Dorota Biczel | Barnard College (original) (raw)
Articles and Catalogue Essays by Dorota Biczel
Cuentos bárbaros, 2023
This essay examines drawings of seascapes and coastal landscapes from the series Cuentos bárbaros... more This essay examines drawings of seascapes and coastal landscapes from the series Cuentos bárbaros by Lima-based artist Claudia Coca (b. 1970), best known for her Pop-art-inspired examinations of Peruvian identity—especially, the construction of a mestiza female. Vacillating between open expanses of water and the sea seen from a shore, Coca’s images are devoid of landmarks and often overlaid with stylized, fragmentary words or phrases. These drawings reverse the motif of the Pacific coast engrained in Peruvian contemporary art. For decades, artists stubbornly turned their backs on the ocean, focusing their gazes on the coastal desert. Looking through it towards the country’s interior—so-called “deep Peru,” they searched there for foundational and defining characteristics of national identity. Indeed, the trope of the internal exploration has been paramount to the identity construction in South America, serving as the source of “authentic” values to counter the “colonized” urban culture of the coast(s). In my essay, I read Coca’s turn towards the sea beyond its interpretation as a liminal space of the encounter between the colonizer and colonized. Rather, I argue that the sea’s surface and indeterminacy act as tools for a postcolonial reconfiguration of Peruvian and, more broadly, Andean identities.
Cuentos Bárbaros, 2023
Short text written originally in 2021 for Ethan Cohen Gallery's exhibition, Claudia Coca: Landsca... more Short text written originally in 2021 for Ethan Cohen Gallery's exhibition, Claudia Coca: Landscapes of Desire and Oblivion
Beyond the Record: Muriel Hasbun, Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, Jessica Carolina González, 2022
This exhibition centers on the selection from three photographic series by the renowned Salvadora... more This exhibition centers on the selection from three photographic series by the renowned Salvadoran-born and Washington, DC-based artist and activist Muriel Hasbun (b. 1961)--Pulse: New Cultural Registers (2020-), X post facto (2009-13), and Saints and Shadows (1991-2004)--and two installations by younger, Houston-affiliated artists of Salvadoran descent-Stephanie Concepción Ramírez (b. 1984) and Jessica Carolina González (b. 1995). The three artists represent two distinct generations that bookmark the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-92). All three reappropriate personal and official archives found in El Salvador and the United States to address violent legacies of the war and its effects on Salvadoran individuals and communities both in their motherland and in exile. To do so, they simultaneously harness the power of records and put records under scrutiny to examine their ability to witness and convey lived experiences.
Erika Verzutti: The Indiscipline of Sculpture, 2021
Feminino(s): Visualidades, Ações e Afetos, 2021
Essay for the catalog of 12th Mercosur Biennial: Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions, and Affects
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2019
Teresa Burga: Aleatory Structures, 2018
In the exhibition catalogue published by JRP | Ringier, edited by Heike Munder.
Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely, 2018
Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisur... more Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely," October 28, 2017--January 27, 2018, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX.
Also with texts by Javier Sánchez Martínez and Ronnie Yates.
Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, 2017
// También disponible en español el la página de la revista // This article considers an unsucce... more // También disponible en español el la página de la revista //
This article considers an unsuccessful bid of the Peruvian capital, Lima, to enter into global networks of artistic exchange through a short-lived, ostensibly failed project: Lima Biennial of Latin American Art [Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima], held three times between 1997 and 2002. Aside from a collapse of the municipal cultural policies, the article attribues the “failure” to other, aesthetic and political factors that highlight the contradictions involved in exhibition-making. On the one hand, it discusses an impossibility of striking the unattainable perfect balance between “international” and “local” ingredients that would be legible and artistically satisfactory to both internal and external observers, which would have been crucial in the area long considered closed off from the rest of Latin America. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the biennial project in the light of the rapidly evolving understanding of site and site-specificity during the 1990s. Focusing on two paradigmatic projects of the so-called participatory or socially engaged art realized for the Biennial’s final third edition (2002), Allora & Calzadilla’s Tiza and Francis Alÿs’s Cuando la fe mueve motañas, the article argues that the turn towards the social ultimately blurred the readibility of Lima as a site, necessary for the Biennial’s viability.
