A place for resistance. Ninth Video & Media Art Biennial, Chile 2009

The Ninth Video & Media Art Biennial, Chile 2009, is far more than a collection of a hundred pieces –situated halfway between art and technology, with an Internet accent and a touch of interactivity and Latin America– displayed between August and September at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile’s Quinta Normal. It’s just indispensable to talk about the history of an event that has grown thanks to the willingness of a few people, the heir to a video art-oriented movement that started out back in the 1980s in the midst of the dictatorship. It’s also important to speak about the artistic situation of a country that whipped its cultural institutionalism into shape in the course of the 1990s, with a democracy engaged in the free market and a fledgling scenario owed at that time to the proliferation of collegiate art schools and the opening of new exhibition spaces –a process that has been getting beefed up dramatically in the 2000s. FROM VIDEO TAPE TO NEW MEANS The antecedents of this Biennial hark back to the French-Chilean Video Art Festival, sponsored by the Chilean-French Institute of Culture, that gathered a bunch of creators in the 1980s. Swaying between the fascination for the format and the political commitment, this was a generation that managed to portray itself and talk with artists coming from Europe. After the end of the military regime and the start of the new decade, the event is going through a process of reaching out to other Latin American nations. Some of the authors that made the rounds there moved on to television and publicity. Thus, the spirit that breathed life into the event faded out and eventually turned it into a myth and a standard of counterculture. Things seemed to go quiet in the early 1990s. However, the feeling was still alive among some authors who, in addition to teaching, witnessed the birth of a new breed of audiovisual creators that belonged to the Chilean Video Corporation. One of them is Nestor Olhagaray, a man who grabbed this platform to launch the First Santiago Video Biennial in 1993. Thanks to the ties with other Latin American festivals and the support provided by bi-national institutes, the event embraced other emerging artists with a flair for documental works. The networks that are opening, coupled with the steadfastness of its director –he counts on sporadic institutional support– are the factors that give consistence to this event. Private funds were virtually nonexistent. Called the Video and Electronic Arts Biennial in 1995, it changed name to “Video and New Media Biennial” in 1999. The event had already engulfed the new art trends thanks to the advance of cutting-edge technology all over the world. Nonetheless, the critical-experimental trend taking shape in Chile from the collegiate art schools remains reluctant to technology. Little by little, video elbows its way into the contemporary practices. People are already talking about video installations. But those artists who get trained in audiovisual means are still trapped in some kind of parallel circuit and don’t get access to the fledgling institutional exhibition halls and to an art vehicle increasingly marked by academicism and endogamy. Audiovisual artists will hardly ever get a foot in a circle of critics and artists who look at themselves and waste their time on self-references, who tangle up the local and international social-political context, yet they don’t manage to move past the universal environment of the museums and the galleries into other contexts and disciplines. One of the audiovisual artists who embraced the contemporary arts was Guillermo Cifuentes (1968-2007).1 The author was formed in Audiovisual Communication at the Arcos Institute, the same place that churned out such major artists as Claudia Aravena and Patricio Pereira. It wasn’t until his return in 1998 from a Master degree in Fine Arts with Video Mention at the University of Syracuse, the U.S., that he swooned into filmmaking and video, thus redefining himself as a visual artist and going all the way into full-time legitimization with openly contemporary works, critical-based pieces that go beyond all sight and documental concerns. [In the United States] was the first time I found out the idea of making art by using means, such as video, cinema, photography and computers, was not in doubt at all. It was a fact… Until now, I tend to think of visual solutions for certain concerns linked to political contingency. Even though video continues to be the means I feel most comfortable with to tamper with reality and reflect creatively, he said in an interview in 2005.2 TECHNOLOGY IN ACTION This time around, the Ninth Biennial unveiled its new name (Video and Media Arts Biennial, BVAM), and a multidisciplinary team of youngsters –always under the leadership of Olhagaray– took the reins of its organization. Convened by the Plataforma Cultura Digital group, some of the talented creators in the event were Enrique Rivera and Catalina Ossa, plus sociologist Simon Perez. Under a slogan reading “Critical Resistance,” Olhagaray’s political consciousness melted into the drive of a team that boasts tremendous management skills, a team that in the course of the 2000s has generated research studies, creation, reflection and spread related to the multimedia practices. The money came mostly through the funds granted by the Audiovisual Council of the National Council of Culture and Arts. Video installations, works built with both analogical and digital tools, recycling strategies and technological vanguard, net art, performance, sound art, photography, art video cycles, documentaries, cinema and experimental music, but above all interactive artworks, were the name of the game in an event that attended by such artists as Tom Heene and Yacine Sebti, from Belgium, Colombia’s Santiago Ortiz, Argentina’s Emiliano Causa, Uruguay’s Brian Mackern and Spain’s Nerea Calvillo. The BVAM is the number-one event of its kind in Chile, a Latin American reference given the turnout of artists and institutions summoned to attend, plus the participation for the first time ever this year of the IMAL Institute (Belgium) and Le Fresnoy (France). On the curatorial concept, Olhagaray has pointed out:3 In