young democracies in similar socioeconomic processes. If we refer specifically to the art system, there are also occurrences that repeat themselves in institutions, such as an ongoing challenge to keep budgets on track and the continuous operation of research programmes, the difficulty in maintaining public collections while private collections emerge (all we have to do is look at the emergence and establishment of art fairs throughout the continent), there is also little government or private support for cultural production which, despite the emerging professionalisation of the sector, requires self-management and for administrators to assume multiple roles within the art system to ensure the existence of artistic processes. All these recurring themes have not yet established or generated structures sufficiently autonomous and stable so that to imagine an interpretation where each ‘love protagonist’ is placed in their designated corner of the triangle in an obvious, clear or stable manner, as the assembly I propose here. Rather, these somewhat shifting and unstable contexts seem to require a theory of love as a production system which offers each of our protagonists a mobile connection with contingent notions of ‘necessary love’, using the 12th Bienal de Cuenca as a case study. The Bienal de Cuenca Cuenca is located in the Andean mountain range in Northern Ecuador, a relatively small city of 300,000 inhabitants. The Bienal de Cuenca began in 1987 as a biennial of paintings. In institutional terms within the Ecuadorian context, the Bienal is an institution that survived the crisis in the late 1990s, which resulted in the closing of almost all galleries and spaces dedicated to the visual arts across the country. The Bienal also resisted political instability for over thirteen years, during which Ecuador underwent seven presidencies, making it perhaps the only stable and permanent event dedicated to the visual arts in Ecuador for years. The Fundación Bienal de Cuenca depends on the mayorship of the city and has been responsible for producing this event since its inception. Up until the 2009 edition, it is organized through national representations. From that point on a change is made, when curator José Manuel Noceda requests a list of artists from each participating country from which he generates the final selection. In the 2011 edition there is another change with Arnaldo Farías, Fernando Castro Flores and Katya Cazar who are each invited to do a separate project. The format does not work and the Fundación Bienal de
Manuela Moscoso
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