Emilio Rodríguez Larraín. , 2016
In Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, edited by Natalia Majluf and Sharon Lerner, 40–67, 261–273. Lima: Mu... more In Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, edited by Natalia Majluf and Sharon Lerner, 40–67, 261–273. Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2016.
In Spanish and English. Please message me if you'd like to read it.
Teresa Burga: Estructuras de aire/Structures of Air, 2015
Relying on media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler, this article examines a large-scale installati... more Relying on media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler, this article examines a large-scale installation, Self-Portrait. Structure. Report. 9.6.72 (1972), by Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (b. Iquitos, 1935) in comparison with the structuralist underpinnings of the dominant formulations of Conceptual art. I argue that in Self-Portrait, Burga mobilizes the logic of the media in order to open up closed, disciplinary system inscribed within both tautological/linguistic and so-called critical currents of Conceptual art. Under a familiar concept, Burga’s project combines diagrams, blueprints, photographs, medical records, light, and sound. Thus, it functions at the critical juncture of language, media, and material experiences. On the one hand, through text-based proposals and diagrams, Burga asserts the role of the artist as a creator of ideas—the paradigm of Conceptual art. On the other, she puts forth encounters with highly experiential structures, prevalent in minimal, postminimal, and technology-based art. I investigate how the artist deploys the logic of the media to transpose the content of the documents, which at first seem to constitute a repressive, police-like, archival system. I maintain that as a consequence of the transposition, Burga manifests that in reality the discourse and the media are not equivalent. In her Self-Portrait there are impassable gulfs between every single element of the piece, even if they are all supposed to encompass just one body. Therefore, by exposing self-contained and self-referential limitedness of discourse, Burga decenters the subject and opens up spaces of freedom in the closed systems that captured the imagination of her generation.
This is the English original of the catalogue essay published in Spanish in the catalogue of the ... more This is the English original of the catalogue essay published in Spanish in the catalogue of the exhibition "Perder la forma humana" (MNCARS, 2013).
Perder la forma humana: una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina., 2013
Sé realista: ¡Pide lo imposible! 1 De acuerdo con los patrones retóricos, una utopía mediocre con... more Sé realista: ¡Pide lo imposible! 1 De acuerdo con los patrones retóricos, una utopía mediocre constituye un oxímoron. Socava la noción de perfección implícita en el concepto, en alguna medida escurridizo y abarcador, de un conjunto entero de visiones sobre la sociedad ideal. Pero además, el contradictorio califi cativo de "mediocre" desplaza radicalmente este "no lugar" de su remota ubicación temporal, espacial y enunciativa. Al situar la utopía en el momento inmediato, de modo que requiera una acción en un lugar contingente y desplace el punto de su articulación, rescata el ideal distorsionado y lo modifi ca para el imperfecto y cínico presente.
![Research paper thumbnail of De un punto ciego a línea[s] [in] visibles [sobre Luz María Bedoya]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/35465533/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Líneas, palabras, cosas: Luz María Bedoya., 2014
Líneas, palabras, cosas: Luz María Bedoya., 2014
![Research paper thumbnail of Lima I[NN]Memoriam, In Transit to Democracy: Shaping Public History in the Urban Landscape](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/32569848/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Arara - Art and Architecture of the Americas No. 11, 2013
About "Manifestaciones de una lejanía" by Nancy La Rosa.
