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Centro Cultural Chacao
Av. Tamanaco
Caracas 1060, Miranda, Venezuela

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About
The seventh edition of the Seminario Fundación Cisneros, Disruptions: Dilemmas Regarding the Image in Contemporaneity, conceptualized and directed by Ileana Ramírez, Program Director of the CPPC, will take place on March 16, 2018, at Centro Cultural Chacao, in Caracas.

As in previous editions, the seminar program includes a wide range of presentation formats, from lectures to workshops and editorial contributions. It also involves several collaborators in the conceptualization and creation of parallel programs such as architectural tours and film and video cycles. The main event of this seminar is a one-day conference.

The seventh Seminario Fundación Cisneros will consider art’s links with politics. This art-political connection is important because it operates as a model for the construction of new subjectivities, and encourages the questioning of what Jacques Rancière called "the aesthetic and representative logic of art" (The Emancipated Spectator, 2008), as well as its forms of production and its influence on the perception of the spectator. The day’s presentations will put into critical discussion the position taken by images in relation to the temporalities of art and historical events. To clarify this complex network, we will focus specifically on the spaces for art and politics, distinguishing the areas where they may overlap (the political in art, politics for art, political art, art as public action, citizen political action).

In Disruptions, we hope to recognize the articulations between art and politics in contemporary culture, selecting specific cases in which, on one hand, the contradictions that occur there are evidenced through a critical viewpoint that allows the work to be valued, not only for its formal aspects but also for the intentionality of the artist. On the other hand, the use of new technologies and media that have modified the forms of production and circulation of images invite us to think about what constitutes the viewers’ space and their considerations in assessing perception. Data and information will also be collected around relevant social and political phenomena, generating debates that will fuel reflection. Finally, activities will be promoted through experimentation, will clarify these issues in practice, and produce unedited contents that serve as a referential framework for future research.

Focus and Content
The seminar will cover three main points of development. The first part will focus on the use of images with the presentations of Erik Del Búfalo and Marilé Di Filippo. The second part, Historical Inventories, will address the issue of activism and social protest through experiences that have occurred in different places and have marked a significant moment, with presentations by Miguel A. López and Elizabeth Marín.

In the third and final thematic axis, New Media, the presentations of Rosina Cazali and Leticia Obeid will directly address the technologies that have created a field of new professions with unique politics, where appropriation and translation expand their dimension in other spheres of power.

Much theater is also a relevant discipline because of its political vocation, and we will have the participation of the live arts collective Los Peces del Guaire, a multidisciplinary enterprise that will invite us to reflect on contemporary notions of freedom of thought, equality, and human rights through dynamics that call for the participation of the public.

Finally, a set of short presentations in Pecha Kucha format will focus on various topics, including: notions of the image; forms of representation and the scope of power; and the possibilities of change in public space. Rodrigo Figueroa and Iván Candeo will posit a historical perspective; Elisa Silva will explore the image as a new form of the word and representation; we will investigate further into this digital age through a poiesis generated by decoding or "hacking" by Yucef Merhi, and we will learn about listening through perception via sound, image, and speech with Gil Samson. To conclude this section, Erly Ruiz will examine the importance of the meme as a new form of language to recreate the world from the everyday.

Additionally, 6 texts have been commissioned for publication on the CPPC's website from María Virginia Jaua, Felix Suazo, Sandra Pinardi, Bernardo José de Souza, José Luis Barrios and Albeley Rodríguez, on significant features inherent in the relationship between art and politics, and their relationship with the image in varying contexts of contemporary art in Latin America. Those texts will be published here on this website.

Within the framework of the seminar, artist and filmmaker Carlos Castillo will offer a workshop on moving images in the independent space ONG in Caracas. We will also have a film and video cycle selected by Iván Candeo and, finally, we will extend the seminar experience with an architectural tour through the city of Caracas designed by LuisRa Bergolla and the organization CCSen365.

