PROYECTO SECUNDARIO LILIANA MARESCA

After the violent uprisings in Argentina in 2001, a group of artists (who later assumed the name Liliana Maresca Secondary School Project) initiated various social and artistic endeavours in La Cava de Villa Fiorito, a shantytown in Lomas de Zamora. Since 2007 they have focused their efforts on developing an educational programme with a visual arts focus for the public secondary school no. 349 in the neighbourhood. The Ministry of Education approved the programme in 2009.

The project is an independent collective engaged with the socio-economically deprived Fiorito community. The collective works to empower community members through an educational proposal of contemporary art strategies derived from the neighbourhood’s identity and particular—and very immediate— problems such as discrimination, domestic violence, child labour and the absence of public services. Firmly grounded in the grassroots and employing local cultural elements and participatory methods, they prioritize being inclusive. The collective’s current members—Lorena Bossi, Florencia Cabeza, Ariel Cusnir, and Leandro Tartaglia—operate not merely as pedagogical advisors to the school’s authorities, but also as practitioners and educators, integrating visual-arts methodologies into the general curriculum. These methodologies seek to develop the students’ perceptions both as spectators and producers of visual culture, and foster critical thinking and creative solutions for difficult everyday situations. The artists generate relationships with artistic institutions and alternative art spaces; organizes visits to museums, art centres, and art fairs for children who have almost never left the neighbourhood; invites artists and art professionals to lecture at the school. The collective also organizes art exhibitions featuring renowned artists in hallways and class­rooms, using their work as pedagogical material for academic subjects: Leon Ferrari’s Heliografías series for teaching mathematics and geometry; Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg’s Camp del Cielo meteorite project for science and history...

Blog of the Proyecto Secundario Liliana Maresca.

10:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

LUZ NAS VIELAS, BY BOA MISTURA

We had the opportunity to live in a favela with the Gonçalves family. 

During the first few days, we realized of the possible framework made by the narrow and winding passageways that connect the up and low urban areas, known as “vielas". The project aims to respond to this characteristic spatial complexity. Flattening the perspective from a point (anamorphism), the words "BELEZA", "FIRMEZA”, "LOVE", “DOÇURA" and "ORGULHO" are read and framed by a flat color, equally covering all the construction materials, democratizing the space. For us, these words are the best portrait of the favela.
Boa Mistura's website.

23:46 - By Unknown 0

LOCATING SOCIAL (UN) AWARENESS, BY ANDREJA KULUNČIĆ

Technology is often just another tool for leaving others behind, and above all in favour for those who are skilled, equipped and able. That is why, when thinking about technology as a symbolic 'gate/passage', I could not avoid the question of social awareness. How to (conceptually, and in somewhat cynical gesture) into the 'discourse of mapping' the reality around us, introduce the reflection of attitudes toward the others, and the issue of social vulnerability? In fact, mapping in itself with its military and invading symbolism denies the 'awareness' towards the society, underlines the cynical, if not absurd idea of monitoring, locating, mapping and using thus in the name of freedom and democracy.
Do we want to know what people currently surrounding us think about the issue of asylum seekers, homosexual relationships, women's rights? Whether the people with whom we are in the same room are racist, sexist, homophobic? Wether our neighbours want equal payment for both sexes, and whether they would agree that all Russians living in Estonia receive Estonian citizenship?
Technology is here used to monitor not our actions, but our thoughts and attitudes. This method of 'thought-policing' is not used to separate the acceptable from unacceptable but first of all to question how important it is for us to share our social (un)awareness with others? Does it even matter?
The work starts from this last question. It should matter, and then with time we might correct our social (un)awareness and tacit acceptance of (un)awareness of our fellow citizens, politicians, and written laws.

Andreja Kulunčić's website.

