebel, spontaneous, is a socially committed language but it does not look for the citizens approval, it does not engage in negotiations in a way that’s more compatible with street murals.

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Anchor

Francisco Vergara This time Francisco Vergara works on the nakedness of the hills of Antofagasta. Going through the mandatory individual exhibit at the beginning of the capsules, during the next month he concentrates on preparing an out-door intervention, that demands from him not only an historical research on the gigantic concrete anchor installed in 1868 on the hills that surround the city, but -above all- a rethinking of the work strategies, due to the fact that now it was thought as an in situ intervention on an already existent piece.

The Ancla was designed to be a landmark for the foreign ships, for them to know where to load the cargo of prime matter extracted from the pampa and to supply the companies from abroad on the construction of the railway. These railways now divide the city in class sectors. The same with the traffic route that, perhaps without further thought on their conceiving, determined the paths and the expansion of this ransacked territory, with practices that prolonged by the current merchants.

Of course this axis of railways and roads have their origin on the old traffic routes from the sulfur times and form the foundation of the city. From this perspective, the pride and symbol of Antofagasta becomes into some sort of root of all evil, all the karma from its beginnings, with out the capability to change fate. It turns out to be paradoxical that the Golden Anchor, annual recognition that the city gives to its illustrious sons, embodies this symbol of submission. This can be only comprehended if we realize that the submission of the northern people and the exploitation of natural resources, make up the Chilean north and turns it into what it is today.

From this point of view the gesture of covering this 22 meters long and 11 meters wide symbol, with a huge city visibility, acquires the meaning of conscience or even liberation wake up call.

From whom we inherited and on what principles we protect and cherish the identity of Antofagasta? The intention of making disappear the anchor has the purpose of making society think about what they are, how they see the cultural patrimony that narrates the stories and the physical scenarios.

The dawn of October 7th 2012, the anchor disappeared from the urban landscape. It was not destroyed nor painted on, but simply covered with dirt dyed cloth and the goal of letting us

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imagine a city without this weight that denies free and not structured roaming. But just on that brief moment: during the afternoon the anchor was uncovered by the ones who identify with this state of stalling, from which the anchor will always be their symbol.

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To be-come Orphan

Pamela Canales & Francisco Vergara Por-venir huacho is born, on every sense from precarious conditions. Francisco and Pamela were invited to the SE VENDE collective six weeks before the inauguration of the La RED exposition Utopías aplicadas. Un manual de bolsillo. By then, they couldn’t be part of the exhibit in the Multiuse Room of Biblioteca Viva, just because the museographic design was already closed and the small space was totally occupied; but they intervened the main hall of Biblioteca Viva, where the conditions were absolutely inadequate, because of all the practical nature of the space. The lack of time and space was part of the methodologies of the formation capsules, testing the newcomers’ creativity and capability to respond in a very coherent manner, according to the imposed conditions. From there, the floor of the library, bad conditions established itself as the concept of the work.

Pamela and Francisco mark cardboard with a stencil, printing on them a social identification number that is yet to be used, a number to be assigned by the civil registry, constructing a random collection of identification numbers of unborn Chileans. It doesn’t matter if they don’t exist, the authors say: their lives are already defined by the time in which they were born. Within that pessimistic questioning, if it its fate or ourselves who decide on our lives, in the Chilean case it would be better to ask, is it us or the eight digits number that decide everything?

When marking an identification number in these cardboard pieces, that at first moment are new, we identify future people that, not having born yet, are already under a neoliberal context. The branding makes us visible to the system and quantifies us like an industrial product. Once the cardboard has been used for it’s main function as a commercial product, another cruel cycle begins, perhaps being dumped, in a context of decay, filled with errors, thorn, marks that speak of natural living conditions. It is so how the climate and customs are inscribed in this material their constant transit.

On other side, the intervention proposes a criticism to the conservative catholic views that under the excuse of preserving life, encourage the expansion of poverty, with the mean of securing the status quo and cheap labor into the future. Pamela and Francisco propose imagining a human wave that comes as a result of these policies, vulnerable and

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unprotected, being the number their sole possession.

We question ourselves, nevertheless, we are unable to not step on the cardboard with the numbers of the unborn.

Cardboard as a material has an expendable character, replaceable and cheap, besides it is never an object on itself, always at the service of something allegedly more valuable.

Just like the lives it represent.

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THE DRIEST PLACE ON EARTH

How to resist to an announced death According to history, Quillagua was the main source of cattle food supplies for the sulfur offices in the area. This oasis, located approximately 70 kilometers from the banks of the Loa River, had a population of two thousand people. After the pollution of the river in 1997, the inhabitants number dropped down to 500 and most of them lost their crops, being forced to emigrate to the urban centers of the region.

Those who stayed were victims of a plot, losing their rights to irrigation waters in favor of a mining company. Even further, as a result of the abusive exploitation of waters upstream, the river disappears during harvesting season (December-March) it dries out. Now drinking water is brought to Quillagua in a truck that takes to hours to get there from the far town of Maria Elena.

Quillagua, located next to some of the mining giants and almost under the power towers, during the night it is lit with flashlights and the starry skies. At this moment population has dropped down to 120 people.

In 2007, thirteen families constituted the Aymaran Native Organization to obtain visibility and a right of speech in the local political scene. Today they try to recover their native heritage and reconstruct their beliefs and language, almost totally forgotten, trusting that this will be their shield in their struggle to survive.

The seduction of the settlement of Quillagua, located in the middle of the Atacama desert and in the frontier between the regions of Tarapacá and Antofagasta, can not only be understood by external, climatic or landscape factors but also because of the testimony of their inhabitants and their so many times fractured history. From pre-colombian times until the sulfur bonanza, Quillagua was place for commercial exchange between the natives, mainly Atacameños and Aymarans. All this can be seen on the petroglyphs sites and some graveyards; nevertheless, these sites have been looted, mostly by the very inhabitants to exchange the mommies and ceremonial elements, for powered milk and other scarce supplies.

Today we can compare Quillagua with a laboratory, because due to the huge extents of territory, we have to investigate the oasis with a magnifier glass to discover the scale and density of accumulated phenomenon. This small settlement

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constitutes an exceptional concentration of bigger global problems: state abandons, abuse from private companies, lack of water, pollution, earthquakes, internal struggles, loss of identity and traditions, destruction of patrimony, emigration, and insecurity towards the future. All of this can be observed on several regions on Earth, but here it is presented with extraordinary intensity. In the most pessimistic of scripts, we could say that this is an announcement of the planet’s future; it is the possibility of grasp future, in the worst of possibilities.

Confronted to the Quillagua situation, extreme on every sense, the first proposed objective by SE VENDE is to avoid the silent death of the oasis, in the case of this being it’s outcome. We work on this ancient settlement using all of the strategies that an art collective can use, with the main emphasis of making it visible far beyond our borders, through in situ projects performed by artist and researchers. During 2012, we boosted three international residences: A Fernando Prats’ (Chile-Spain) individual one; and two group ones, Marisa Caichiolo (Argentina-USA) with Arcángel Constantini, Karen Perry (Mexico) and Andrea Juan (Argentina), and one of Luis Arango (Colombia) with Marcos Figueroa, Roxana Ramos, Luciana Guiot and Mariano Gusils (Argentina).

Through interventions, art actions, photography and video taping, the artists constructed an imaginarium of great symbolic and poetic significance, that speaks of Quillagua giving new meaning to the drama and beauty of the landscape, being the result of work processes where, at the same time, relations and cultural interchange emerged. The projects done in the settlement usually invited the community to participate, looking to build a bridge of common knowledge support.

All the registry of the process and the done pieces are in the collective archives, due to the fact than in Quillagua there is no place to storage it. Neither the inhabitants of the oasis nor the interested researches have now access to those materials, neither does the volunteer team from the Archeological Guild of Chile, that has made important retrieving of soil and existent patrimony. Currently we are working trying to instate the Quillagua center of documentation, to avoid the ominous oblivion and the constant initiative from scratch, in areas such as art, art history, archeology, sociology, ethnography, among other, along with the residences center, to open up The Driest Place on Earth to local artists and researchers, nationally and internationally,

generating an axis for interdisciplinary reflection, bonded to the community.

We extent he invitation to dive in the Quillagua desert, to everyone who think that culture is a potent engine to move conciseness and activate change processes; with an especial opening to artists and researches that comprehend the context -political, social, geographic, cultural- as a trigger of new horizons in the creative processes.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

Quillagua highlights Fernando Prats (1967) is a Chilean renowned artist, even do he resides in Spain his latest work has been strongly related with the landscape of his birth country. The extreme nature of this environment has activated the shape of work that feeds on on-site processes. Opening new senses as much for the place and for its own production.

From the Atacama Desert to Chaitén, he has worked with actions and interventions where he relates landscape and pictorial strategies causing the winding track of the wind, smoke, water, volcanic ashes, to be captured on paper and smoked glass surfaces. From this exercises, photographs, audiovisual proposals, “paintings” and objectual pieces are derived that are related with several montages.

In 2011, the author was the national representative in the 54th Biennial of Venice. There he installed Gran Sur, that included pieces captured in Chaitén; images and materials gathered from his actions in settlements such as Curepto, Cobquecura, Lota and Dichato, when they were just affected by the earthquake; As well as the registry of a work in the Chilean Antarctica, where he contrasted the silent vastness of the place with a phrase that gleamed warm and shone under the neon light effect: “Men wanted for a hazzardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, Safe-return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success”. That was the announcement published in a British newspaper by the Irish man Ernest Shackleton that invited to an exploration of this continent. Prats once again aimed to the power of our geography.