![Research paper thumbnail of "Tropical Hangover: Optical narratives and carnal consumptions." [On Jonathas de Andrade]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/31177029/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Chelpa Ferro & Jonathas de Andrade: Tropikalizmy/Tropicalisms., 2012
Cuentos bárbaros, 2023
This essay examines drawings of seascapes and coastal landscapes from the series Cuentos bárbaros... more This essay examines drawings of seascapes and coastal landscapes from the series Cuentos bárbaros by Lima-based artist Claudia Coca (b. 1970), best known for her Pop-art-inspired examinations of Peruvian identity—especially, the construction of a mestiza female. Vacillating between open expanses of water and the sea seen from a shore, Coca’s images are devoid of landmarks and often overlaid with stylized, fragmentary words or phrases. These drawings reverse the motif of the Pacific coast engrained in Peruvian contemporary art. For decades, artists stubbornly turned their backs on the ocean, focusing their gazes on the coastal desert. Looking through it towards the country’s interior—so-called “deep Peru,” they searched there for foundational and defining characteristics of national identity. Indeed, the trope of the internal exploration has been paramount to the identity construction in South America, serving as the source of “authentic” values to counter the “colonized” urban culture of the coast(s). In my essay, I read Coca’s turn towards the sea beyond its interpretation as a liminal space of the encounter between the colonizer and colonized. Rather, I argue that the sea’s surface and indeterminacy act as tools for a postcolonial reconfiguration of Peruvian and, more broadly, Andean identities.
Cuentos Bárbaros, 2023
Short text written originally in 2021 for Ethan Cohen Gallery's exhibition, Claudia Coca: Landsca... more Short text written originally in 2021 for Ethan Cohen Gallery's exhibition, Claudia Coca: Landscapes of Desire and Oblivion
Beyond the Record: Muriel Hasbun, Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, Jessica Carolina González, 2022
This exhibition centers on the selection from three photographic series by the renowned Salvadora... more This exhibition centers on the selection from three photographic series by the renowned Salvadoran-born and Washington, DC-based artist and activist Muriel Hasbun (b. 1961)--Pulse: New Cultural Registers (2020-), X post facto (2009-13), and Saints and Shadows (1991-2004)--and two installations by younger, Houston-affiliated artists of Salvadoran descent-Stephanie Concepción Ramírez (b. 1984) and Jessica Carolina González (b. 1995). The three artists represent two distinct generations that bookmark the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-92). All three reappropriate personal and official archives found in El Salvador and the United States to address violent legacies of the war and its effects on Salvadoran individuals and communities both in their motherland and in exile. To do so, they simultaneously harness the power of records and put records under scrutiny to examine their ability to witness and convey lived experiences.
Erika Verzutti: The Indiscipline of Sculpture, 2021
Feminino(s): Visualidades, Ações e Afetos, 2021
Essay for the catalog of 12th Mercosur Biennial: Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions, and Affects
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2019
Teresa Burga: Aleatory Structures, 2018
In the exhibition catalogue published by JRP | Ringier, edited by Heike Munder.
Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely, 2018
Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisur... more Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Gabriel Martinez: Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely," October 28, 2017--January 27, 2018, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX.
Also with texts by Javier Sánchez Martínez and Ronnie Yates.
Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, 2017
// También disponible en español el la página de la revista // This article considers an unsucce... more // También disponible en español el la página de la revista //
This article considers an unsuccessful bid of the Peruvian capital, Lima, to enter into global networks of artistic exchange through a short-lived, ostensibly failed project: Lima Biennial of Latin American Art [Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima], held three times between 1997 and 2002. Aside from a collapse of the municipal cultural policies, the article attribues the “failure” to other, aesthetic and political factors that highlight the contradictions involved in exhibition-making. On the one hand, it discusses an impossibility of striking the unattainable perfect balance between “international” and “local” ingredients that would be legible and artistically satisfactory to both internal and external observers, which would have been crucial in the area long considered closed off from the rest of Latin America. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the biennial project in the light of the rapidly evolving understanding of site and site-specificity during the 1990s. Focusing on two paradigmatic projects of the so-called participatory or socially engaged art realized for the Biennial’s final third edition (2002), Allora & Calzadilla’s Tiza and Francis Alÿs’s Cuando la fe mueve motañas, the article argues that the turn towards the social ultimately blurred the readibility of Lima as a site, necessary for the Biennial’s viability.
Emilio Rodríguez Larraín. , 2016
In Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, edited by Natalia Majluf and Sharon Lerner, 40–67, 261–273. Lima: Mu... more In Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, edited by Natalia Majluf and Sharon Lerner, 40–67, 261–273. Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2016.
In Spanish and English. Please message me if you'd like to read it.