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Program
8:00–8:45 am
Register
8:45–9:00 am
Diverse Connections: Projection of video works from the CPPC (a selection)
9:00–9:20 am
We Begin
9:20–10:50 am
Session #1: The Place of Images
The first session of the seminar includes two presenters, each focusing on the interstices of the political in images:


9:20–10:50 am
Session #2: Historical Inventories, Body, and Activism
The second session of the morning includes presentations focused on case studies of activim, body actions, and emblematic artistic movements in the recent history of Latin American countries:


12:20–2:00 pm
Break
1:40–2:00 pm
Diverse Connections: Projection of video works from the CPPC
2:00–2:20 pm
Choose the Disruption
#PecesDelGuaire
Using strategies of the live arts (theater, performance, improvisation, dance, music) spectators will have before them a fifteen-minute action charged with comedy and cynicism that will put pressure on contemporary notions of freedom-of-thought, equality, and human rights.

2:20–3:50 pm
Session #3: New media
The third session of the day includes presentations focused on cases involving new technologies, the relationship between people and machines, and their ability to create new modes of producion of art, new languages, and behavior in the collective:


3:50–4:10 pm
Break-Coffee
4:10–4:55 pm
Session #4: Pecha Kuchas
This session, designed in Pecha Kucha format, includes five unpublished presentations by Venezuelan artists, sociologists, and architects, each proposing a practice of new media, appropriation, and new policies in art, images, sound, and words:


5:00–5:20 pm
Conversation
5:20–5:30 pm
Closing Remarks

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Parallel Events

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Speaker and Participant Bios
LuisRa Bergolla
LuisRa Bergolla is a communications professional who studied museology from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has worked in cultural production in both the public and private sectors, and he is always driven by two passions: the protection of cultural patrimony and interventions in public space. Currently, he is General Manager at Collectivox, and since 2016, has been the driving force behind @CCSen365, a program for patrimonial (re)interpretation that promotes urban walking tours and the enjoyment of cultural patrimony by Caracas residents in re(conciliation) with their city. @las_itacas

Iván Candeo
Since 2004 Iván Candeo (Caracas, 1983) has been part of the independent study group Taller de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, coordinated by Antonio Lazo and Zeinab Bulhossen. In 2008 he obtained the title of Professor, with a specialization in plastic arts. He studied contemporary Venezuelan history and the theory and history of plastic arts. In addition, he has carried out complementary studies in performance, art criticism, and experimental cinema in the Aula Xcèntric of the Contemporary Cultural Center of Barcelona. He has been awarded the Armando Reverón Award at the 65th Arturo Michelena Art Biennial (2010), the Venezuelan Association of Plastic Artists Award in the Young Artist category (2012) and second prize in the XII Edition of the Eugenio Mendoza Prize of the Sala Mendoza (2013). Additionally, he works as a teacher. He currently resides in Barcelona, Spain.

Rosina Cazali
Independent curator and writer Rosina Cazali studied art at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. She is the founder of the project La Curandería, was Director of the Cultural Center of Spain in Guatemala from 2003 to 2007, curator of international biennials and exhibitions throughout Latin America, the United States, and Spain. She has participated as a speaker in theoretical conferences convened by dOCUMENTA 12, held in Cairo, Egypt; the Royal College of Art, London; and Independent Curators International at the New Museum of Art, New York, among others. In 2011, she was invited by Mexico’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) to curate one of the central exhibitions commemorating the Bicentennial of Independence, entitled Móvil, by the Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo. In 2014, she coordinated the symposium The Day We Became Contemporary, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) in San José, Costa Rica. In 2010, she received a John Simon Guggenheim scholarship for research. In 2014, she was honored with the Prince Claus Award for her career as a curator and writer. She was a columnist for the newspaper El Periódico and essayist for the cultural supplement El Acordeón. In 2016, the Lay Project was formed. In 2017, with Anabella Acevedo, she earned a Research Fellowship from the Júmex Foundation, Mexico.

