The Seventh MERCOSUR Biennial
t is a well-known fact that for some time now, biennials have been multiplying themselves; they have proliferated here and there and each new edition appears to justify itself as a platform bound to be involved in the complex perspectives which contemporary art discusses, and which are increasingly distant from the innovations restricted solely to the field of production. In the latest Sao Paulo Biennial, Ivo Mesquita proposed a reflection on the current validity of formats focusing on the history of the first Latin American biennial, which he was selected to design on this occasion. His attempt, considered a failure by many, served at least as a reflection regarding how far-reaching boldness can be when it originates within institutions themselves. But it also served to assert the value of certain budgetary luxuries that a country like Brazil cannot dilapidate.
The issue certainly did not go unnoticed at the time of defining the character and the imprint of the seventh MERCOSUR Biennial, which took place between October and November 2009, and proposed focusing on artists “as social players and constant producers of necessary critical meaning”, a definition that implies, per se, an interesting approach to the current situation, which seems to demand increasingly less frivolous reflections. This may explain the attunement with certain proposals from the 1970s. In this edition, entitled Grito y Escucha (Screaming and Hearing), conceived by a team headed by the Argentine curator Victoria Noorthoorn and the Chilean artist Camilo Yáñez, artists played a fundamental role. Particularly, in the conception of a project which, besides the seven exhibitions presented at Porto Alegre (five at the quayside warehouses harbor and two in the city center) and a series of artistic interventions scattered in the city, incorporated a network articulated with local art workshops and projects, an education program, a publishing and communication program, and a radio system.
In sum: a network proposal aimed at fostering the links between the biennial as an eventual event, artistic production and the larger universe of the community. In this way, specialists as well as non- specialists and the students of the State of Rio Grande do Sul’s schools had a place assigned to them within this biennial’s programs. The Argentine artist Marina de Caro was in charge of the education project, which had already been a key chapter in the past edition, managed on that occasion by Luis Camnitzer. This seventh edition included an artists-in-residence program comprising projects that were developed in different towns in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, aimed at working with the people from the different communities. Fourteen artists were convened by De Caro to implement in different towns and regions of Rio Grande do Sul diverse work methods that had already been applied in other situations and were adapted on a case by case basis. One of the main objectives of the residencies, which included the participation, among others, of the French artist Nicolás Floc’h, Argentine artists Claudia del Río, Diana Aisenberg, Rosario Bléfari and Diego Melero, Uruguayan artists Francisco Tomsich and Merín Verges, and Guilherme Moojen, Caludia Hamerski and Natalia García from Brazil, was to work with young people with the aim of fostering freer and more poetic critical thinking. A promoter of the Drawing Club in Rosario, Argentina, Del Río worked on a similar proposal of drawing interchange at Santa María Federal University and in the city’s public schools. For her part, Aisenberg took to the schools of Porto Alegre an adaptation for children of her well-known project Historias de Arte, diccionario de certezas e intuiciones, while Diego Melero presented a curious seminar on political philosophy before adults taking gym classes. Among all these experiences, the one with the strongest impact was perhaps El gran trueque, promoted by the French artist Nicholas Floc’h, who worked on the imaginary and the capacity to dream of extremely poor young people from different neighborhoods in Porto Alegre, whom he encouraged to materialize dreams that they could unexpectedly crystalize under the exceptional circumstances created by the Biennial. El gran trueque implied nothing more and nothing less than imagining and producing a desired fictional object (a Kombi van to travel around) and be able to trade it for a real one.
Can art transform people’s lives or contribute to modify their circumstances? The question, formulated so many times by the avant-garde movements and currently discarded with certain cynical skepticism, seems to reappear in experiences such as this.
In addition to their significant participation in complementary programs that became central, the role of artists in the organization and design of the exhibitions was also a key element. The adjunct curators presenting their own exhibitions were Argentinian Roberto Jacoby, Arthur Leischer and Laura Lima, from Brazil, and Mario Navarro from Chile. Jacoby conceived Proyectables, the exhibition featured at the downtown Santander Cultural. Here the Argentine artist presented in the context of an impressive staging a selection of projects using the Internet for their production and circulation.
Twenty projects were selected from among eight hundred presented by fifty countries, which reflects the dimension of an invitation delivered through this means. Arthur Leischer, for his part, was the curator of Texto Público, a project conceived as a dialogue with the city, which included the participation of Argentinian, Chilean, Brazilian and Mexican artists, among them, Rosangela Rennó, from Brazil; the collective Provisorio Permanente, Patricio Larrambebere, Eduardo Basualdo and Eduardo Navarro from Argentina; Cadu and Camila Sposati from Brazil, and Pablo Rivera from Chile.
In keeping with a premise aimed at activating reflection processes, one of the two main downtown exhibitions was El dibujo de las ideas, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn at the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art -MARGS. The ensemble rescued and brought to the forefront an important production of critical conceptual art of the 1970s that resorted to drawing as well as to calligraphy and typography, as well as works by Cildo Meireles, León Ferrari, the Chilean Juan Downey and the Uruguayan Jorge Caraballo. The visual poetry and the mail art of Edgardo Vigo and the Brazilian Paulo Bruscky found a sensible space for corespondence. And in the interstice between both, their legacy could be read in more recent works, such as those of Magdalena Jitrik. Since this biennial was conceived as an aesthetic experience of a relational type, Noorthoorn’s exhibition at the MARGS appeared to align with the aesthetic rather than with the relational. Impeccable, exquisite, and more museological that the rest of the shows that comprised this Biennial, El dibujo de las ideas focused more on a sensible and speculative order than on the disorder that characterizes instances of turbulence. Very different in this respect was the presentation of the rest of the shows – including Noorthoorn’s – at the Casi do Porto warehouses, which confirms that the container contributes to the content and vice-versa.
Every biennial boasting to be such aspires to mark a turning- point in the ways of producing and conducting the art experience. In this respect, time will confirm if this biennial will effectively materialize this aspiration.