Teresa Burga: Estructuras de aire/Structures of Air, 2015
Relying on media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler, this article examines a large-scale installati... more Relying on media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler, this article examines a large-scale installation, Self-Portrait. Structure. Report. 9.6.72 (1972), by Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (b. Iquitos, 1935) in comparison with the structuralist underpinnings of the dominant formulations of Conceptual art. I argue that in Self-Portrait, Burga mobilizes the logic of the media in order to open up closed, disciplinary system inscribed within both tautological/linguistic and so-called critical currents of Conceptual art. Under a familiar concept, Burga’s project combines diagrams, blueprints, photographs, medical records, light, and sound. Thus, it functions at the critical juncture of language, media, and material experiences. On the one hand, through text-based proposals and diagrams, Burga asserts the role of the artist as a creator of ideas—the paradigm of Conceptual art. On the other, she puts forth encounters with highly experiential structures, prevalent in minimal, postminimal, and technology-based art. I investigate how the artist deploys the logic of the media to transpose the content of the documents, which at first seem to constitute a repressive, police-like, archival system. I maintain that as a consequence of the transposition, Burga manifests that in reality the discourse and the media are not equivalent. In her Self-Portrait there are impassable gulfs between every single element of the piece, even if they are all supposed to encompass just one body. Therefore, by exposing self-contained and self-referential limitedness of discourse, Burga decenters the subject and opens up spaces of freedom in the closed systems that captured the imagination of her generation.
This is the English original of the catalogue essay published in Spanish in the catalogue of the ... more This is the English original of the catalogue essay published in Spanish in the catalogue of the exhibition "Perder la forma humana" (MNCARS, 2013).
Perder la forma humana: una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina., 2013
Sé realista: ¡Pide lo imposible! 1 De acuerdo con los patrones retóricos, una utopía mediocre con... more Sé realista: ¡Pide lo imposible! 1 De acuerdo con los patrones retóricos, una utopía mediocre constituye un oxímoron. Socava la noción de perfección implícita en el concepto, en alguna medida escurridizo y abarcador, de un conjunto entero de visiones sobre la sociedad ideal. Pero además, el contradictorio califi cativo de "mediocre" desplaza radicalmente este "no lugar" de su remota ubicación temporal, espacial y enunciativa. Al situar la utopía en el momento inmediato, de modo que requiera una acción en un lugar contingente y desplace el punto de su articulación, rescata el ideal distorsionado y lo modifi ca para el imperfecto y cínico presente.
Líneas, palabras, cosas: Luz María Bedoya., 2014
Líneas, palabras, cosas: Luz María Bedoya., 2014
Arara - Art and Architecture of the Americas No. 11, 2013
About "Manifestaciones de una lejanía" by Nancy La Rosa.
Chelpa Ferro & Jonathas de Andrade: Tropikalizmy/Tropicalisms., 2012
Colección Cisneros [.org], May 18, 2014
fnews magazine, Apr 4, 2008
KAYPUNKU. La Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Arte y Cultura , Jul 2015
Con el fin de revelar los distintos significados que pueden recibir los monumentos y sus diversas... more Con el fin de revelar los distintos significados que pueden recibir los monumentos y sus diversas facetas para provocar la reflexión contemporánea, se entrevistó a tres artistas de tres distintas generaciones, que se abocan a los monumentos a través de diferentes medios artísticos y metodologías muy variadas. Las entrevistas son aproximaciones enfocadas en los monumentos en sí, como en el concepto general que encaja el deseo de la preservación de la memoria y los intentos de la construcción de la historia, por un lado. Por otro, también se reflexiona sobre los significados de los monumentos particulares, dedicados a personas específicas, como, por ejemplo, el monumento a Francisco Pizarro ubicado actualmente en el Parque de la Muralla o el monumento principal al llamado libertador del Perú en la Plaza San Martín. Entonces, entre la segunda mitad de marzo y el principio de abril de 2015, se conversó con Pablo Patrucco, Juan Enrique Bedoya, y Juan Javier Salazar. Las entrevistas tuvieron lugar en Lima, donde viven y trabajan los tres.
