LAST DAYS TO VISIT AND PARTICIPATE IN "IMPRESSIONS ABOUT TODAY" IN ESPACIO EL DORADO, BOGOTÁ
Impresiones sobre la actualidad (Impressions about Today) is a project of collective creation by the artist José Ruiz Díaz in which, through open printing sessions and with 7000 sheets of paper, he uses the word "TODAY" as a conceptual support to speculate on the concept of actuality, and intervene in the Espacio El Dorado building.
The participation methodology consists in that the visitors (face-to-face or virtual) propose a sentence in Spanish of maximum 25 characters that begins with the word “TODAY” and that alludes to their own current situation. The artist-typographer prints several copies of the statement and uses them to wallpaper the exhibition rooms.
At the beginning, Impresiones sobre Actualidad was thought as a routine action that would respond to current events. It started from an analysis of press clippings and the urgency of accounting for the political and social mobilizations that became stronger at the end of 2019 and that promised to intensify in 2020. The succession of headlines, texts and announcements that use the term Today are the starting point of an archive on current affairs without any validity and the object of study of this project. "Today last day", "Today is built", "Today I claim", "Today I find", "Today anarchy" are some of the statements that give rise to thinking about the present as a fiction or as a promise.
One of the starting points of Impresiones sobre Actualidad is the cinema, specifically the forms and structures used to advertise films on billboards today. Each poster printed and pasted on the wall is the potential advertisement for an existing film, in the process of shooting or about to be made. Each poster announces a possible fiction that will be screened and that will be announced on the billboard as shown by the records of several Colombian photographers.
Espacio El Dorado is a contemporary art gallery established in 2015 in the neighborhood of La Macarena in Bogotá, Colombia. The name of the gallery comes from the legend of El Dorado and borrows the imaginary of this mythical place of abundant riches. A utopia that results fictitious due to its own impossibility. Espacio El Dorado seeks to materialize artistic imaginaries whose ambition resembles, in a certain way, the conception of the mythical golden city. The colonial origins of the legend allude to the constant dialogue between Espacio El Dorado and its Colombian context. In that sense, the purpose of the gallery is the realization of these ambitious ideas, apparently impossible, which can profoundly alter the identity of the artist, the space, and the surrounding local art scene.