general terms, there’s great confusion about digital formats that are usually shown in a linkage with the market system. The BVAM does not intend to display technological breakthroughs. These artworks go through a decanting process, a critical work with the language of art, with the space and the contexts it gets slotted in. Technology takes on the notion of the poetic, in which the author is a socializing agent of contemporary cultural problems… Resistance is synonymous of “here we are,” we do exist amid difference, plurality and diversity, fostering the defense of free actions, promoting participative actions and boosting the esthetic quality of the artistic creation as well. The key to success is an inclusive and experimental art stacked up against a decorative and dazzling art. Topics like the influence of the Internet, the democratization of digital means, the use of communitarian software and hacker-activism, among others, also took center stage through a multitude of parallel activities during the event, such as theoretical workshops, chats with artists and, above all, the International Colloquium entitled “Critical Resistance Esthetics,” attended by boldface names like Brazil’s Arlindo Machado, Mexico’s Fran Ilich and Argentina’s Rodrigo Alonso. These instances were the ones that doubtlessly cheered up an event whose each and every edition always reels in a young public, yet it also encourages previous generations of authors willing to share the concerns generated by technological development and the advance of digital means of communication. Among Chilean authors, for examples, it’s important to mention the addition of painter Yto Aranda and engineer Roberto Larraguibel. Other artists who have been working on video and the Internet for quite some time also attended, such as Alejandra Perez, who logged in with citizenship resistance groups in the seaport of Valparaiso (Wiki_del_pueblo: CachUreo? Valparaiso: Pichanga Urbana); Viviana Bravo, who worked with the interactive registry of a group of women cleaning a monument that pays tribute to the victims of the dictatorship: Untitled (The Heroes); and Andrea Wolf, whose video Souvenir: Keepsakes of the Future invites viewers to rely on their own presence to end the presentation of a group of playful kids that appear on the screen. The public that visited the exhibit on a daily basis and the diversity of creators in both the parallel activities and the “Juan Downey” Contest (an event in support of art video and digital means that takes place alongside the biennial and that pays homage to the like-name Chilean artists who dies in 1993, a harbinger of art video in the world) bore out the increasing high spirits about multimedia practices in Chile. There was, of course, clear primetime hype on interactive art. On a general basis, there were proposal of tremendous esthetic presence, experiences teeming with poetry and a lot of sense that sway from intimate printings to contents of enormous social and political incidence. Some of the could even be activated all at once from the Internet, something the Chilean public is not used to if we consider that the most massive expositions are usually hooked up with the masters of the traditional language and that a considerable chunk of the public visiting museums and art galleries still remain somewhat reluctant to a breakup with that language and the conceptual density of an engrossed scene. For convening this public, there were precisely installations in which technology called for fluent and efficient interaction. However, in the face of that symphony of sounds, forms and colors that the gesture itself triggered in Sensible (by Argentine group Biopus, home to Emiliano Causa); in the face of the deadly hell raised by Salt Lake (by Belgium’s Tom Heene, Yacine Sebti and Charo Calvo); the intimate and subtle experience of Fabrice Cavaillé’s cinematographic devices, or the mathematic rigor of Santiago Ortiz’s faces, some Chilean artworks only showed powerful ideas; better yet, good intentions with a level of experimentation and embracement of limited technology due to the lack of institutional support and adequate research, creation and critical platforms. In works like the electronic painting RX1000 by Yto Aranda, the pretentious sound installation in The Farm of Discursoz by Mario Z, or the performance Habitar by Klaudia Kemper, as well as the photographic series entitled The Big Fish by Monica Palma, there were clear-cut evidence of the creations by authors coming from different languages and who take on technology in an anecdotic and non-troublemaking incomprehensive fashion. On the other hand, there were works that needed the presence of staff members to inform or brief the unknowing public, or proposals whose kinky and glitch-laden technology buckled under after so many days of exhibition –three weeks in all. This laid bare a lack of resources –just another reality brought up by this biennial. The event presented itself as one huge lab that, in the same breath, undertook recycling strategies –event the mounting and redesign of the former museum building- that showcased low–tech and apparently precarious pieces in some of the installations. A good case in point is Quicksand Box by Chilean group UDK, in which an image of Santiago streets projected on the floor could perfectly be stepped on, featuring circuits tied up with masking tape, but that it unfortunately succumbed a week after its debut. Maybe this is something very personal, but it struck my attention to see in the public a number of artists and critics from the critical-experimental side of the contemporary art, rather than from the media arts, with mixed emotions of interest and certain unprecedented resistance. “Why should I interact to finish a work? I’ll rather watch the work that shakes me up all over without having to collaborate with it in order to get that feeling,” said a renowned artist from the 1990s generation while referring to notions of art and authorship. With some uneasy experiences, the biennial showed by and large the need to review the recent history, to revise the art systems and their influence on the public hit hard by misinformation, showbiz supremacy and humongous social urgencies. The media art circuit that taking shape wants to see some action now.