To Quillagua, the artist arrived invited within the concept of “residence”, which implied to stay in the place, make a work in progress and activate several bonds with the context. The phrase that convinced him was “the driest place on Earth”.

Because he was coming out of Antarctica, site with great water density, he found interesting the situation of geographic extremes. He had been before in Antofagasta (he worked in the area of La Portada for The Triennial of Visual Arts of Chile 2009), but he did not know this Aymaran settlement.

He relates that a series of condition made it even more interesting yet, related to archeological patrimony, the native culture, geologic phenomenon, the presence of meteorites on the valley, the experience of time and wind in

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the landscape and the dramatic situation of its inhabitants in the last years: “Because of this, the first thing we did was to perform exercises with them, using the water polluted by the mining companies as a manifest, as complain and protest.

There where these different sessions related to the reflection of water, where around 30 participated. The idea was to gather the town-folks to manifest through certain works. We placed polluted water on a fountain. People would reflect themselves and took a picture whether by photography or video as a kind of negative from bottom to top. From the depths of the water we tried to capture with characteristic faces of town”, he explains.

Acción Quillagua was a filled work that lasted six days and where he worked with bodies from the museum and with other ones found, printing the bound’s pigments on several surfaces: “we walked around several times the structure of a graveyard and we found handled bones. The place was already been looted. The idea was to work with this image; to make evident the situation, make visible the condition of the mummies exhibited in the museum. Because of the effect of the sun the bones were brittle. We worked then rubbing on smoked paper, dropping the bones’ sand a white pigment that marked its figure on the support”.

Finally, he worked inside a crater where once again he deal with water and smoke, registering founded skulls, on water and smoke surfaces, and with two inhabitants of Quillagua that went down to write their names on smoked pages. “The idea was to aim to the dimension of the world on this specific place, besides of the crater compared to the size of a kid and an adult”.

Throughout a series of actions, the artist referred to the landscape experience, the concept of direness and resistance, looking to manifest “how this oasis in Atacama Desert is affected by mining and how a town disappears. From a thousand inhabitants, Quillagua got to a hundred, due to the pollution of the Loa River”.

Pamela Canales and Francisco Vergara are young artist, from the formation capsules, that works in this residence. How was the experience?

The encounter was very interesting. I explained them the methodology, how you get to a place, what for, how to engage it and develop a project that finishes in a work. It was very encouraging, having in mind that there are no artists from places in Antofagasta. I can see that the city has some kind of scene. Something is happening from the collective (SE VENDE) and from Dagmara Wyskiel. It’s a catalyst. That’s why it is key for the possibility to improve.

possibility to go into places that exists in Chile and that are completely alien, complex, for the dimensions they have, the environment and those extreme conditions. I think that these places encourage us to reflect in ways that can make certain art operations to be more bonding, consistent, and not centralized in Santiago. I believe that in this specific case, Antofagasta has the capability to active a residence place with huge imaginative potential.

Carolina Lara (Concepción-Chile)

How was the work process in the residence?

The residence is a work where further knowledge of the place is to obtain, real closeness. This generates activities related to use in a sense of whole, to resolve during work what the territory offers. Here it was to confront with a place with huge living historic burden. You have to be swift reflection, to use it with sense. The criterion on about what to do is given by the place itself. From the arts, the interest to manifest and explain a problem, discovering in Quillagua that people has been submissive towards a reality that cannot be changed.

This was subtly shown in the final piece. When working with the place, is not about generating noise, but absolutely the opposite. To conclude with specific work, to confront and take to the limit the capability of conducting our own piece.

In general it was a very good experience. Interesting for my work and above all because of the possibility of uplifting the place.

How you took these in situ operations to an exposition montage in Biblioteca Viva?

Being a very small room, I conceived it as an exercise were to define a specific part, putting together a series of drawings, Quillagua’s map confronted to Antarctica and the action on Elephant isle to extrapolate climatically; and a sort of cast made from a mummy found in the graveyard.

What did you think of Quillagua as a place for working and residence for artists?

It is interesting to idea of using Quillagua not only as a platform for artists, but as some kind of epicenter where creators, intellectuals and theorists can gather. It is the

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N.N. Night and Fog The performance NN is based on the “Night and fog decree” or Hitler’s “Decreto Nacht und Nebel”, also “NN decree”, as reference to its particular way of working and in the application of forced people disappearing techniques, base of the sinister Operación Condor that the southern nation dictatorships applied, with a toll of more than 50 thousand victims in Latin America, being the Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet one of the main protagonist.

My work is generally based on exposing the mechanics of power and, in this particular action, I wanted to bury symbolically on the driest and loneliest place on Earth, which in fact is the perfect graveyard due to the hardships of living in the desert, the military badges that speak of honor and bravery, but that are just symbols for death and suffering.

The medals and their banners are given during the curse of perfecting killing techniques. Its odd to me for death and suffering to be symbolized through the color on this badges, so as an artist I proposed myself to represent and destroy them as an act of forgetting and remembering. It was an act of purification on death through art. Nevertheless, something odd happened, because at the moment of painting the badges I found harmony, delicate and beautiful, on the color sequences that have given me a new approach on my pictorial work. It was a metamorphosis from the main initial sense of the action towards a more universal path and of enlightenment about the existence of the realms of darkness.

The artist works with light (the colors that derive from it) and his task is to preserve it, keep the fire of life burning upon the sinister territory of death. It was to snatch the most precious trophy of the conqueror, the tyrant, represented on every bar of decoration, of arrogance upon life; and in the flags of the participant authors, destroy it and condemn them to oblivion.

The NN performance was also a test of resistance towards power, of defiance to it’s cruelty, of historical payback for those thousands of victims that where tortured and disappeared, and above all for all that multitude of silenced voices asking to manifest themselves against destruction insensibility. In a personal aspect, it was also an endurance test due to the harshness of terrain, whether being political, geographic and social; and a test of detachment and loyalty to the purpose of the action, because it consisted on destroying

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of product of hundred of ours of labor, after working our and snatching time from night and exhaustion.

At the moment of knowing about the testimonies of the survivors and their families on the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, I had the absolute conviction of doing what I’ve done, despite of the deeply politically incorrect action in the country where I was on.

Luis Fernando Arango (Manizales-Colombia)

Up the hill Sin Fin (Endless) consists on an in progress artistic project, that boards the landscape problematic in front of contemporaneity, using interventions, installations, performances and videos.

During the residence in Quillagua, The Driest Place on Earth, I performed on a meteorite crater found in the desert.

There I descended to the bottom of the hole, filming the immensity of the landscape. When on the deepest part of the crater, I decided to dig even further the big hole. Get even deeper. It is like this that I dug with my hands until I got a longitudinal d e p t h for my body. Then I performed a burial.

The sensitive practice overcame what is conceptual, which stood frozen.

The experience turned into portrait on the photographic image. In the gesture I transform on advance in the picture. ...a curious action: I don’t stop mimicking myself and its because of that every time that I took pictures of myself (or allow me to take them), an inexorable feeling of inauthenticity strikes me. Ideally, the photograph (that that is in my intention) represents that subtle moment on which I am not object nor subject, nut a subject that feels its becoming into an object: so I live a micro death experience: I truthfully turn into a specter.

(R. Barthes. Camera Lucida) At the moment of standing up, I feel little. The universe is relative. The artistic gesture gains significance. The return walk consists in a subjective filming of the ascension with tiredness. Many feelings appear during this pilgrimage. From atop I think I may have left something behind.

Quillagua is an apparently silent place, with which evokes sense. Art is enhanced there.

Roxana Ramos (Salta-Argentina)

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Minimalistic Ritual Círculo de protección (Protection Circle) was an intervention performed in the Quillagua landscape and was characterized by the simplicity of the action, working as a milestone. One of the core ideas of this work was to produce a place we could feel as ours. A salt circle surrounding me, to protect me, was the image I had in mind when and the action that I did. In a formal and symbolic point of view, I just captured by the circle as a form that makes us think in nature’s cycles, the rounded of some processes. I took the salt as prime material for the drawing, because it seemed as an element compatible with the idea of the action, and that worked well in metaphorical terms with the Quillagua landscape. I think that salt, as a mineral element dialogues harmoniously with the desert, drought and wind. It was an alien element for the environment, but part of it blending in naturally. I also found interesting to generate the gesture of protection in a hostile environment, characterized by the adversity that the looting by the contemporary mining industry. I think that you have to point out places to make them ours, signify them to understand them, generate gestures in the landscape to mark situations. This intervention in Quillagua worked as a symbolic action that also had a political interest, based on the necessity to reflect on the natural and cultural possibilities to build environments habitable through art.

Mariano Gusils (Salta-Argentina)

An aye looking at another To Quillagua I traveled to observe how an artist worked in an environment. But this trip began with a previous decision, that was of revising the view that different artists articulate from their work on different territories on the country: this is the objective of the television show Imagined Territories, that this time took me to Quillagua. The matrix for this TV show, awarded by the National Television Board and realized during 2012, it is that of a traveling painter that visits the territory and represents it on his work. But on this occasion, ours, its the one of a visual device, a cinematic eye that observes an artist working in a territory and reveals it from its own perspective.

