TEOR/ética,
Dec 01, 2006 - Feb 15, 2007
San José, Costa Rica
Doubtful Strait
by Clara Astiasarán
News from the Filibuster was put together in consideration of a historical event, the 150 years since the 1856 campaign in Central America that ended with William Walker’s capitulation. The artists’ proposals in this show revolved around the filibuster and on a fresh reading of it from the contemporary context, one that managed to display a high level of humor thanks to Nadia Mendoza’s animations, Humberto Vélez’ horse races or Pablo Helguera’s ode, all of which helped to balance out the exhibit as a whole.
But possibly the exercise that appeared more intangible than the intangible itself, in terms of formal solutions or concrete products, was Traffics. Scattered across the city, doing their own thing, the artists of Traffics managed to satisfy the old San José dream of finding itself submitted to an artistic project from outside the institutional borders. It bet in favor of what Lorca illustrates when he says la poesía está en las calles [poetry is in the streets].
In terms of potential audiences, Traffics was definitely the most courageous and effective of Estrecho’s proposals. The actors in this project were not from exclusively artistic centers but instead were anthropologists, architects and members of other disciplines. The title itself speaks of a certain illegality within the informal business and economy upon which the project was founded. It also intimates a certain relationship among the artists in the city, and their contact with the local public, as a presupposition for their proposal’s success. The particular convivial and collaborative links that Antoni Abad’s project brought about among the Nicaraguan migrant community, for whom he created an information and dissemination channel for local cellular phones, was perhaps the most complex and successful of all of Estrecho’s program. It revealed an effectiveness within a population that until that moment, had remained completely outside the art circuit.
The relationship between the Brazilian collective Bijari, Colombian Carolina Caycedo and Salvadoran Danny Zavaleta, was a collaborative project that pointed out concrete, problematic issues regarding the city while delving into them in terms of their work together. At the same time, the Full Dollar project included workers at the Hotel where anthropologist X. Andrade stayed while Juan Ignacio Salom’s project called for urban tours by children from poorer city areas.
Traffics burrowed deeply. It incorporated the help of everything surrounding it, turning everything into an accomplice of the artistic process and reminding us of the political within everyday life. Its actors brought the event to a close after a major feast, which unlike any formal ceremony, made Estrecho at once human and subversive.
Estrecho Dudoso’s validity rests in putting the touch of uncertainty in its name and thereby daring to question political, geographical and ideological frontiers that art is always able to overcome. Some missed out on this. Each project’s success can not be measured in terms of how long it lasts in the media, in catalogues or text books; there is also an exceptional ingredient made up of the experience, uncertainty and intangibility that once - now twice - were those of Estrecho Dudoso. We learned this from Carolina Caycedo (who exchanges things or labor outside [current] economic circuits) when in refusing to exhibit documentation concerning her work she said: Art has to serve some other purpose, be latent in a little girl, in a haircut, in the grateful demeanor of a family, or of friends.
Clara Astiasarán
Notes:
(1) Estrecho Dudoso was carried out at the following institutions: Fundación TEOR/éTica, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC), Museo de Arte Costarricense (MAC), Museo de Formas Espacios y Sonidos (MUFES), Museo Nacional, Museo Histórico Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia, Museo Juan Santamaría de Alajuela and Museos del Banco Central. The lower levels of the Parque Central, Plaza de la Cultura and public areas of San José were integrated in the same way.
Link:
Doubtful Strait
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