Reports - curaduría - Colombia
Proyectos La Usurpadora, Ana Luisa González Pinzón
Reading time: 10 minutes
22.10.2021
The cultural journalist Ana Luisa González Pinzón interviews the Proyectos La Usurpadora collective about their exhibition “Jagüey: sobre un mismo horizonte” at the MAPUKA museum in Barranquilla, Colombia, as part of the program of art encounters in the Caribbean.
In the search for other galaxies, as if they were space engineers opening portals and inviting others to make the transition to unknown artistic dimensions, is where Proyectos La Usurpadora finds its creative engine. Formed by artist and curator María Isabel Rueda from Cartagena, and curator Mario Alberto Llanos from Barranquilla, this project was born more than ten years ago in Puerto Colombia (Atlantic) as a space to host independent contemporary art initiatives that create bridges between science fiction, quantum physics, and spirituality, exploring the work of artists from the Caribbean, unknown in the history of Colombian art. Likewise, its work of archiving and historiographic recovery of artists from the region has closed intergenerational gaps between emerging artists and those from the seventies to the early nineties.
This was the first time that the public call format was used, which created a channel for a wide variety of proposals, artists, and thoughts. More than 100 people presented themselves, among artists and collectives. There were very interesting things; one could make hundreds of fusions where the selection could lead to multiple options. We try to direct that river towards a particular interest.
In the last six or seven years, we have worked with the crossovers between history, science fiction, and quantum physics. A strong interdisciplinarity in relation to science and spirituality. From our position in the Caribbean as readers and producers of what is happening socio-culturally, we consider that throughout its history the Caribbean has been a place of confluence between the US and Europe where people settled, bringing knowledge and thoughts from both places and collapsing into each other, as a great coalition.
MAL: As a continental country, unlike Venezuela and Panama, to mention one example, Colombia never declared itself as part of the Caribbean. Caracas is a Caribbean city but Bogota is high in the Andes. Historically, those of us who live closer to the Caribbean were required to relate to the center of the country, the places of political strength, and not to our peers. In that sense, we wanted to reestablish that type of communication and create projects to settle historical and family debts we have with our colleagues and comrades in the Caribbean.
ALG: We are at a time when museums are reopening after more than a year of closures of cultural spaces. What were the challenge and the stimulus to face the curatorship of Jagüey?
MAL: We had a long time without doing a project in the city. We use this space as a form of reading that revisits what we have done around the physical inabilities to capture thoughts or moments on a time-space level. The stimulus is related to the question: How can we contribute to the critical dialogue in relation to the growth of the city and the region? Through (non) history, science fiction, geography, and spirituality, to name a few ever-changing themes, the Jagüey project seeks to build bridges due to the fragility of these at the institutional level in the region. That is our challenge.
MIR: After the shutdown of cultural spaces, there is a certain power in declaring that in spite of everything we continue thinking and producing. Moments of crisis are very important. As we are going through a global crisis that destabilizes all systems, we should not cling to certainties in order to move forward.
Certainties keep us rigid in a single point, a moment in which we must try things, create new strategies, attempt what seems impossible in the midst of uncertainty and difficulty.
Doubts, questions, and searches generate the framework, the network connections that lead us to new certainties irremediably bound to fall apart again. Visualizing this internal process reflected in the culture generates the necessary energy of transformation; it gives support to the community and reactivates spaces for thought through the visual arts.
Aldalberto Calvo proposes a contemporary re-reading of histories, official and ancestral narratives in relation to the tension between the colonial and the decolonial. In this geographical region of the Colombian Caribbean, the area between Bolivar and Barranquilla (Atlantic), there is one of the few indigenous ethnic groups that until recently were recognized, the Mokaná. Through archaeological forgeries intervened with graffiti, Calvo problematizes the colonial annulment legitimized by institutional histories where falseness within a museum allows other kinds of languages.
MAL: Multiple layers of reading is something that has always been of our interest. To finish off the project, the work of the Dominican artist Ricardo Ariel Toribío refers us, as people from the Caribbean, to all those family members who live abroad, creating an imaginary about spatio-temporal tensions in relation to the information that the Caribbean diaspora shares with us. His work reminds me of Rita Indiana’s records when she talks about the fluctuations of what the relatives brought and the relationships with idyllic places through the image. Likewise, Toribío’s work presents the reading of Frank Báez’s poem Llegó el fin del mundo a mi barrio [The End of The World Arrived At My Neighborhood], where the end of the world is an infinite return that portrays our curatorial intention in terms of non-linear forms of time.
ALG: What are the creative and thematic connections between the archival work of Caribbean artists that you have built from the 1970s to the early 1990s with younger artists from the Caribbean region? What crossings and bridges have you found?
ALG: Finally, can you talk about the bridges between science fiction and art in your curatorial projects?
MAL: Science fiction is a free place where anything and everything can happen. For many years we had projects that were aimed at rewriting the official history of the arts in the Colombian Caribbean. From science fiction, as historians, we were able to allow ourselves to work on history without being tied to the linearity of time.
MIR: We are very interested in the crossover between literature, film, and other disciplines. At the Salón Regional, we proposed a wormhole where we connected with a generation of artists who had been forgotten. For us, this was not metaphorical. Once the Salón Regional culminated, we made that connection in space-time. Then we worked on narratives of the future in relation to Afrofuturism.
The Caribbean is a pioneer of science fiction in the history of Colombian literature. With this background, we wanted to open a space to unfold these imaginations in view of their potential in relation to the current apocalyptic and utopian stories about the pandemic. Science fiction allows us to make proposals that transform reality.
Comments
There are no coments available.