It is so how I have also traveled to Iquique, Puerto Montt and Castro. On every place I have observed artists that work on subjects related to the environment on which they live.

In this particular case I have traveled to Quillagua to see how Fernando Prats, internationally renowned Chilean visual artist, performs an intervention on The Driest Place on Earth.

One of the different aspects of this trip is that Fernando does not normally live on Quillagua, he is a traveler who comes to realize a residence and to explore the place to make an intervention. It turns out to be even more relevant to look at that foreign eye in this so far and apparently desolated place.

What’s what happened between Fernando and Quillagua?

What we see on the show is that the view of the artist goes to the people, the inhabitants of the place; Fernando looks at them through the reflection of water that has contaminated them, looks at them reuniting the ages of the youngest and oldest inhabitants, writing down their names in a crater in the middle of nowhere, and also looks to their ancestors brutally scattered throughout the land. This is something I find incredibly potent and relevant: I am on front of a man that has worked on different art projects in Chile and the world, and that arriving to Quillagua what looks at is the people and gives value to the resistance of the people on staying in this harsh place and devastated by current mining.

1Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922), one of the main explorers of the Antarctic

continent that a century ago published an ad in a British newspaper, inviting men to “a hazardous voyage” and of a “safe return doubtful”, that Fernando Prats has used in neon letters in some interventions in natural and urban landscapes.

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Fernando leaves and we stay, talking to the people and observing their every day; they are still there. We see the capacity of overcoming that the artist speaks about, but we also see them living happily despite of everything, doing their every day things and in love with the place. Through them we see the beauty of the land in contrast with a daunting fate.

We also see Gran Sur, a previous work of Fernando, and we compare it with Quillagua. So we see the boldness of Shackleton1 in relation with boldness of the people of Quillagua, and from there we started to look how was the original way of populating a territory that is currently threatened by the devastating mining that is being done in Chile.

Rodrigo Cepeda (Valparaiso-Chile)

Bodies in the womb Achieving to make emerge the dormant creativity and feeling, enclosed within a group of artists, and transform all that into a collective action, is not an easy task. A connection between them and a synchronization of their subliminal perceptions is required for the materialization of the work.

The landscape intervention done by Karen Perry (Mexico), Marisa Caichiolo (Argentina/USA), Dagmara Wyskiel (Poland/Chile) and ArcĂĄngel Constantini (Mexico) on July 15th 2012 in one of the craters that surround Quillagua, established itself as an important precedent for all the participants, interesting from the point of view of the experimental a spontaneous process this generates.

The fact that the artists shared time and space in a long residence in Antofagasta, previously to this trip to the desert, helped to the synchronization I mentioned before.

The fusion of the bodies inside the crater, stuck to the blazing ground and surrounded by an infinite landscape without horizon, it immediately generated, almost simultaneously, and in silence for all the participants to assume fetal position, almost touching the bottom of Earth with their bellies, as if connected to mother Earth with an invisible umbilical cord. From that moment, the crater became into a gigantic womb that held the bodies, irradiating with warmth and protection.

The collective subconscious contained at the moment the spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution.

Paradoxically in this intervention on the Quillagua crater, the most heterogeneous elements (four artists from different nationalities) and the mass of subliminal perceptions, the managed to obtain an encounter with the prodigal treasure of all what was deposited in the course of the life of the ancestors, whom by their existence contributed to the differentiation of the species. They achieved the divine convection of all that has life in this planer, becoming whole.

Marisa Caichiolo (Los Angeles-USA)

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HEAVY MACHINERY

Thought Cranes

Some attempts of insertion in rocky ground Lets contextualize. In Antofagasta, a city built on top of pure soil rich on minerals, thriving economically yet limping culturally, the historical system of values based on the purely numerical, added to the black out imposed by the dictatorship and from which it has never recuperated, has left the subject of reflection out of the relevant matters of city living. The uningeneering of criteria and the need for insertion of other paradigms, not even suspected by pragmatic thought, lead us to bring an exhibit of performance from Concepción, language almost nonexistent in the north, and at the margin of the economic mechanisms and arts markets. For such reasons, to which is added the work on the territory that we realized as SE VENDE collective we invited Fernando Prats to perform in The Driest Place on Earth an extreme residence, experience to the limit due to the disconnection, absorbency and significance of the contextual elements it demanded. With La RED, we built a new instance of exchange of ideas and collaborative experiences, generated from Chilean, Argentinian and Colombian provinces, that we share with the public throughout a montage and a conference.

We achieved the arrival of the international exhibition Art+Politics+Environment to the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, to generate a platform for direct learning and interaction with contemporary creators of the international scene Key elements and at the same time the most visible among these actions were the exposition events that had a big audience from which can be conceived as the mining capital.

Parallel to the exhibits, and with the goal of installing formation platforms on contemporary arts, we invited diverse actors in the context of each of their projects, to dictate workshops and conferences from their view and experience.

These thought cranes were the most complex elements to install in the existing scene, because being different to an inauguration; they lacked of any neither entertaining nor social elements and demanded more commitment with knowledge.

From this committed stand to fortify the local critical mass, we have invited Carolina Lara to dictate the workshop for cultural communicators Cultural Journalism: new challenges and ways of educating, and the open conference Curators and Curatory on the current art scene. Julio Pastor Mellado along Fernando Prats, confronted on a public conference their works Gran Sur and Acción Quillagua. In the context of the RED encounter the conference Latent Territories - independent initiatives on the local art scenes, Argentina/Colombia/Chile. The project with

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the highest educational profile was the 1st Contemporary Art Week, that included the conference of the curator Marisa Caichiolo and of the museographer Jaime Delfín, on international management and the creation of the Building Bridges International Art Exchange Foundation; the talk on the project Invisible Forest, realized in the Arctic by Andrea Juan; forum with Karen Perry From manual to industrial and back; video conference The revolution of the Egyptian people related to the work exposed by the artist Mohamed Abou El Naga; and the workshop Creation processes with low tech elements, of Arcángel Constantini.

In this chapter write: Carolina Lara (journalist and independent art critic, Justo Pastor Mellado (theoric and curator, head of Parque Cultural Valparaiso), Marcos Figueroa (artist and theorist, academic in the Arts School of the National University of Tucumán) and Nicole Barrios (cultural communicator), expressing their views on what has been shared in the eye of the indications of a local scene, that as Mellado defines is the artistic medium in Antofagasta.

“The analysis and opinions of the participants were intense, leaving the feeling that the discussion was just starting”, states Lara, after the talk on the part of the curator, inserting the expectation of a growth on the demand of instances for reflection and learning. Mellado thinks that the most important is the creation of a focused core: “This thirty people represented the critical mass of the beginning of a contemporary institutionalism, whose strengthening depended on the collaboration with other scenes”. Figueroa shares with us the conviction of the need for us to protect the way of working of La RED: “The values of this last encounter lays on the fact of having established a work scheme that -beyond contingency- could give continuity to the projects”.

“How many people could have understood the pieces from an extra-esthetic point of view?”, finally asks Barrios, pointing out in her text the absence of institutionalism in education and formation.

It seems to be paradoxical that we go back and speak about numbers. But there are this small but essential positive quantities (above zero), that can slowly provoke a qualitative change on the local landscape.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

Image from Acción Quillagua (fragment); Fernando Prats

Concepción on tour From five or more years ago, from some cities of the country, a contemporary art movement can be perceived, on its beginnings perhaps, not really prolific, but with a character of its own. Its characterized by the emerging of collectives or associative platforms that work in an independent, self-managed and autonomous way, aiming towards contemporary practices and establishing links with other regions in an out of Chile.

The invitation extended to Concepción by the Agenda project, built a significant bridge between the capital of the Bío Bío region and Antofagasta, being a journey that touched its protagonists and had diverse reaches. The exposition Rebelled Bodies, performance from Concepción, with works of Natascha De Cortillas, Guillermo Moscoso, Alperoa (Álvaro Pereda Roa) and Luis Almendra, was a core activity that gathered or the first time relevant artists from that city, and that define a recent scene.

The first challenge was to imagine a curatorial that could represent what has been done here in the matter of contemporary arts, focusing in an especially determinant and transverse language to many expositors from the area. In the Multiuse Room of Biblioteca Viva, photographs, video and photonovel were united, diverse formats and materials. Key works of the itinerary of each artist, registers or pieces made from recent action traveled from a regional capital to another, including unedited proposals. The result was an austere but determinant montage, that countered imaginariums where the essential has been the presence of the author’s body, resignifying of the landscape or places of the city, with proposals that interpolate the audience in a context of precarity: the artistic system in Concepción, but with an expressive power capable of not needing the complexity of the institutional or of the circuit.

Thanks to the backup from the Artistas del Acero Cultural Corporation, there could also be present in Antofagasta two of the expositors, adding a program that included the contact with the public. De Cortillas and Moscoso participated on the montage and realized performances that powerfully caught the attention of the audience.

The first artist presented a version of the series Chile amasa su

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pan (Chile bakes its bread), initiated in 2005, and developed in different places of the Bío Bío region. So it has constructed an itinerary where she relates with the spaces and the audience, assuming the part of a baker. In austere scenery, the actions and elements she uses are symbolic. In the context of the exposition, the lines drawn on the floor with flour, the writing of texts on bread bags, plus the delivering of objects and food to the audience, put together a ceremony that carried with resonances to the autobiography, the mother language, referring as well to the subject of political frontiers and the situation of drug traffic.