In my paper I consider anarchist, informal architectural interventions realized in Lima, Peru, be... more In my paper I consider anarchist, informal architectural interventions realized in Lima, Peru, between 1984 and 1987 by an amorphous collective called Los Bestias (The Beasts). Since the group built them with their own hands, using recycled and discarded materials, it was often nicknamed “architects-masons,” “architects with dirty faces,” and “kings of trash.” I argue that at the core of the contestatory endeavors of the Bestias were the vital issues of collective existence and decision-making. Their actions rearticulated the very meaning of the term “democracy” during the period when the concept itself was under assault as a result of extreme violence unleashed by the two sides of the Peruvian Civil War (1980–2000): the Maoist guerilla group, Sendero Luminoso, and the governmental military forces.
Concentrating on two of the Bestias’ projects, Deshechos de Arquitectura (1984) and Lima – Utopía Mediocre (1987), I trace how the group’s ephemeral, makeshift proposals were crucial exercises in the grassroots efforts to reformulate the beliefs on who and how would have the access and the right to the city; to planning and to utilization of urban space. Taking the phrase “democracy building” as an architectural metaphor, I see the Bestias’ projects as decisive attempts to construct the city from the literal and metaphorical ground up, harnessing the energy of the emergent youth subcultures and the new migrant populations, during the time when such venture seemed least likely to occur. The collective rejected homogeneous entities proposed by the dominant ideologies, “Leninist-Maoist” revolution and neoliberal modernization. Instead the Bestias envisioned a collective body that operated on participatory, non-identitarian principles of subversive, pragmatic realism of an anarchist kind: a society that refused hegemonic powers and that did not strive to totalize itself.
“Chicago Effect: Teresa Burga before and after the School of the Art Institute” Dorota Biczel an... more “Chicago Effect:
Teresa Burga before and after the School of the Art Institute”
Dorota Biczel and Emilio Tarazona
At the end of the 1960s, due mostly to the pressures exerted by the radicalized student body, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) went through a decisive transformation. The 1968 Democratic Convention and the activities of the Weather Underground as well as the overall climate of the country also contributed to this upheaval, however, much of the demand for change came from foreign students, such as Peruvian Fulbright scholar, Teresa Burga (born Iquitos, 1935), one of the leading voices of her class. In 1969, SAIC revamped its curriculum, opening up narrowly defined departments, introducing seminars in new media, and allowing students to create their own courses of study with faculty consultation.
Burga came to Chicago as a leading member of Arte Nuevo (1966–69), a crucial Peruvian vanguard group, which had crystallized around the prominent critic and theorist, Juan Acha. Her 1968 arrival in Chicago coincided with the military coup of the general Velazco Alvarado in her native country and, at that point, the profound impact that her master’s studies at SAIC would have on her career could not be foreseen. Exposure to new ideas and theories, promoted in Chicago by visiting artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Vito Acconci, and Dennis Oppenheim, introduced a radical shift in Burga’s own practice, leading her to abandon her experiments with pop art in favor of endeavors based around the utilization of text and new communication media. Her first ventures into this new realm took place on the pages of the 70 magazine, the key platform developed to host a variety of experimental, ephemeral, and utopian proposals that did not find an outlet in the city’s scene, dominated by the popular Chicago Imagists.
Paradoxically, however, upon her return to Peru in 1971, the ambitious and pioneering proposals that Burga had developed did not find resonance on the Peruvian scene under the cultural policy of populist nationalism. In this paper, we will focus on three of Burga’s mature projects, the installations Autorretrato. Estructura – Informe 9.6.72 / Self-portrait. Structure – Information 9.6.72 (1972); Cuatro Mensajes / Four Messages (1974); and Paisaje Urbano / Urban Landscape (1978), in order to trace how they conform and depart from the models proposed by the North American conceptualists. We hope that by tracing the particular “Chicago effect” in Burga’s work through a critical analysis of body, language, and public space, we can uncover a unique and viable proposal that had been obscured by the dominant views of the two crucial milieus of its emergence.