Erik del Bufalo
Erik Del Bufalo has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris X. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela. He is dedicated chiefly to the field of contemporary philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, political thought, and the philosophy of communication and photography. He has published Deleuze et Laruelle. De la schizoanalyse à la non-philosophie, Paris, Kimé, 2003. El rostro lugar de nadie, Erotismo, ética y umbral en la obra de Alí González, Fundación Mercantile, 2006. Coauthor of La Política encarnada, Luis Duno Gottberg (Ed. ), Caracas: Equinoccio, 2016, and has published several articles in national and international journals.

Marilé Di Filippo
Marilé Di Filippo is a researcher and teacher in both undergraduate and graduate programs, in Argentina and abroad. She has a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies and a BA in Political Science from the National University of Rosario (UNR). She was a Doctoral Fellow and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and is a member of the Academic Committee for Specialization in Cultural Management and of the Work Nucleus on Cultural Practices and Experiences at the UNR. She is also involved with the Research Program in Cultural Studies; the Politics & Management Group at the UNR; and the group "Recent art, culture and politics in Argentina" at the UBA.

Di Filippo continues to participate in various teams and research projects. She is a lecturer, exhibitor, coordinator and organizer of various scientific meetings, and the author of book chapters and diverse articles for scientific, cultural, and media journals.

Rodrigo Figueroa
Rodrigo Figueroa (Los Teques, 1985) resides and works in the Capital District of Caracas. He graduated from the School of Arts, with a Mention in music at the Central University of Venezuela, with studies in music composition. Rodrigo has taught as a university professor in art theory. He has participated in various exhibitions with works and installations dedicated to addressing sound and its ramifications in art. He is currently the coordinator of programming and communications at Centro de Arte Los Galpones.

Luis Miguel Isava
Luis Miguel Isava has a PhD in Comparative Literature (Emory University, Atlanta, USA) and is a tenured professor in the Department of Language and Literature of the Universidad Simón Bolívar. His areas of specialization are poetry and contemporary poetry, relations between literature and philosophy, theory, aesthetics and film studies. He is the author of the book Voz de amante (Caracas: National Academy of History, 1990) on the poetry of Rafael Cadenas, and has translated, among other works, the essay by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility (Prologue, notes and additional texts, LMI Caracas: El Estilete, 2016) and recently translated into English a book by Hanni Ossott, Spaces to Say the Same [Thing] (Caracas: Letra Muerta, 2017), and published an extensive work on the poetry of José Lezama Lima, “Lo indescifrable que engendra un infinito apetito de desciframiento” in Asedios a lo increado. Nuevas aproximaciones a José Lezama Lima (Madrid: Verbum, 2015) and another on the work of Juan Luis Martínez, "La poiesis: the process of making meaning or how to write without words" in Martínez total (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 2016). He is currently working on a book about the transformations of experience through cultural artifacts in general, and artistic forms in particular.

Miguel A. López
Miguel A. López (b. 1983) is a writer, researcher and Co-Director and Chief Curator of TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and feminist re-articulations of art and culture in recent decades.

His texts have been published in journals such as Afterall, E-flux Journal, Ramona, Art in America, Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, and Manifesta Journal, among others. He has curated exhibitions such as Social Energies/Life Forces; Natalia Iguiñiz: Art, Activism, Feminism (1994-2018) at the ICPNA, Lima, 2018; Balance and Collapse: Patricia Belli, Works 1986-2016 in TEOR/éTica, San José, and Fundación Ortiz Gurdian, Managua, 2016-2017; Teresa Burga, Air Structures (with Agustín Pérez Rubio) at MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2015; and the God is a faggot section of the 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014), among others. He has recently published the books Steal History: Counterrelations and Oppositional Artistic Practices (Heavy Metals, 2017); The Words of Others: Leon Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (together with Ruth Estévez and Agustín Diez Fischer, REDCAT and JRP-Ringier, 2017); and Shake Before Use: Educational, Social and Artistic Movements in Latin America (together with Renata Cervetto, TEOR/éTica and MALBA, 2016).

