Rencontres Internationales Berlin 2015

Artistas latinoamericanos en el programa:

Miércoles 24 de junio, 18h00 :
– Juan Alfonso Zapata, Prima Vita

Jueves 25 de junio, 16h00:
– Ana Vaz, Occidente.
– Carlos Motta, Nefandus.

Sábado 27 de junio, 13h00 :
– Claudia Joskowicz, Los Rastreadores.
– Clemencia Echeverri, Supervivencias.
– Felipe Guerrero, Nelsa.
– Roberto Collio, Muerte blanca.

Sábado 27 de junio, 21h00 :
– Sebastian Díaz Morales, Insight

Domingo 28 de junio, 15h00 :
– Eduardo Williams, Forgot !

Informacion sobre las obras

Prima Vita, Juan Alfonzo Zapata

Prima Vita is part of a series about mechanized landscapes. A short piece recorded in Barcelona´s container terminal from Montjuïc, a nearby hill overlooking the city. Huge tired cranes roll along aisles made of thousands of containers stacked on top of each other in an otherwise rigid matrix that provides for efficient storage and transport between large ships and trucks. The cranes are operated by a single driver assisted by computers in a carefully choreographed dance thru the meadows of invisible goods. Landscape is a machine part of larger machines, where humans, surface rolling vehicles and ships are gears in permanent interaction.

1974, photographer and architect. Graduated from the PUCMM in Santiago, Dominican Republic. I´m a founding member of Grupo Fotográfico de Santiago since 1996, a group of photographers from different backgrounds committed with promoting photography through exhibitions, lectures and workshops. I moved on to study architecture and urbanism at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam in 2000 focusing on recent urban transformations through the landscapes of Rotterdam and Zuid Holland and eventually went on to work for the photographer Francesco Jodice and Multiplicity, in projects like Secret Traces and Uncertain States of Europe at the Triennale di Milano. Among other distinctions is the Wilfredo García international photography prize, first prize at the 2005 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (Al_Caribe with Supersudaca) and being selected for the XXIV Bienal Eduardo León Jimenes. I`ve taught at several institutions in Latin America and Europe while working in collaborative projects and workshops as an independent architect and visual artist in projects on architecture, landscape and photography.

Occidente, Ana Vaz

Antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A film-poem of an ecology of signs tracing a colonial history repeating itself: celebration and power relations, objects and fetishes, roots and branches, power and class relations in a struggle to find ones’ place, ones’ sitting around a table.

Ana Vaz is a Brazilian artist and filmmaker whose films, writing and performances look into the relationships between cinema and language through an anthropologics of dystopias & class relations. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy Studio National, Ana is presently engaged in an experimental research group in art and politics directed by Bruno Latour. Her films have been showed at a number of international film festivals including the New York Film Festival – Views, Visions du Réel, Ann Arbor, Images, Premiers Plans d’Angers, Femina International Film Festival (Special Jury Prize), Melbourne International Film Festival as well as solo and group shows at FRAC/Le Plateau (Paris), Museum of the Republic (Brasília), Salon Jeune Création (Paris),Temporary Gallery (Cologne), among others. Recently, her films have been shown retrospectively at the Melbourne Cinémathèque (Australia) & Void Gallery (Ireland).

Nefandus, Carlos Motta

In Nefandus two men travel by canoe down the Don Diego river in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean, a landscape of “wild” beauty. The men, an indigenous man and a Spanish speaking man, tell stories about pecados nefandos [unspeakable sins, abominable crimes]; acts of sodomy that took place in the Americas during the conquest. It has been documented that Spanish conquistadores used sex as a weapon of domination, but what is known about homoerotic pre-Hispanic traditions? How did Christian morality, as taught by the Catholic missions and propagated through war during the Conquest, transform the natives’ relationship to sex? Nefandus attentively looks at the landscape, its movement and its sounds for clues of stories that remain untold and have been largely ignored and stigmatized in historical accounts.