This paper takes up as its starting point the legacy of two prominent critics, Stefan Morawski of... more This paper takes up as its starting point the legacy of two prominent critics, Stefan Morawski of Poland and Juan Acha of Peru and Mexico, who worked at two ends of East – South intellectual axis, which had crystallized through a body of the translations of key Marxist texts realized in Spain and Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. Since both thinkers championed neo-avant-garde movements and advocated vehemently for the transformative powers of art, can we claim that Critical-Utopian Conceptualism postulated by Morawski is the East-Central European doppelganger of Acha’s no-objetualismo (which should be understood as a broad concept embracing a diverse array of “non-object-based” art)? And if so, what happened to these unexpected twin concepts in the era of neoliberal democracies that swept through both regions following 1989, effectively unarming – as Luis Castañeda suggested – their respective utopias?
Through a close reading of key contemporary examples from the territories that Morawski and Acha respectively covered (Artur Żmijewski of Poland, Minerva Cuevas of Mexico, and Eduardo Villanes of Peru) , I will trace the effects and influence of the utopian Marxist thinking on its heterotopic successors. Who, where and why is willing to take up the radical claims of the past? How do the contemporary dematerialized artistic practices relate to their historic antecedents? And, finally, what does it mean to transform reality today, if its current state is at best liquid, if not simply vaporous? If we cannot aspire to utopia, what do we aim for in our post-Socialist condition?
The Cantuta massacre was the most infamous case of forced disappearances of the Peruvian civil wa... more The Cantuta massacre was the most infamous case of forced disappearances of the Peruvian civil war (1980–2000). This paper discusses two artistic projects realized in response to the massacre, Eduardo Villanes’s Gloria Evaporada (1994/95) and Alfredo Márquez’s Expediente “Armando” (2002), which served as material weapons in the battle to establish the truth about the fate of the disappeared and as antidotes to the falsifications of history. Everyday material objects that marked the crucial points in the unraveling of the Cantuta story provided artists with the means of constructing vital links between the dematerialized dead and the corporal world of the living. A carton for cans of evaporated milk and a set of keys allowed Villanes and Márquez to publicly manifest and retell the story of the massacre. More importantly, they supplied material vestiges that continuously put under the spotlight the officially endorsed narrative of the internal conflict.
For both projects at stake is the conception of Peruvian society as a whole – a heterogeneous social body capable of articulating its needs and desires. While the Maoist rebel group, Sendero Luminoso, constituted this society’s radical wing, its violent actions aimed at the social integrity, Fujimori’s authoritarian government was equally invested in eradicating those elements whose vision did not adhere its neoliberal doctrine. While the massacre had been ingeniously designed to destroy any material traces of the existence of the uncomfortable subjects seized at La Cantuta campus, to remove them from the official archive of the State, the artistic projects sought to re-establish the presence of the disappeared and reaffirm their physical existence against their forceful erasure from the social and historical corpus.
Arara - Art and Architecture of the Americas, 2013
As much a novel as poetic prose, El Cuerpo de Giulia-no is one of the two novels by Peruvian poe... more As much a novel as poetic prose, El Cuerpo de Giulia-no is one of the two novels by Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1923- Milan, 2006). Written in the 1950s, the first of many decades that Eielson lived in Italy, El Cuerpo de Giulia-no tells the story of a kind of romantic triangle between the narrator, who can be considered an alter ego of Eielson himself; a mysterious, beautiful Venetian woman named Giulia; and another, wealthy Peruvian expat in Europe, Giuliano—“a manufacturer of ice cream and chocolate.”
Nonlinear in structure, the book is full of flashbacks to the narrator’s youth in Peru. What is of interest in the excerpt below is an extremely condensed and evocative image of Lima at a tipping point when the city—according to many of its inhabitants—started “going to shit.” Following World War II, Lima experienced an uncontrolled (arguably still ongoing) demographic explosion, mostly due to internal migration from the rural areas of the country, which irrevocably changed its social and ethnic makeup, as well as its urban landscape. In section 17 of the book, Eielson sets up an irreconcilable tension between the old criollo Lima and the new indigenous Lima of the migrants; between the “white” (white dress, white shirt, white house, white lady, white Cadillac) and the “yellow” embodied by the clay from which the peripheral slums are constructed; between the progress envisioned by criollo capitalists, such as Giuliano, and the miserable poverty lived by indigenous peoples, such as Mayana, the protagonist’s romantic interest during his adolescence spent on a rural coffee plantation. It is a pessimistic vision in which the solution to the problems of the city is not a reform or development but a total cosmic catastrophe: a new flood that will clear the foundations for a new city.