Moscoso developed Mi mesa está vacía...en este último almuerzo (My table is empty...in this my last lunch), a video performance that remembered people who died of HIV. In the room some of his constants were noted, the theatricality, the subject of memory, the presence of an alter ego- The Indulgent Angel – that assumed its own pain as well as the others’, throughout a series of rituals where the twisted gestures and the different situations, meant transmutation, the clinical feeding, the sacrifice, the repartition of bread o the experience of traveling. The character would place itself along a table -or shrine- where food and diverse objectual resources, such as flowers, pieces of the Chilean flag, earth and water, kept personal and collective connotations.

Both artists also developed a joined art action in the middle of the desert, that -at the moment of this edition- remains unedited.

As a specialized journalist on contemporary art, I offered to the public the conference Curatory and Curators in the current art scene. In Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, aimed to define the part of a key actor on the distribution of pieces and practices in such a diverse landscape as the contemporary. The encounter had a bonus: the participation of the artists from Concepción, with an approach to their own work, through images and open dialogue with the audience, where several were local artists and participants of the Formation Capsules of the Agenda project. The conversation extended for several minutes after finishing the encounter. It was no doubtlessly motivating for this young people to know the experience of two artists of a regional scene that lacks of specialized exhibition places, of collecting, market and instances for distribution, proving at the same time the advantages and disadvantages of having an art school, thing that is nonexistent in Antofagasta.

The links among some artists and cultural agents of both cities was already existent, but this trip allowed them to be strengthen and broad them, with the unanimous conviction that to develop certain cultural dynamics in the regions is no longer necessary to go through the middle of the country.

A whole morning activity was the workshop: Cultural Journalism: new challenges and ways of educating, where nearly fifteen local journalists arrived. With a broad assistance of independent professionals, the local media was missed, even more when the critics landed right on the treatment that the media gives to cultural subjects.

From my personal experience on different platforms and projects, working as specialized journalist, but also as art critic, curator and producer, the objective of the encounter was to make understand -from the view of journalism- that a big contribution can be given to the art system in the regions, to cultural distribution and to the attempt to educate on contemporary art. Especially when there are no historical conditions for settling on mass media that has restricted the space given to culture. The analysis and opinions of the participants were intense, giving the sensation that the discussion was just starting. There’s much to be shared among communicators of so distant regions, where the work conditions seems to be the same.

1 2

3 4

Carolina Lara (Concepción-Chile)

5 1 Record of the actions in the desert, Natascha de Cortillas and Guillermo Moscoso 2 Workshop Cultural Journalism: new challenges and ways of educating 3 Performance Chile Amasa su Pan, Natascha de Cortillas 4 Conference Curatory and curators in the Current Art’s Scene 5 Exposition Rebelled Bodies: performance in Concepción, photographs of the performance of Alperoa 6 Performance My table is empty...in this my last lunch, Guillermo Moscoso

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Residence to the limit I remember that the first conversation that I had with Dagmara Wyskiel about the possibility of a residence for artists in Quillagua, was in 2008, in the context of the preparation for the Triennial of Chile. What I proposed to myself at the moment of creating such project were two things: strengthen the local scenes and the realization of archives. One needed the other. There’s no writing without contemporary art’s archives. There is no strengthening with out a double institutional relationships policy that contemplates a dynamic between inner and outer fiction.

Before I proceed I must make a point. There isn’t in Antofagasta another effective policy of development of visual arts other than the one Dagmara Wyskiel has established, having to confront the opposition of the own local cultural authorities.

In this terrain, making the difference between the practices of producing art and art production. It’s the practices that install their own formal autonomy and the relative demands to the construction of audience.

So well: from this practices, the internal and outer fictions have to do with two initiatives that now I will describe. The first one, deals con the policy of relationships with close foreign scenes; the second, boars matters of methodological investment with inner scenes. This is the way of articulating the presence in Antofagasta, of artists from Tucumán and Salta, as a corresponding scene, lead by Marco Figueroa. And on the other side, of placing the realization of the residence in Quillagua, that involved the presence of the artist Fernando Prats. This, to say, fulfills the expectations that the very Dagmara Wyskiel proposes to herself: to combine an external strategy with an internal one. And, in this field, her efforts turn out to be more consistent than those of an official agency.

On my first visits to Antofagasta, what I perceived as a product of the field analysis was the nonexistence of a fit scene. It is to say, that in contemporary terms, what there is, it’s an indication of practices of institutionalization, but not of a scene. And these must make way through in an environment that unequally shares with late-modern-pre-contemporary practices. With this scenario, realizing the residence in Quillagua is something that overcomes in a complex way the tolerance of the local space. The existence of university studies of architecture and design, and the teaching of art in establishments supposedly oriented to work on the platform

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of “artistic education”, are not a guarantee for any rigorous production and does not lead to any relational consistence whatsoever. This way, the initiative of an organic autonomy proposed from a specific practice is the only possible guarantee for a center for the developing of contemporary art.

I hope that the difference that I propose between artistic practice and artistic management to be noticed, because its fundamental to insist on the prevalence of the first one over the other. The failure of some experiences is that the artistic practice is submitted by artistic management to its logic of guilt and punishment through impact. There is no more impact study for art practices than the consistence of its own diagrams. Management is the new public relations’ science, as much in the governmental and company terrains.

Above all, in those that offend with their late awareness of corporate responsibility, accelerating the covering of their communicative misshapen via the funding of highly distracting operations. It’s the norm.

The residence in Quillagua, as it was proposed by Dagmara Wyskiel during our first conversations in 2008, had as a purpose to connect extreme experiences, directly borderline.

In that way, she spoke of inviting to Quillagua, The Driest Place on Earth, artists native to Norway, Sweden and Finland.

They had to come from the coldest parts of the planet. I remembered these audiovisual expeditions to the gulf of Botnai where Jean Rouch and Raul Ruiz participated. In the meantime, a Swedish TV crew recorded a report on the work of an icebreaker ship.

Then, the Triennial of Chile took place. At least the biggest achievement was establishing relationships between the indications of institutionalism in Antofagasta and the scene in Salta/Tucumán. The result has been the impulse of a conscience of collaboration that forces the northern space to measure the reach of their relationship with Arica and Iquique, because if its not dealt in a macro regional way the possibility of development of a contemporary art center, in tight bond with the esthetic effects of consistent social practices the only thing that will be established is the retrograde system of a late modernity, maladjusted and incestuous.

Dagmara Wyskiel herself has had to elaborate a collaboration policy with expository instances from the south of the country, that have lead her to develop experiences in Chiloé, Concepción and Valparaíso. This has been an affirmative

process for the indications formerly refereed, that for an adaptation for the scene must be confronted to the experiences on other spaces where similar indications are manifested. At least in Concepción and Valparaiso they can be recognized as scenes, yet fragile, while in other cities, included Antofagasta, there are indications that consolidate in relation to the articulation with other indications.

In this context Dagmara Wyskiel knows the work of Fernando Prats, who at this point has already participated of the 54th Biennial of Venice. We are talking about 2011. And of the odyssey that meant the trip of Fernando Prats to Elephant Island (Antarctic) aboard the icebreaker Viel. Having taken care of the Parque Cultural de Valparaiso in November 2010, I immediately embraced the initiative to exhibit the work that was installed in Elephant Island. What was possible in May 2012, date in which Fernando Prats performed the residence in Quillagua. It was then when Dagmara Wyskiel invited me to participate on the closure of the residence.

It was not a surprise to find myself in front an assistance of thirty people, interested in a work of which they knew almost nothing. It not about distributing art but exposing a core of informative complexities that demand multiple connections. It was not a surprise, because this thirty people represented the critical mass of the indication of contemporary institutionalism, which strengthening depends on the collaboration with other scenes and indications. In this way, the residence was conceived as a methodological investment anchored on the work of Fernando Prats and its ethnographic extensions. Its to be said, in his scheduled retentions as a seismographer of local culture submitted to exceptional situations, that out into crisis the relationships between “nature” and “culture”, in the symbolic frontiers and material in the handling of the waters.

From the excess of water to the almost total lack of it, a piece can register the tensions (un)attached to the endurance of the human body. Ice and dryness conserve the remnants of Culture. Wild museography of amateur historians as officialized looters, of looters as pirate historians, of officials of the culture of covering, does nothing but make shallow the patrimony and cover up a local existence thanks to differed and compensatory subsidies. Only from an art practice and of radical experiences of indications of institutionalism it’s possible to reconstruct a work policy that realizes both objectives that are already present in our 2008 conversation:

strengthening local scenes and archive production. What is at stake in this residence and in those that will come, is the possibility of working on the artistic practices as an anticipated memoir of a complex local history of imaginary production of territory.

Justo Pastor Mellado (Valparaiso-Chile)

Not every road leads to Rome

La RED: an organization of artists beyond and within of the own borders To be from a province is also to be foreign in countries like this where federal is a fiction, even more in this culture of simulacrums. To live in a province, is frequently, to live in the margins when the “interior” is another “externalization”. The logic of the dominance models of this duality center-periphery, based on exploitation, exclusion and demonization of the “other”, was generally determined -among other factors- by the laws of power as there are given within the concentration paradigms and the conditions of territorial closeness or distance.

open up in different possible directions. To rhizomatizate the linking schemes is, definitely, to break with the traditional incestuous processes that characterize our local scenes, dismount the colonizing internal policies of countries and to contribute to that scenes so they constitute new centers.