He is a co-founder of Bisagra, an independent space active in Lima since 2014. In 2016 he was awarded the Independent Vision Curatorial Award, given every two years by Independent Curator International.

Yucef Merhi
Yucef Merhi (Caracas, 1977) is an artist, poet, and programmer, and pioneer of Digital Art. He studied Philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela; the New School University in New York, and obtained a master's degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University, NYC.

His artistic career began in the mid-1980s and includes solo and group exhibitions in museums in Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Mexico, United States, Canada, Spain, Italy, Holland, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Turkey, Croatia and Norway, among other countries.

Merhi's work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, all located in New York; as well as the Newark Museum (New Jersey); Orange County Museum of Art (California); LACMA (California); Science World British Columbia (Vancouver); From Appel (Amsterdam); Modern gallery (Ljubljana); Paço das Artes (São Paulo); Chopo Museum (Mexico City); Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas Sofía Ímber (Caracas) and Museum of Fine Arts (Caracas); among others. Also, he participated in the official selections of the São Paulo Biennial - Valencia, 2007; the 10th Istanbul Biennial; the 30th Ljubljana Biennial; and the XIII Cuenca Biennial.

Leticia Obeid
Leticia Obeid was born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1975. She lives and works in Buenos Aires. She graduated from the School of Arts of the National University of Córdoba, Argentina in 2001, with a Bachelor of Painting. Her work is distributed among several media: video, drawing, installation, and writing, concerning themes related to language, translation, and communication. She participated in the Petrobras-ArteBA awards (2006); Klemm (2012); Braque (2013); the 6th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2007); and the 54th Venice Biennial (2011). In 2010 she won first prize in the New Narrators contest of the Rojas Cultural Center, National University of Buenos Aires. She published the novels Frente, perfil y plana, (2013) and Preparación para el amor (2015) with Editorial Caballo Negro, Córdoba, and the monograph Leticia Obeid. Escribir, leer, escuchar, Blatt & Ríos, 2015. www.leticiaobeid.com

#PecesDelGuaire
#PecesDelGuaire defines itself as a political protest action in charge of a Disarmed Collective, composed of creators and performers of the live arts. It arose in Venezuela during the events of 2017, when a group of protesters was forced to cross the Guaire river while fleeing from the public forces, and the social networks of the Ministry of Culture broadcast a photograph next to the text: "Render unto God what is God’s, to Caesar what is Caesar’s, to Guaire what is Guaire’s.”

It would have been more of a virtual gesture, if not for the fact that the Guaire river collects the sewage of Caracas and its water stream is made up of excrement. Before a cycle of protests that each time were more violent, this Disarmed Collective decided to offer a collective protest space, peaceful and creative but also inclusive, common, and open. For twelve weeks, this group met in the Hall Cabrujas de los Palos Grandes to carry out political actions from the performative exercise. Actresses, actors, directors, musicians, dancers, photographers, writers, all put their work at the service of the citizenry, serving as a catharsis that allows the theater and its political powers to activate reflection, in the face of necessary urgency.

The main objective was never the spectacularity or the aesthetic achievement of each intervention, but the possibility of creating discussions, of recognizing the other, of meeting again and being able to defend freedom of expression, free thought, and citizens’ responsible exercise of protest. The incident was just the starting point.

Erly J. Ruiz
Erly J. Ruiz is very academic for the everyday and very everyday for the academic. A Caraqueño—but never a caraquista (e.g., a denizen of Caracas but not a die-hard fan of the Caracas Leones baseball team)— he was born in Barcelona, Anzoátegui, on July 29, 1983. He is a sociologist by profession and a musician by vocation, always attentive to harmony as well as to integration. He currently works as a full-time professor in the Department of Social Theory at the School of Sociology of the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

Gil Sansón
Gil Sanson (Valencia, 1970) is a composer and artist. His work, developed in various media, emphasizes the paradoxical and the empirical, as opposed to the narrative, the symbolic, the dialectical, and the rhetorical.