Carlos Motta’s interdisciplinary artistic practice includes the making of video essays, documentaries and online video archives. His early video Letter to My Father (Standing by the Fence) (2005) narrates the experience of living and working in New York City at the aftermath on 9/11 and focuses on the personal and political intersections of immigrants within that context. Motta is interested in questioning the structures of power that control and regulate civic life as well as hegemonic construction of historical narratives. One of his most recognized projects is We Who Feel Differently (2012), a comprehensive video archive of interviews with dozens of queer subjects that speak about the forty years of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer activism from a variety of social perspectives. The installation was first presented in a solo exhibition at New York’s New Museum in 2012 to great acclaim. Motta’s most recent video works Nefandus Trilogy will have its World Premiere at the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Tiger Awards Competition. Composed of three short films, Nefandus (winner of Catalonia Hotels Award for Best Video at LOOP, Barcelona, 2013), Naufragios and La visión de los vencidos, the trilogy exposes the imposition of the category `sexuality` onto indigenous cultures in the Americas during the Conquest and throughout the colonial period, based on moral and legal discourses of sin and crime. These works will also be presented at the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias in February.

Los rastreadores, Claudia Joskowicz

Los rastreadores is a two channel video installation set in Bolivia and very loosely inspired by John Ford’s American Western classic film The Searchers. It does not attempt to recreate the film but adapts its major themes where the similarities lie in the use of landscape and depictions of themes like race and alienation. The main character in Los Rastreadores, Ernesto Suarez, is a drug lord who, recently released from a Miami prison, returns to his home in Santa Cruz only to immediately depart in a search towards the oposite side of the county for his family’s only surviving members after a home invasion and massacre. Ernesto’s character is modeled after Roberto Suarez Gomez, a Bolivian drug trafficker nicknamed «king of cocaine» and the most powerful drug lord in Bolivian history. Los Rastreadores merges and distills issues of race, belonging, class systems, and alienation into a minimal narrative that con – denses the massacre of Ernesto’s family, the kidnapping of his daughter, and his departure to search for her. Using silences and voice-overs rather than traditional dialogue it centers on the power of myth where literal events operate as a displacement for the political discourse in the country.

Claudia Joskowicz (MFA New York University, 2000) has had solo exhibitions at LMAK Projects, Forever & Today, Inc., Thierry Goldberg Projects, and Momenta Art in New York, Dot Fiftyone in Miami, California Museum of Photography in California, Galeria ACBEU in Salvador, Espacio Simón Patiño and Museo Nacional de Arte, Centro Cultural Santa Cruz and Galería Kiosko in Bolivia, and Lawndale Art Center in Houston. Recent group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Fondation Cartier pour l`art contemporain, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Tenth Sharjah Biennial; the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the Tenth Habana Biennial; Slought Foundation, Philadelphia and the 17th and 18th Videobrasil Festivals in São Paulo. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a mid-career artist commission from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, a Fulbright Scholar award, and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Recidencies include Sacatar Institute in Brazil, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM program. Joskowicz is currently the artist in residence at the LMCC’s Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

Supervivientes, Clemencia Echeverri

Supervivencias (Survivals) is a multichannel video installation that merges from an investigation I made of political distances in our Colombian territory. I took multiple journeys through the country, in order to hear the pulsating beats of a territory that has experienced the conflict, controversies and discords for many years; in order to sense how a land gets scorched while being traced by boundaries as well as crossroads, and how that stories, histories get calcined. This piece– executed on the basis of their own rhythm, forces and times – betoken vital ferments, trepidations and a foreboding darkness. Sol Astrid Giraldo a Colombian art critic wrote about Supervivencias » The land cannot be tranquil in the wake of sacrifices: It is a restless land, plowed by presences as much as it is by absences, limited not only by physical boundaries of blood and fire but by invisible ones as well, of added terrors and secrets. Such is the land of war, which won´t fit in with pacifier narratives. How can it be named then? How can it be made visible?».In Supervivencias a house emerges with its atavistic symbolism in full display: doors opening and closing, corridors leading who knows where inscrutable nooks and corners. Then, finally, an invasion of ghostly, overflowing presences, The ancestral house, the sheltering one, the dwelling and the refuge is now ridden with porosities that cannot curb the exterior pressure.” www.clemenciaecheverri.com