La RED propose to work in this loopholes and presumptions that were present since its genesis.

In this way, we can affirm that currently not every road leads to Rome, or that this expression has lost its former power.

This schemes of circulation that still denote our railways and highways begin to live along other models that disperse and make transverse the world of exchange. Said in another way, not every road leads to Buenos Aires and Santiago or to any other of our capitals. Maybe the roads between provinces with those centers are stopping with being straight lines to

As a fact, this geopolitical vision and its relation in the field of esthetics were key materials in the planning of the Antofagasta Project encouraged by The Triennial of Chile in 2009, as of the ideological axis of the chain of actions1 that were registered since them to this date. In that opportunity, the objective was focused on the creation of infrastructure to collaborate in the construction of a local scene, taking advantage of the favorable conjunction that the triennial offered form the political and economic point of view. The project gathered coordinated precedent experiences with this principles as much in Antofagasta as in the Argentinian provinces and finally proposed different axis of work among there were: the development of a residence, and exposition on the Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta (Argentina) and the National Arts and Culture Council of Antofagasta (Chile), managements in pro of the artistic education in a university level (Catholic University of the North), managements for the creations of a museum and finally the organization of a network composed of artists from both countries. Among this activities, the exposition and the formation of La RED worked very well, given that the first one accomplished the objectives of distributing and connecting artists from both countries; as for the second, logical consequence of the last one; constituted the right tool for the vehiculization of projects from the very capitals of each sector. Differently, objectives like the formation of an arts career and a museum, showed to be more difficult due probably the string dependence on bureaucratic decisions and not always coincidental with the requirements and local emergencies.

1Precedent Actions: 2009 - Encounter in Salta. Act of inauguration in the Museum of Contemporary Art (September 12th 2009) and video-conference with Justo Pastor Mellado.

Visit to the Museum of Fine Arts of Salta and artists workshops. Collective action in La Guarda workspace. Encounter in Tucumán. Visits to Taller C with presentation of works. Worktable in La Punta artspace, with the assistance of local artists. Tucumán.

artists from Antofagasta, Tucumán and Salta. Salta, March 2012.

2012 – Encounter of La RED that included: 1) The conference Latent Territories- independent initiatives in the local art’s scene. Argentina/Colombia/Chile.

2) The exposition Applied Utopias, a Pocket Manual, in the Multiuse Room, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta.

3) The interventions in Quillagua of Luis Fernando Arango (Museo del Barrio, Colombia), Mariano Gusils and Roxana Ramos (both from La Guarda, Salta).

Currently, this conditions of subordination tend to reorient towards the crisis of this paradigms and as regional policies are reactivated, democratic processes mature and operative autonomy is achieved through new technologies -especially in communication- that allow to broaden the game to new economic and cultural transactions, beyond the frontiers of states. Accordingly, the disputes that the provinces have been struggling with historically are actualized and re signified in the face of the renovation of concepts as frontier and territory from which belonging or not acquires directions that have grown to not being unidirectional. In virtue of this, the old maps that allowed to perceive the games of power over which a hegemonic development subsisted, begging to be redrawn in front of the emergency of new linking contingencies in network.

2010 - Presentation of Ana Maria Avendaño to assist to the seminar on daguerreotypes dictated by Darío Albornoz. Tucumán, February 2010.

2012 - Encounter in Salta. La Guarda, La Punta and SE VENDE with independent

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Currently, La RED is a factual non profit international organization, formed by visual artists2 that collaborative work to contribute the strengthening of the cultural processes inside the region, generating and distributing projects that set the bases for the exchange with other regions.

In this context, the new Antofagasta encounter organized by the SE VENDE collective has as a purpose of deepening this process of empowering initiated in 2009 and for that it a group of activities have been thought, that include such things as a conference on which ideas according to contemporary arts and their conditions of production on each region, to an exhibition of pieces and finally the interventions of artists that had as physical and symbolical framing the deserted landscape of The Driest Place on Earth, on the shore of the meteorites craters in Quillagua3.

The value if this last encounter lays on the fact of having proposed a work scheme that -beyond the contingencywould give continuity to the project, thinking on the support given to the debate as much in the fields of esthetics as in what belongs to cultural policies.

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Marcos Figueroa (Tucumán-Argentina)

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1. Polyphony 4 %, video, Luis F. Arango, Museo del Barrio (Manizales, Colombia).

2. Flock, barbwire installation on wall (fragment) Marcos Figueroa, Taller C (Tucumán, Argentina) 3. Fragments of Minimal, diptych / digital photograph, Marino Gusils, La Guarda (Salta, Argentina) 4. Applied Utopias, a Pocket Manual. Multiuse Room, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 5. Conference Latent Territories- independent initiatives in the local arts scen, Argentina /Colombia /Chile. Journalism School, Catholic University of the North.

6. Topographie. Drawings - carved objects, Ana Benedetti, La Guarda (Salta, Argentina)

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La RED is conformed by La Guarda (Collective from Salta, Argentina, formed by Ana Benedetti, Roxana Ramos and Mariano Gusils), La Punta (Collective from Tucumán, Argentina, formed by Pablo Guiot, Luciana Guiot, Luis Carrizo, Pablo Córdoba and Emiliano D’Amato Mateo), The SE VENDE collective (from Antofagasta, Chile, formed by Dagmara Wyskiel, Christian Núñez and a group of local emergent artists), TALLER C (Contemporary Arts Lecture, of the Art School of the National University of Tucumán, Argentina (formed by Marcos Figueroa, Carlota Beltrame and Geli González) and in this opportunity, came as a guest Luis Fernando Arango (Museo del Barrio, Manizales, Colombia).

3Quillagua, settlement located in the region of Antofagasta, about 280 kilometers north of the northern capital.

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Shades and possibilities Antofagasta, region filled with possibilities, in the last decade has developed a broad spectacles schedule in the city, these thanks to the investment and opening of new spaces.

Nevertheless it turns out impossible to notice that the tendency goes toward the massive and free, the spectacle, the entertaining, “the circus” -without the mean of looking down on this ambit of creation- and it is in such context, of few instances that respond to the need of critical exchange in terms of art, that the exposition Art+Politics+Environment was realized in the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, on July 2012. The participation, the recognition of patrimony, education, and arts and culture distribution, are the engine of this cultural center that accepted the challenge of exposing contingency subjects, giving entrance to a new way of questioning the world we lie in, through contemporary art.

SE VENDE Collective, Platform of Contemporary Art, being consequent with current policies, like the creation of national and international links for the circulation of works, of their creators and of course of knowledge, a key card was played in the history of visual arts of Antofagasta in this exposition.

As managers and communication bridges between ADC & Building Bridges and Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, this cultural center that is two years old, thrusts on that culture is a collective gesture that need communication spaces where men and women -as cultural being- gather with the ideas and experiences of others.

Here lays the importance of these cultural exchange platforms, committed with public formation. Marisa Caichiolo, curator of the exposition, expressed that this pretended the modification of attitudes, to generate awareness through analytic lectures. Nevertheless, how does the audience achieves an analytic lecture with the lack of preparation that our society has toward art? A great challenge is the one that ADC & Building Bridges took at the moment of deciding to mount this exposition, in this desert, filled with possibilities, that advances slow and steady.

Going back to the subject of the lack of education on art (that we suffer thanks to “brilliant” educational policies) the media in Antofagasta will play an important part of this process.

Nonetheless, they don’t, because -having the possibility of educating audiences with quality contents- they do not cross the informative frontier, and it is that in this region questioning is scary, especially if art, culture and environment are discussed, the editorials prefer to plead lunacy, limit

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themselves to the news worthy and feel that they did something, “I posted the information”. As Chuck Palahniuk would said: “that wound on you palate that could heal only if you would stop touching it with the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t”. That’s the situation, a lack of commitment in the labor of distribution.

In Art+Politics+Environment the artists exposed in formats where the contents and the way of boarding it kept the seal of the cultural origin of each creator (Argentina, Egypt, Mexico and Poland). In an independent way to this, the themes also touched us as a society. The political and environmental struggles were fundamental subjects at the moment of questioning globalization. The techniques used, such as video art, photography, installation, electronic art and calligraphy, had different lectures, which accomplished the basic objective of provoking something. Nonetheless, for the audience to have a more open mind to analysis, more of these initiatives are needed in the city, plus the possibilities of accessing to expositions. I go back to the lack of education, motive for which we are not used to contemplate, read, analyze, digest, and debate art.

In definitive, whereas the exposition had success and great participation I still wonder how many people left with something different in their hearts. How many may have understood the pieces from and extra-esthetic point of view. Independent of the media not informing as they should, or that art is not integrated as it should on educational policies, we reach a point in which we can’t be always blaming it on others. As citizens of a globalized world we most take charge of the lack of conciseness and what better way than art, a way of questioning imposed policies. In front of this filled with shades view, an infinite world of possibilities is breaking through cultural exchange platforms, that -despite rain or sleet- believe on their work and bet on shaking minds, broaden horizons, get other visions closer, familiarize, introduce, wake the taste fro provoking Nicole Barrios (Antofagasta-Chile)

Poster for the Art+Politics+Environment exhibition and 1st Contemporary Art Week

OUT OF PLACE

Scene in expansion It has being said in some text present on this book that the 2012 was especially intense for the SE VENDE collective. Besides the National Arts Grant’s project Agenda, the exhibitions, encounters and residences, that this platform commanded in Antofagasta, the trip could have been a constant practice that allowed to go far beyond the local territory to materialize links that before were virtual, concreting projects that once started to be built via Skype, and emails; reaching new places and institutions, and artists, curators and art agents form other localities and nations, that have navigated the same currents of contemporary practices and autonomous management.