Elisa Silva
Elisa Silva is an architect with a Master's Degree in architecture from Harvard University (2002). She has worked in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Madrid, Rome, and Caracas. She received the Premio Roma de la Academia Americana award in 2005; the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University in 2011; and the Graham Foundation Grant in 2017.

Since 2007, Silva has been Founding Director of Enlace Arquitectura whose projects include: the Sabana Grande Boulevard Pavement project in Caracas; a public space project on Beethoven Avenue in Bello Monte, Caracas; the urban design and public spaces of Puerto Encantado Higuerote in Miranda, Venezuela; and the Acqua Aruba tourist complex. Enlace Arquitectura has been awarded prizes including: first place in the Inparques contest; finalist in the Parque Metropolitano La Carlota contest; first place in Parque Metropolitano Maracay; first place in the Rehabilitación de Sabana Grande contest; and prizes in the 7th Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (2012), the 11th Bienal de Arquitectura en Venezuela (2014), the 10th Salón Malaussena (2016), and the 20th Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Chile entitled Diálogos impostergables.

Silva is co-author of the book CABA Cartografía de los barrios de Caracas 1966–2014, which received the Premio Andrés Bello de la USB in 2016; Pro-inclusión, edited by CAF and presented at Quito Habitat III in 2016; and various publications from Fundación Espacio.

Elizabeth Marín Hernández
Elizabeth Marín Hernández resides in the city of Mérida, Venezuela where she works as a professor of Latin American Art and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the Universidad de Los Andes. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Art History, as well as a degree in Education, and a Doctorate in Art History from the University of Barcelona, Spain.

She has published articles in various national and international journals dedicated to contemporary art. She is an active researcher at the Universidad de Los Andes where she has collaborated with various research groups.

She was the coordinator of La Otra Banda art gallery, attached to the Department of Culture and Extension of the University of Los Andes, where she developed a major exhibition. Curator and organizer of the MéridaFoto Photography Festival, she currently coordinates the Libertad Project Space for the dissemination of Venezuelan contemporary art in the city of Mérida.

Carlos Pedro Raúl Castillo Blanco
Since the 60s, after trying out studies in Engineering, Architecture, Photography and Industrial Design granted by the prestigious Institute of Design Newman/INCE of Caracas, Carlos Castillo—an intelligent and mercurial personality—independently undertook an incipient career as an artist where he combined the knowledge acquired in his early studies and turned them into his first works.

As a result, he made welded sculptures from metal scraps, two of which were accepted into the Official Art Salon of Venezuela 1961.

Throughout the 60s he appeared, and won prizes, in almost all the Venezuelan Art Salons, and continued to be active in the Salons in the 70s.

His interest was focused on industrial design, until in 1977 he emigrated to London to explore new creative forms, such as new imaging technologies like holography, video and Super 8 film that were emerging, apart from traditional cinema and photography, in the great art centers. Some would use these forms in a constant that spanned half a century back, as pioneers of the Venezuelan vanguard: the fusion of the arts because, since then, their sculptures were video, their performances circuses, their films of a virginity that would envy the Lumiére brothers.

It is from 1975, when the International Festivals of Super 8 film of the Caracas Vanguard were created, that Carlos Castillo ventured into this creative medium chosen by the major artists of the new generation because there was no portable video equipment in the country, and Super 8 was very economical and guaranteed artistic quality in the final product. So, first as a filmmaker (Matiné: 3 and 15, Made in Venezuela, TVO, Ciudad vs Arte and others) and then as an organizer, he participated in 8 consecutive editions of the International Super 8 Film and Video Festival, which created a network of very interesting and productive relationships.

This event and the International Theater Festival of Caracas, led by the playwright Carlos Jiménez, gave Caracas a unique personality for two decades as a city of new art and new theater.

The works in Super 8 followed one another and granted him a great celebrity for the few elements with which they were made, until in 1983 he created his most famous work and the first video sculpture in Venezuela, "La Bandera," now in the permanent collection of the Galería de Arte Nacional.