BIO Clemencia Echeverri lives and works in Bogotá. She got her BA in Fine Arts in Colombia and Masters degree in Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Arts, London. She has worked as an arts professor in Colombia. Having dedicated herself to sculpture and painting until the mid-nineties, Clemencia started to work on installation, video, sound and interactive works inspired by the political and social problems that have marked her time. At the moment she is preparing Nóctulo, for Nce–Arte in Bogotá (2015). Relevant and recent works: Treno/ Waterweavers curated by José Roca, at Bard Graduate Center New York.(2014) Sacrificio at the I International Bienal de Arte in Cartagena, and at 43 Salon (inter Nacional de Artistas)Curated by Gabriela Rangel, Medellin (2013-2014). Supervivencias at Alonso Garcés Gallery and Versión Libre (nominatedin the VI Luis Caballero award (2011) The Liverpool Biennial (2010)No longer empty sound project. CENART Mexico (2011) Cosmovideografías Latinoamericanas. A solo site specific show at Museo Nacional de Colombia. Biennal de la Habana (2000), Bienal de Bogotá 1998. Treno at Daros-Latinamerica Museum, Zurich (2009); Don’t Stare at the sun in Poland; Galeria GAK Bremen. Electronic arts festivals such as ISEA in Helsinki-Stockholm and Tallin; Artes Electrónicas Banquete in Madrid; Ars Electronica in Austria; international fellowships such as those given by Yadoo, arts residency in New York, The Arts Council, London; Canada’s Daniel Langlois Foundation; and the Bienal de las Artes award in Colombia. Collections; Daros–Latinamerica National Bank in Colombia, Los Angeles (MOLAA); the Museo MEIAC, Spain; the Essex Latin American Collection,England, as well as by a number of private collectors. www.clemenciaecheverri.com

Nelsa, Felipe Guerrero

A mission in the middle of the Colombian jungle. Time seems to have stopped. There is something sinister in the air. The ambiance is tense. Hot and humid. A man surrounded by an environment that burns himfrom the inside. Power, poetry, violence. Everything happens in an instant, leaving everyone breathless.

Director and editor Felipe Guerrero was born in Colombia in 1975. His first film Paraíso(2006) received the Mention Spécial for First Films at FIDMarseille. Corta(2012), his second film, premiered in the BrightFuture Section at the Rotterdam FF 2012, and was exhibited in Festivals around the world (FICCICartagena de Indias, BAFICI Buenos Aires, JIFF Jeonju,FIDOCS Santiago de Chile, DISTRITAL México DF, SPLITCroacia, DOKLeipzig, La Habana). As an editor, he worked in films exhibited and awarded internationally, among them: Los Hongos (2014), La playa DC (2012), El páramo (2011), El vuelco del Cangrejo (2009). In 2011 he founded his own production company Mutokino.

Muerte blanca, Sebastian Diaz Morales

White death is the impressionist portrait of a landscape marked by tragedy. A ghostly stroll among the vestiges of a story where forty-four young soldiers and one sergeant were pushed to their deaths in the mountainous region of Antuco.

Roberto Collío – 25 November 1986, Santiago (Chile) Graduated of Integral Realization of Film and Television from Center of Cinematographic Research. While studying in Argentina he wrote and directed his first short film «Hombre muerto», an adaptation exercise based on the homonymous short story by Horacio Quiroga. Roberto Collío returned to Chile on 2009, where he participate as sound mixer in several film, both documentary and fiction. During 2013, Collío directs his second short film, «Muerte Blanca», an experimental documentary that chronicles the tragedy of Antuco. Currently Collío is developing his first feature, a documentary called “Petit Frère». The project, co ¬directed with Rodrigo Robledo and produced by Isabel Orellana, is a playful approach to the idea of identity, built in the fantastic imaginary writing of a haitian immigrant.

Forgot ! Eduardo Williams

Climb up, let’s jump, the fields are green and the houses grey. We’re all small. It feels like the pores of my skin have become gigantic.

Eduardo Williams studied at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires (Argentina), then at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains (France). Tôi quên rồi ! (I Forgot !) is his sixth short film. He previously directed the following short films : Que Caigo ? (That I`m falling ?), 2013 El ruido de las estrellas me aturde (The sound of stars dazes me), 2012 Pude ver un puma (Could see a puma), 2011 Tan Atentos (Beware), 2010 Alguien los vio (They were seen), 2010

Enlaces de interés