The periplous of SE VENDE allowed to establish nets through Santiago, Villa Alegre, Coliumo, Villarica and cities of Colombia, Argentina and Poland, expanding the possibilities of creation, support, reflection and growth with interdisciplinary work strategies, experimental and associative. This Out of Place turn out to be the engine for a local scene whose body is not necessarily the regional instances but the crossing with other realities: modus operandi that has already being applied by other artists in different cities of the country, that tend to build nexus not precisely with the big epicenters of art o great institutions, but throughout frontiers and peers, with those authors or groups that represent certain synchronization whether they being political, cultural and affective.

We said that 2012 was very intense, generally thanks to the effort of the couple of Dagmara Wyskiel and Christian Núñez, the name SE VENDE was present in places like the Contemporary Arts Museum and Caja Caja Negra Visual Arts of Santiago; Casa Poli (place for artists in residence) en Coliumo, the Casona Solariega in Villa Alegre; the Museo del Barrio of Manizales; Casa Tres Patios in Medellin and Laagencia of Bogota. Through this periplous, actions as expositors were activated, workshops, residences, interventions, works with the audience and editorial exchanges, that involved authors and groups as the artist and director of Caja Negra, Victor Hugo Bravo, the polish actress Halina Chmielarz, the curator and gallerist Marisa Caichiolo from Los Angeles (USA), the museographer Jaime Delfín from Ensenada (Mexico), the art critic and journalist Carolina Lara, MÓVIL collective (Oscar Concha, Leslie Fernández, Dany Berczeller y Consuelo Saavedra) from Concepción, the curator Jorge Sepúlveda, the Experimental Arts School of Antofagasta and the Salvador Allende School of Santiago.

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Having assisted in January to the encounter of independent projects of contemporary arts Local+Visita, organized by MÓVIL in Concepción, is noticeable the participation of Pamela Canales in this activities Out of Place: the young artist was in charge of the presentation of SE VENDE in front of a concentrated audience composed mostly by art students and local artists, and the member of other collectives from Valparaíso, Santiago, Temúco and Concepción itself: Espacio G, Galería Callejera, Galería Daniel Morón, Arte y Crítica, Arts & Culture Laboratory, MESA 8, República Portátil and MÓVIL, the nine invited projects integrated an exhibition composed mainly by archive material, such as photographs, publications, posters, videos and conceptual maps, also in charge of the visiting representatives in the city.

Pamela Canales just entered SE VENDE in 2012, being part of a young generation that is already adopting as a reference some of the actions of the collective and arrives to enlarge its rows. Native to Concepción, she was the ideal representative for a key task on inter-regional interactions, and also symbolic: after that artists from the capital of Bío Bío region were present in Antofagasta in the exhibition Performance in Concepción (June – July 2012), by the first time in Antofagasta, this city located a thousand kilometers to the south. It dealt then with uniting the poles of cultural development on both extremes of the country, going over the capital, being cities that somehow are already connected, through the flux of workers that move from the fishing companies and lumber companies towards mining, historical emigrations, of common families and parallel realities marked by centralism.

Carolina Lara (Concepcion-Chile)

Pieta, second stage of the interdisciplinary project, Three Edges of Beauty, Halina Chmielarz and Dagmara Wyskiel, Salinas Grandes, Argentina, April 2012

Time export The Cultivo de Tiempo (Time Crops) project emerges from the utopic idea of growing and commercializing time as a valuable good, that responds to a high demand in an international scale, and to a market niche yet to find supplying. An experimental crop is installed with the objective of promoting the new product and to offer testing before introducing it to the market, to evaluate the preference of the consumers. The economic sustainability of the project is supported, because the sector where the biggest lack of time is the one with more resources. Finding ourselves in the initial stages of this initiative, that -doubtlessly- will democratize and pluralize for ever the access to time inserting it on the free market, we still don’t count with a processed or packaged product reason for which we replaced time in the testing in Antofagasta, Manizales, Medellin and Bogota with a product of similar qualities, but with a longer trajectory in the market: water.

To simulate its market viability an already existent form for applying to founding for innovative agriculture project was applied: TYPE ON INVESTMENT: Crops SPECIES TO BE GROWN: Time (aetatis) UTILITY: Time as a physical force allows ordering sequences of successes, establishing a past, present and future.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECIES: Diluent, irreversible, disposable, intangible, vital, common, cyclic and repetitive.

ORIGIN: There are different theories, among the scientific one predominates (Big Bang) and the ones related to a superior power. Definitive origin not proved.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION: A lack of time is detected to be a universal inconvenient, problem that confronts a lack of supplies with out real offers in the market. Constant acceleration and problems causes by the relativity deepen the necessity for free access to the different products that contain time.

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SYNTAX OF THE MARKET ANALYSIS: High demand on a global level, generalized and transverse.

FERTILIZERS: 100% human fertilizers.

PROCESSING: Chronological and accumulative.

MAIN CONSUMPTION: Life PARASITES: Multiple. Depending on the specific case, the main causes of malevolent attitudes are found in a domestic environment, associated to television, internet, and other domestic parasites. On a global scale predominates: work, conflicts, vices, ambitions and accelerated competitive system.

PACKAGING: According to the line of the product system will be developed, packaged in lapses, moments, and successes.

RECOMMENDATIONS: The rational and significant use of time is recommended. Its lost can cause anxiety and feelings of guilt, its ideal usage generate feelings of tranquility and order.

The first promotion of time was realized in the Municipal Beach of Antofagasta in November 2009, as intervention of public space with 600 clocks installed as plants. Near to the crops, the testing of the new product is made offered on this nine lines in the market: extra time, leisure, free, minimum, empty, intimate, for one, extra and eternal (only for wholesome buyers). The action includes the delivery of promotional material of the product.

In the summer of 2009- 2010, the crop is moved to Castro, where it was installed in the shape of South America in the beach of Nercón. In the whereabouts of the Modern Arts Museum of Chiloé the harvesting of made by picking the arms of the 600 clocks.

After detecting a high demand in Chile, the sales project of time is opened to international markets. On February 2012 we went to Colombia to evaluate the possible demand for our product in the main cities of that country. The tour was organized by the Museo del Barrio of Manizales and included testing and presentations in each city.

Manizales Testing: Boulevard El Cable and Bolivar Square Presentations: Museo del Barrio and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Caldas.

Medellín Testing: Bolivar Square and Botero Square Presentation: Casa Tres Patios, residences workspace

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Bogotá Testing: Lourdes Square and Bolivar Square Presentation: Laagencia, residences workspace The project was presented in parallel in video format in USA (Los Angeles Art Fair, 2011) and in Indonesia (North Art Space, Jakarta, 2011), which allowed us to evaluate the possibility of coming into these markets with the sale of time.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

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5 1 Time crops, Municipal Beach Antofagasta, November 2009.

2 Intervention with 600 clocks in Nercón, Chiloé, January 2011, aerial view.

3 Crops on the surrounding area of the Modern Arts Museum of Chiloé, January-March 2010.

4 Time tasting in the Cable Boulevard, Manizales, February 2012.

5 Tasting in Botero Square, Medellín, February 2012.

6 Tasting Bolivar Square, Bogotá, February 2012.

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War or Peace?

During May 2012 SE VENDE collective was present with the project Polonus Populus, of Dagmara Wyskiel, in the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago. It was an objectual intervention in the whole hall of the building, that tried to graphic -and question- more than a thousand years of Polish history, an overwhelmed exercise of memory and identity that invited the observer to involve physically and reflectionary from its own place.

The operation seemed simple: it was a transparent plastic belt of about 37 centimeter tall and 300 meters long, painted in successive numbers, each of the thousand years of that country, in red the ones that were lived in war and in white the ones in peace. The line was thought in scale with the body.

Suspended and at the height of the spectator, it conformed a labyrinth of curves and passages that could be walked freely.

The sound -as involvement- was the whispering in polish of the author verbalizing her thinking in an effort to remember, element of the video Qué hago con tanta memoria (What can I do with so much memory).

The exhibit started on May 3rd, day of the constitution of Poland. Of 1791, it was the first to be implemented in Europe and the second on the world “with an absolutely transgressive and innovative democratic vision”, said the artist. The title of the exposition also has references to this conception of a country, quoting the way in which Pope Juan Pablo the second refereed to the polish people on his apostolic letters “Ad perpetuam rei memoriam – Polonus Populus”. The last phrase Wyskiel tries to translate literally as the “polish people’s affairs”, being an inclusive country, modern, that evokes certain years of glory.

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how to achieve it when it is about a place in “constant social conflicts, sovereign problems and imposed governments, without the need for blood spilling”?

The problem aimed to interpret, synthesize and represent the historical, social, political and religious processes; to hide and to uncover throughout a subjective order symbolism that would not admitted gray tones. But there were complex years.

The author dialogued with other polish people in search for definitions and she did not always find them. Because of this, a pictorial game of staining and cleaning, there are years that remain in an intermediate state: they are red under the white.