The image of Lima that Eielson conjures in his book precipitates to some extent another famous archetype of the city: Lima, the horrible (Lima la horrible), coined by Eielson’s contemporary, the renowned journalist and intellectual, Sebastián Salazar Bondy (Lima, 1924-1965).
Cotidianidad delatora: la escultura urbana como testigo de las independencias latinoamericanas (1820-1920), Jun 30, 2015
Con el fin de revelar los distintos significados que pueden recibir los monumentos y sus diversas... more Con el fin de revelar los distintos significados que pueden recibir los monumentos y sus diversas facetas para provocar la reflexión contemporánea, se entrevistó a tres artistas de tres distintas generaciones, que se abocan a los monumentos a través de diferentes medios artísticos y metodologías muy variadas. Las entrevistas son aproximaciones enfocadas en los monumentos en sí, como en el concepto general que encaja el deseo de la preservación de la memoria y los intentos de la construcción de la historia, por un lado. Por otro, también se reflexiona sobre los significados de los monumentos particulares, dedicados a personas específicas, como, por ejemplo, el monumento a Francisco Pizarro ubicado actualmente en el Parque de la Muralla o el monumento principal al llamado libertador del Perú en la Plaza San Martín. Entonces, entre la segunda mitad de marzo y el principio de abril de 2015, se conversó con Pablo Patrucco, Juan Enrique Bedoya, y Juan Javier Salazar. Las entrevistas tuvieron lugar en Lima, donde viven y trabajan los tres.
arteBA, 2017
In the first installment of our debate, we, Dorota Biczel, Andrea Giunta and Luis Vargas Santiago... more In the first installment of our debate, we, Dorota Biczel, Andrea Giunta and Luis Vargas Santiago, asked questions about the current meanings of the term “decolonization.” Yet, we have to admit that what we want to see as the denormativization of social life remains only an aspiration—and one likely held by just a fraction of society. Not a single decolonial battle has been resoundingly won. We live in a world that continues to be hostile to at
least 50% of its inhabitants. Not a day passes without at least one piece of news about violence against humans, usually against women. Every day women are tortured, raped, murdered; their bodies discarded like trash.
Since the early 2000s, “Ni una más”/“Ni una muerta más” has been the cry of activists in Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, demanding that this violence come to an end. Starting on June 3, 2015, when demonstrations broke out in major plazas across Argentina, that cry has been inverted as a way to refute the loss: “Ni una menos”–“Ni una mujer
menos.” The pace with which the #NiUnaMenos movement has gained momentum across the continent shows that no country is immune to the problem of femicide or to systemic gender-based violence. An international women’s strike with public demonstrations in fifty-four countries on March 8, 2017 attests to the violence’s catastrophic global dimension.
Considering this, we made a call to a group of theorists, artists, collectives, and curators (Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Octavio Zaya, Hellen Ascoli, Hsu Fang-Tze, Rían Lozano, Natalia Iguíñiz, Desperadas por el ritmo and Mónica Mayer) to think together about the importance of feminism and the still very present challenges of gender inequality in the art world. Together, their responses trace a map of radical stances. What follows makes most sense if all the individual texts are considered as a whole. We propose starting with the initial text, which formulates the questions that were envisaged as triggers, and then continuing with the polemic positions articulated in response.
This dossier is the second out of two instalments on Decolonization for the Buenos Aires's magazine ArteBA. The first instalment deals more specifically with decolonial issues. Find more at: https://www.academia.edu/35119379/Dossier_Descolonizaciones_Inciertas_Uncertain_Decolonizations
arteBA, 2016
This dossier is based on a text written jointly by Dorota Biczel, Andrea Giunta and Luis Vargas S... more This dossier is based on a text written jointly by Dorota Biczel, Andrea Giunta and Luis Vargas Santiago on the situation of art in the contemporary world; that text was sent out to a group of theorists, artists, and curators (Walter Mignolo, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Gonzalo Aguilar, Nestor García Canclini, Nelly Richard, and Nicole Franchy). Together, their replies trace a map of radical stances. What follows makes most sense if all the individual texts are considered as a whole. We propose starting with the initial text, which formulates the questions that were envisaged as triggers, and then continuing with the polemic positions articulated in response.
