Our main goal is to make local art scenes more visible, as well as art practices which are usually kept in the shadows of the international mainstream. If we succeed, we will bring new ways of working and making things closer to others, causing inspiration and revitalisation.
Today we start publishing a series of articles together with our Art Spy blog contributors. Throughout this year, five curators, researchers and cultural managers, will be writing about the artistic contexts in which they carry out their work.
Our first contributor is Rodolfo Andaur (Iquique, 1979), a Chilean curator who will be taking a closer look at art practices in an area as legendary as unknown, the Desert of Atacama in northern Chile. His work as a curator, spanning nearly ten years, has zeroed in on the local reality surrounding the desert and its peoples, from the perspective of space as a canvas for new meanings. He creates a dialogue amongst artists who incite re-examinations of space through their works, making borders blur while reflecting on their own territories through historical and anthropological narratives.
His practice is of special interest to us because it highlights certain viewpoints and experiences which question the dominant relationship “centre-periphery”. In an environment of extreme institutional anorexia, he contributed turning public initiatives aimed at the “Great North” into a vehicle, articulating the work performed with artists into multidisciplinary platforms.
Rodolfo's five posts are the first of a series of contributions of our correspondents, who, through their specific professional knowledge and fields of activity, will allow us to get a closer look at scenes that usually remain invisible to the contemporary art world. As a whole, we hope that these epistolary summations of troubling “microcosms” at the fringes of hegemonic art circuits will form all together an archive/network/laboratoire for producing knowledge and sharing it amongst all.
Image credit: Michelle Marie Letelier