“It was tried to find a plastic solution for those periods of lack of sovereign, of authoritarian governments, of imposed kings” she detailed. Periods -like the nineteenth century- in which Poland even lost its independence and disappeared from the map, divided among three countries “nonetheless it never stopped resisting, cultivating its identity and believing the utopia of a country”

The intervention called for us to submerge in a view on Polish history as a touched space. To cover it, was to assume the comparative game between the periods of clam and catastrophe; it was imagining history. The intervention was also an experience of winding time. In the apparent linearity there was a chronology plagued of folds, contractions and parallel laps. “The backbone of Polish history is long and broken on several spots. With fragments in casts and badly healed, with hernias in shameful places, memory fractures, religious prosthetics, mystical bandages and holy placebos in the shape of hope”, said Wyskiel. In the walk about the hall “a history that goes back, repeats, crosses, erases and links” is unveiled.

To rethink the territory of origin from thousand of kilometers, the artist chose to focus on a situation that seem to define the character of Poland, a people historically on the edge of war and peace. Located just next to the ex URSS, “its not the west nor the east, but neither center. With an awful geopolitical location between the German order and the Russian volume, that always confront in the middle of the way. The most catholic people of the world and the most conservative in the European Union” states the author

Polonus Populus also invited us to stop in painting, that sort of zen calligraphy, gestural and repetitive, that formed the number that intersect, lead and disoriented us in a maze where every year became -despite the intensity of the eventsjust a second. To read again the history of the own nation implied a pulsating construction where what was being put together was not necessarily a history but a text to decipher, a written map or a suspended territory.

The exercise -then- implied defining the periods on which they lived in one or another of the states. Nevertheless,

The memory exercise turned out to be a question on identity.

An identity that blurs by the distance as in the very lines that

define country and history. A un-territorial identity that looks for a body throughout the pictorial gesture. A “picture� overflowing in an infinite roaming that its no more country or history neither painting but a repetitive and mediative experience for one another, of this country, given to the game of interpreting the own processes of war and peace.

Carolina Lara (ConcepciĂłn-Chile)

(Dis)order Art likes the ambivalence; it’s because of this that its terrain seems to be the correct one, to deal with the matter of order. (…)

In the fundamentals of this exposition its found the conviction that our knowledge its filled with empty spaces, omissions, and suppositions, and that it turns out to be more effective to open significances than to deliver assertive (and incomplete) answers, that brings betters results to present several point of view and levels of perception Lukasz Kropiowski Curator of the 3a Biennale Ars Polonia (NIE)PORZADEK / (DIS)ORDER proposed as bipolar axis for the third biennial in Opole (Poland), gathers works that approach the concept of cosmic and geometric perspective, that interrogate on the principle of order, the play with the architecture of the exposition space, and finally enter the domains of the expansion of pop culture. Order and/or its negative brother (or positive?) are present on every space in the gallery, investigating on the infinite or orders and disorders. There isn’t one without the other and the other way around, it can’t be established which one is more important, due to the fact that the presence of both is indispensable from the creation of the Universe to domestic situations. In an extreme we have chaos; in the other, static death. Only a precise mixture of the two provokes dynamic reactions on every level of reality.

During September and October 2012, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole, through the curatorial project of the Biennale Ars Polonia, for the third time presents works of Polish artists or with polish roots that live outside the country. The logic is and the goal of this proposal its understood measuring the scale of polish emigration since the nineteenth century to the last decade and the quantity of active Polish professionals in all the areas and in all the corners of the world. Historically, its the artists, writers and film makers the ones that end up anchored, by their own option or not, in other place. Biennale Ars Polonia it’s the sole platform for revision and distributing of national production that is generated outside the borders.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

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Collective Knitting

view and formation and professional experience of the other.

We have presented the actions, residences, expositions and platforms of formalization realized during October 2011 and March 2013. Nevertheless, there are still some elements left outside, the ones that have in common the interdisciplinary experimentation and a bet for the construction of networks.

Action of minor scale or satellites to bigger projects, generated by the dynamics of the moment and possible only by the tuning with which we achieved encounters with our peers.

Three Edges of Beauty had its second stage in Salinas Grandes (Argentina) in April 2013 and the third is planned for 2014 en Poznań (Poland).

MIXED TECHNIQUE In the context of the formative extension of the Polonus Populus exposed in the Contemporary Arts Museum of the University of Chile, we were invited along Carolina Lara to dictate a workshop for artistic high school students, related to personal memory and nation memory. This exercise was doubly complex, because it made us design a common methodological strategy, from two totally different perspectives: the one of a Chilean journalist and of a Polish visual artist, it also meant to work against the stream of adolescent nature, evoking reflection on the past. With the commitment of the two involved teachers and the founding from National Artistic Schools Grant for the project Methodologies Exchange in the Teaching of Visual Arts – Experimental Arts School Antofagasta y Salvador Allende School, Santiago we achieved to materialize in Antofagasta and exposition of works initiated in this workshop, accompanied by a work table of teachers of artistic areas from such institutions.1 The residence realized with the Polish actress and researcher Halina Chmielarz in Casa Poli (Coliumo, Region of Bío Bío) in January 2013 conformed the first stage of the project in process Three Edges of Beauty, and was a space for research and experimentation within the search of common readings, crosses and possible coincidences between visual and scenic arts, in a way of understanding the multiple signification of beauty. The work demanded to question the existent dogmas in the matter form this two areas, finding platform of cogs in a level of values and symbolism. The first stage was dedicated to the exploration of common existent languages, from the exercise of understanding one another and learning from the 1Artistic Teaching in Chile, Two Visions. Booklet of conclusions from the project Methodologies Exchange in the Teaching of Visual Arts: Encounter Workshop and Exposition. Experimental Arts School, Antofagasta and Salvador Allende School, Santiago. Teacher: Dagmara Wyskiel.

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EXTENDED CROCHET Our peers are geographically dispersed and the LatinAmerican distances do not help the construction of networks, reality that gets worse with the centralization of flights that in this continent are almost only offered between capitals.

For this reason, to fly from Tucumán to Antofagasta you have to do a fool’s trip, necessarily going from Santiago to Buenos Aires, even when one does not have this intention, which triples the distance and cost. With the geographical, structural and institutional adversities, we insist in the real linking with whom we share the same objectives of production, formation and circulation of works. In this sense, the strategy of working described by Figueroa in Not every road leads to Rome. La RED: an artists organization beyond and within borders, gives testimony of autonomous work and permanent connection.

Following the same logic, we have begun to thread this fabric of links in Colombia, realizing an itinerant residence of the Time Crops (Time export, Dagmara Wyskiel) project. Thanks to the Museo Del Barrio of Manizales, organizer of the tour on three Colombian cities, we established networks with Casa Tres Patios in Medellin and with Laagencia in Bogota.

The expositive project Art+Politics+Environment and the 1st Contemporary Arts Week (Shades and possibilities, Nicole Barrios), realized in July 2012 in the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta allowed the reunion with the curator and gallerist Marisa Caichiolo from Los Angeles, USA and with the museographer Jaime Delfín from Ensenada, Mexico. Parallel to the collective work with the territory (Bodies in the womb, Marisa Caichiolo) we knitted our visions on the possible strategies for acting between Los Angeles, Ensenada and Antofagasta, agreeing to develop as a group a program of formative residences focused on the production of expositions and museography.

Going down in the cartographic elevator of Chile, from the second floor to the eighth, on the road between The Driest Place on Earth and Casa Poli, we have visited Caja Negra Visual Arts in Santiago and the Casona Solariega in Villa Alegre,

operational center of Autonomous Contemporary Arts Management, Latin America, headed by Jorge Sepúlveda and Ilze Petroni. Thanks to the invitation from MÓVIL (Oscar Concha, Leslie Fernándes, Dany Berczeller and Consuelo Saavedra) we participated on Local+Visita, encounter of independent spaces in the Artistas de Acero Cultural Corporation, Concepción. The stops turned out to be significant for the growth of this entangling, making possible the direct dialogue and human encounter within the territorial context of each space, making easier the material and editorial exchange and building affective bonds, that from there can continue to develop virtually toward new projects and associations.

Dagmara Wyskiel (Antofagasta-Chile)

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1. First stage of the interdisciplinary project Three edges of beauty, Halina Chmielarz y Dagmara Wyskiel, Casa Poli, Coliumo, January 2013.

2. Se VENDE in Local+Visita, encounter of independent art spaces in the Artistas de Acero Cultural Corporation, Concepción, January 2013.

3. Encounter: Contemporary Art Autonomous Management, Latin America and Se VENDE, material delivery, Casona Solariega, Villa Alegre, January 2013.

PRESS

The media resonance is the gate to enter art into society.

Cultural journalism has an educational labor that needs to return to urgently.