This dossier is the first out of two instalments on Decolonization for the Buenos Aires's magazine ArteBA. The second instalment deals more specifically with gender issues and the movement #NiUnaMenos. Find more at: https://www.academia.edu/35953129/Dossier_Descolonizaciones_Inciertas_II_NiUnaMenos_Uncertain_Decolonizations_II_NiUnaMenos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIjfMGwQbVAW9w9B5TfnsLq-y\_-YUdoAj The University of Hou... more https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIjfMGwQbVAW9w9B5TfnsLq-y_-YUdoAj
The University of Houston MA in Art History Program invites the international public to join us for a series of free online conversations on the topic of "Interrogating Global Contemporary Art: Research, Pedagogy, Museums," aimed at illuminating the idea of global contemporary art. Individual presentations by preeminent scholars and curators will highlight diverse approaches to shaping the notion of global contemporary art through research, pedagogy, exhibition-making, and public outreach. The series culminates in a Global Roundtable that reconvenes all speakers in dynamic group conversation.
We ask: What is global contemporary art and how is it remaking approaches to artistic practice, scholarship, and curation? In a moment of cultural reckoning that has rendered past efforts at diversifying and expanding the canon insufficient, how can the idea of global contemporary art help us to critically and ethically engage in the reconstruction of a historically exclusive discipline? As academic programs and museums adopt its rhetoric—along with its weaknesses and blindspots—is global contemporary art here to stay? Presented in a lively and engaging format, the series will examine the stakes of the global contemporary paradigm as scholars, educators, and curators urgently push to reinvent the discipline and its institutions.
David Joselit: October 8, 2:30pm CDT
Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University
Mari Carmen Ramírez: October 13, 3pm CDT
Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Leah Dickerman: October 15, 2:30pm CDT
Director of Editorial and Content Strategy at The Museum of Modern Art
Atreyee Gupta: October 28, 2:30pm CDT
Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California, Berkeley
Global Roundtable: November 9, 2pm CST
All events will be held on Zoom with limited capacity and pre-registration required. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/interrogating-global-contemporary-art-research-pedagogy-museums-registration-123411211255
Simultaneous livestreams to the UH School of Art YouTube channel will be open to the public without pre-registration required: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC60EC9Gxw6jZQhcBj3S5tbg
Please visit the series website for further information, including details on how to join the conversations, access related readings, and receive any additional updates: https://uh.edu/kgmca/art/events/igca/
Organized by UH Art History faculty members Natilee Harren, Sandra Zalman, and Postdoctoral Fellow Dorota Biczel with support from the University of Houston Division of Research and with promotional support from Blaffer Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
This seminar examines the changing conceptualizations and theorizations of gender and sex in the ... more This seminar examines the changing conceptualizations and theorizations of gender and sex in the contemporary artistic practices of the Americas. Crucial to the constitution of both individual and collective identity, for contemporary artists gender and sexuality have become primary sites to rethink and reinvent the paradigms of self-expression, creativity, and art-making, and to challenge and contest the (social) body politics at large. We will explore these practices through the prism of the evolution of the notions of gender and sex in a broad range of disciplines during the key historical moments such as the emergence of second-wave feminism and gay rights' movement, critique of "mainstream" feminism by the feminists of color, AIDS crisis, and rise of postmodernist and queer theories, among others. We will pay special attention to the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class, particularly germane in context of the ideologies of progress and development, and the shifts in capitalism during the last fifty years. Finally, we will probe how the notions of gender and sex have been deployed to reconsider and problematize the established art historical canons. Weekly readings and leading class discussion will guide you in crafting a research paper proposal and its development (in consultation with the instructor). Artists pursuing an MFA degree who participate in the seminar are invited to contextualize their own practice through a similar project and an accompanying research-based statement.