22:29 - By Unknown 0

TUTOIA OPERATION, BY FERNANDO PIOLA

In a previous art project, Red Square Project (2005/2013), Piola wanted to turn a public square within the city red by adjusting its urban vegetation. The artist initiated the Red Square Project in a recently gentrified neighbourhood in São Paolo, overhauled by the local government in order to reduce crime, drug trafficking, and prostitution. The goal behind Piola’s projects was, on the one hand, to remember the now-whitewashed former scene of drugs and violence and, on the other hand, to look back at a more contested part of Brazilian history: the repression that existed under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985).

The site that Piola chose for his red square was in front of a building that once housed the Department of Social and Political Order, the government institution responsible for the persecution of ‘enemies of the state’. When Piola requested permission for his project, the authorities denied it.

The artist’s response was to initiate another public art project, Tutoia Operation, to revive a concealed memory of dictatorial state oppression, this time adopting a slightly different strategy. Instead of introducing it as art, Piola presented himself as a gardener with a plan to upgrade the neighbourhood. Plant by plant he exchanged the green vegetation with red foliage. Through this slow and disguised gesture the artist subtly attributed the location with a new and disquieting semantic meaning.

Fernando Piola's website

21:56 - By Unknown 0

MEJOR VIDA CORPORATION, BY MINERVA CUEVAS

The Mejor Vida Corp is an enterprise that provides free products and services such as international student ID cards, subway passes, lottery tickets and barcode stickers which reduce the price of food at supermarket chains. Cuevas started the project in protest against the capitalist companies.
“Mejor Vida Corp. is a non profit corporation. M.V.C. creates, promotes and distributes world wide products and services for free, M.V.C. doesn't discriminates any person for its gender, race, religion, sexual preferences or economic status.”

Mejor Vida Corporation web site: www.irational.org

Minerva Cuevas was born Mexico City in 1975.
She is a Mexican conceptual artist. She studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In 1998 she founded the Mejor Vida Corp which imitates a company layout but it deals with the social and political research the Cuevas is interested in. Cuevas also creates posters, alters logos and producing printed matter, billboards, and performances. Cuevas has assumed the role of both a political and artistic actor.

Other art works by Minerva Cuevas:

16:23 - By Unknown 0

WELFARE STATE PROJECT (SMASH THE GHETTO), BY DEMOCRACIA

The “Welfare State” project has its origin in El Salobral, one of Europe’s largest shanty towns located on the southern outskirts of Madrid. In March 2007, the Madrid City Council and the Regional Government decided that the slum should be demolished and its inhabitants rehoused. “Smashing the ghetto” is a single channel video installation displaying the demolition of these slum properties as if it were a sports event. The public watches the process from its seats on the stands and cheers on the bulldozers in a hooliganish style. The project turns the destruction of the neighbourhood into a show for the members of civil society. Unconcerned by considerations like the disappearance of a specific way of life, civil society celebrates the end of the ghetto as if it were a media spectacle.
Cuatro News footage.

22:42 - By Unknown 0

TAMMAM AZZAM

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam creates a ‘hybrid form’ of painting through the application of various media, arriving at interactions between surface and form that borrow and multiply as compositions evolve. Unconventional materials such as rope, clothespins, and other found objects are employed to create depth, texture, and space, achieving a striking balance between ordinary objects and the expanse of the picture plane despite a visible tension.

Following the start of the uprising in Syria, Azzam turned to digital media to create visual composites of the conflict that have resonated with viewers. These widely-distributed works are informed by his interest in the interventionist potential of digital photography and street art as powerful and direct forms of protest that are difficult to suppress. In early 2013, Azzam made worldwide headlines when his work Freedom Graffiti went viral on social media. Enlisting one of the most iconic works of art, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, to protest the country's suffering, he superimposed a recognisable image of love over the walls of war-torn Damascus. Recently, he has returned to painting with Storeys, a series of monumental works that communicate the magnitude of devastation experienced across his native country through expressionist compositions of destroyed structures. Exposing the current state of his homeland to the world, Azzam delves into a therapeutic exercise of reconstruction, storey by storey.

19:36 - By Unknown 0