Cultural Journalism on the art’s trench

in the area, so they publish as the press counselor delivers

During the last years, artists and cultural groups from the area

bigger circulation of art news. In definitive they copy and

noticed the enormous need of counting with a professional

paste the material they receive.

them to the media, which finally makes it easier and offers

dedicated to the distribution of their activities. So, as the artist dedicates to the production of his work, it’s the

To this is added that art is not a new for many editorials.

journalist who should take care of delivering the information

Example of this is the structure of the local newspaper, that

on art activities. This part, often and in a wrong way, is taken

only gives the last pages to art related news; and, in this

by the artists themselves, who despite their impetus, do not

space, prioritizes news related more to show business than to

achieve to totally enclose the valuable part of communicator.

contemporary art. I worked before with the paper, being able to identify that even in front of the necessity for commercial

The task of counseling communicationally SE VENDE starts

spaces it is the cultural pages the first ones to be used.

on March 2012 with the launching of project Agenda and the inauguration of the first exposition of the emergent artists

There also doesn’t exists the culture specialized journalist,

work. Important publications would come then like the piece

because sadly there are no economically sustainable

in the culture supplement (Sunday) in Diario el Mercurio

informative spaces. Because of this, creative ideas on cultural

Antofagasta, on the work of Dagmara Wyskiel, president of

distribution become fundamental, such as TV and radio

the organization (May 2012).

shows, or printed publications that allow materializing the information on art.

This inauguration, considered broad distribution in radio, papers and web sites, who gave informative space to the

There aren’t also spaces of opinion on art, nor specialized

exposition and to the contents on what would be the

critic. Except in the film area where there are worried and

development of the project, to which were linked several of

actualized specialists.

the communicative hits during the year.

It is so that the diversity of actions of the Agenda project, It’s important to notice that there are several considered

noticeable actions such as using blood on the pieces and the

events in this book that were not supported by this counseling,

presence of renowned artists like Fernando Prats, triggered

communicative work on which also participated the cultural

that the collective work of SE VENDE gained more notoriety.

journalist, Carolina Lara and Dagmara Wyskiel herself. Some

Some events like the polemic with Izak’s graffiti, had huge

of the events were noticeable thanks to social media; other

coverture when involving public spaces and provoking

were introduced by the professionals counseling; and some

different reaction in the citizens, which were fed by the web

others just did not get informative space, not because they

and local written media.

were unattractive or less important, but because there are no art specialized media in Antofagasta.

It’s noticeable that the FaceBook commentaries worked as a “source” for some media and others dedicated editorials ad

It is so the part of cultural journalist and counselor has

texts with an intention of criticism. Nonetheless, confronted

different shades, because in one hand it has to be able to

to this, it results to be unexplainable that these very same

confront the art piece and translate it into an informative text,

media failed to notice the presence of the renowned curator

turning it into news worthy material. On the other hand, the

and arts critic, Justo Pastor Mellado, (whose now director of

designated journalist inside the media receives these texts

the Cultural Park of Valparaiso), that has a large experience on

with the satisfaction of having a colleague who is sending

contemporary art and it’s a person worthy of being interviewed.

them, and this broadens the possibility of getting published.

The facts were considered to be “news” thanks to the sending

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This situation also goes through informative web portals and

of information to the media by the means of counseling.

internet magazines, that do not have a journalist specialized

Nevertheless, in general, artists and the very contemporary

art itself do not achieve to seduce editors; even though many of the people that visited us had renowned careers and are considered invaluable to the local art scene. It was only the national web portals or even international ones, including several specialized web pages, the ones who took the fact as an interpretative and extended note, more than informative.

In the case of the Art+Politics+Environment exhibit this view is potencialized, because having a journalist in charge of communications within the executive organism, the information was distributed and published by the local, national and international media.

Even more, at including the concept of “international� as it was as well the La RED encounter with the presence of collectives and foreign artists, these activities achieved to be considered. La Estrella de Antofagasta newspaper was particularly generous when dedicating almost a complete page to this last encounter of collectives. The same way, web portals showed their interest to publish. In all cases, the communicational councilor acted facilitating information and photographs.

The fact is that despite that Antofagasta is no longer asleep, it lacks of spaces and language concerning contemporary art, an expression that several times is hard to understand, for being confrontational, nevertheless tries to get the attention of an asleep society.

In this sense, SE VENDE collective realized in this last season an invaluable gift to the extension of cultural boundaries, shaking the scene, contributing to expositive work, international presence, formative work such as the Capsules and workshops for cultural journalists and a series of communicational events, materialized in the next selected publications, that respond to just a part of the whole of what we have achieved to publish and of what we gave to be known in different media, national and international.

Helen Simonne DĂ­az (Antofagasta-Chile)

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OFF

Calendario 18/1/12 – 12/3/12 Nude Scheme, exposition, Francisco Vergara, BVAn (Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta) Itineran Residence in Colombia: 3/2/12 – 9/2/12 Manizales 9/2/12 – 15/2/12 Medellín 16/2/12 – 23/2/12 Bogotá Independent Spaces presentation, Se VENDE collective 7/2/12 Museo del Barrio, Manizales 8/2/12 Arts and Humanities Faculty, University of Caldas, Manizales 13/2/12 Casa Tres Patios, Medellín 14/2/12 Laagencia, Bogotá 9/3/12 – 10/3/12 La RED encounter, Salta, Argentina 20/3/12– 10/5/12 Sweet Land exposition, Fabián Mayra, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 22/3/12 y 25/3/12 1st and 2nd action in Salinas Grandes, Argentina 3/5/12 – 3/6/12 Polonus Populus exposition, Contemporary Arts Museum, Santiago, Chile 4/5/12 – 5/5/12 Simple Exercises to Avoid the Pixilation of Memory, workshop, C. Lara and D. Wyskiel, Contemporary Arts Museum, Santiago 17/5/12 – 17/6/12 Through the Veins exposition, Pamela Canalez, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 22/6/12 – 24/7/12 Rebelled Bodies, performance in Concepción, exposition, curatory Carolina Lara, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 22/6/12 Curators and Curatories in the current arts scene, conference, Carolina Lara, Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta 22/6/12 Chile Bakes it’s Bread, performance, Natascha de Cortillas, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 23/6/12 Cultural Journalism: New Challenges and Ways of Educating, workshop, Carolina Lara, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 23/6/12 My table is empty…in this my last lunch, performance, Guillermo Moscoso, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 12/7/12 – 2/9/12 Art+Politics+Environment, exposition, curatory Marisa Caichiolo, Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta Contemporary Art Week, Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta: 12/7/12 International Arts Management, exchanges and residences, conference, Marisa Caichiolo and Jaime Delfín 13/7/12 From Manual to Industrial and Back, conference, Karen Perry 13/7/12 Low Tech Creation Process, workshop, Arcángel Constantini 14/7/12 Invisible Forest, conference, Andrea Juan 14/7/12 The revolution of the Egyptian People, video conference, Mohamed Abou El Naga 15/7/12 Fetus, intervention on the Driest Place on Earth, Marisa Caichiolo, Karen Perry, Arcángel Constantini and Dagmara Wyskiel 19/7/12 – 26/7/12 Residence on The Driest Place on Earth, Fernando Prats 24/7/12 – 28/7/12 1st register of the Imaginary Territories series, director Rodrigo Cepeda & Sergio Navarro, Antofagasta and Quillagua 27/7/12 Gran sur and Acción Quillagua conference, Justo Pastor Mellado & Fernando Prats, Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta 29/7/12 – 30/9/12 Acción Quillagua exposition, Fernando Prats, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 15/9/12 – 21/10/12 Biennale Ars Polonia participation, Opole, Poland 6/10/12 – 5/11/12 The Illusion of being, exposition, Cappry Leiva, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 6/10/12 – 9/10/12 2nd register of the Imaginary Territories series, director Rodrigo Cepeda & Sergio Navarro, Antofagasta 7/10/12 Anchor, intervention on the Antofagasta Hills, Francisco Vergara 9/11/12 Latent Territories-independent initiatives in the local art scene, Argentina/Colombia/Chile, conference, Catholic University of the North 11/11/12 intervention in the Driest Place on Earth, Luis Arango, Mariano Gusils, Roxana Ramos 13/11/12 - 16/1/13 Applies Utopias. A Pocket Manual, La RED collective exposition, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 3/1/13 – 8/1/13 residence in Casa Poli, Coliumo, Halina Chmielarz and Dagmara Wyskiel 9/1/13 – 25/1/13 Local+Visita participation, Artistas de Acero Cultural Corporation, Concepción 24/1/13 – 16/2/13 To be food exposition, Camila Díaz, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 23/2/13 – 31/3/13 The Sweet Right to Mutilate, urban intervention and exposition, Izak, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta 23/2/13 The non-existence of limits for expression in public spaces and the i-legitimacy of citizen’s censorship, debate, Biblioteca Viva Antofagasta

Photographs Christian Núñez Carlos Pino Lilyan Pizarro Marcos Figueroa Fido Pamela Canales Francisco Vergara Roxana Ramos Arcángel Constantini Javier Muñoz Halina Chmielarz Karen Perry Marisa Caichiolo Dagmara Wyskiel

Thanks To Miguel Sepúlveda Railway Antofagasta Mauricio Monardes Denisse Zaffiri Nicole Barrios María Constanza Castro Rodrigo Cepeda Lilyan Pizarro Osvaldo Sáez Alejandro Valdenegro Muriel Fuentes Antofagasta Journalist’s Guild Leslie Fernández Óscar Concha Manuel Cortés Víctor Palape Carlos Pino Ramona Villagrán Mariela Merino Jorge Sepúlveda Ilze Petroni Víctor Hugo Bravo Paola Vásquez Blanca Lucía González Ángela María Chaverra Francisco Salas Grażyna Machałek Łukasz Kropiowski René Huerta Francisco Vergara Maryna Pizarro Wyskiel

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Antofagasta - Chile - 2013 www.colectivosevende.cl