from: | Kekena Corvalán |
to: | graciela ovejero postigo |
date: | Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:00 AM |
subject: | Entrevista / Interview |
Here are some questions:
1- To begin with, how and why did the Elm's Pears / Peras de Olmo project come about?
I Clarify beforehand that having received this interview via e-mail and because of what I will say next, it is possible that in each answer, self-referential comments will slip in crossing information; then, this first one, like any question about an origin will have to abide by a meandering path but before approaching it, it is convenient to establish the idea that the Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA project is an extension of my practice as a transdisciplinary, conceptual, relational artist, something like that. I don't cling too much to any category, but it is possible to see a clear progression in the development of my projects in which from about 1995 onwards, and after having enjoyed intense experiences in 3 collectives --Grupo Crónica (1983-85 Tucumán Argentina), Las Comadres (1991-96 California USA), BAWTAF/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1993 California USA)-- I began to include the work of other artists and the projects began to unfold as open narratives that involved curatorial management, research proposals, participation at different levels with artists and non-artists and an inhabiting the processes. I described those projects as artistic-curatorial and grouped them in a Series I call 'Fondo de Ojo', a way of saying that implies a Retina-like dilation to look inside, naming a bit that extension or movement outward in a more complex way that does not totally adhere to the subject-object paradigm as a clear opposition. I don't know if it makes much sense now, I recognize a certain insistence on naming and re-naming things, a playfulness with language that I observe to be also quite Argentinean... I am concerned with images, and I believe that the most powerful images always have a substratum and an emergence, a happening, in or through language in their conformation, although their source may be in the depths of the unspoken.
Peras de Olmo – ARS CONTINUA opens its doors as a contemporary art space on 11/11/11 with 4 different projects, all with some performative ingredient: a curatorship of Brazilian artists who are no videographers but were invitede to make a video, conceived by a young curator from Sao Paulo who was in residence at the house; a video installation by Los Apoltronados, a semi-fictional ephemeral collective of 'Latin American artists'; an installation of a diary of drawiings in dialogue through almost 3 months committed to make a drawing a day, by two artists from Argentina and Chile; and the installation and collective exhibition of works on paper with 26 artists mostly from Tucumán, entitled Generalas Virgens and the DaDaist Santería of the Northern Army, curated by me. The plan was to open on November 2nd for theDay of the Dead which is an ancestral Mexican celebration we admire and that coincided withe the birthday of my mother, Magdalena Postigo, a powerful artist and wise teacher, the first person with whom I consult all my projects and a fundamental supporter in the making of Peras de Olmo space.
MAGDALENA POSTIGO. “Máscara / Mask”, 2010. Fundamental supporter in the making of Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA. Photo: G.O.P.
Link: MAGDALENA POSTIGO: An incandescent making. Anthological selection of works. Paintings - Sculptures and miscellanea. Museo Provincial de Tucumán Timoteo Navarro. Sala Spilimbergo. May 17 – June 24, 2012. Curated By Graciela Ovejero Postigo.
That experience helped me to verify the cost that objectual exhibitions imply for the spaces and as I do not do gallery work in the commercial sense because it is not my inclination, nor do I care about it as an added profession at this stage of my life, I realized that I could not sustain that kind of exhibitions in a continuous way, nor the expectations they generate in the artists. During and after that first show, performatic events with contemporary musicians and other artists took place and I began to think of a series of action art as an open laboratory, meetings where I could show works and projects in progress. At the beginning of 2012, in May, I lauched the Series that is now the main one and that identifies us as a space dedicated to performance and action art in a permanent way, although from there we may give place to other productions and exhibition projects concerning performance art: Open field / campo abiertO – Laboratorio de acciones 100xSiento.
Inauguration night. November 2011. Photos: Peras de Olmo/.
GIRA. Curated by Paula Borghi. Photos: Peras de Olmo/.
“De lo Virtual en el Alma” / "From the Virtual in the Soul. Installation, Macarena Abarca Flores and Valeria Caamaño.
Performance, "Singing to the drawings', the artists with acoustic group Azul Vencido. November 2011. Photos: Peras de Olmo/.
(1): link Peras de Olmo > Inaugural exhibition
So, Peras/ is a autonomously administered and produced space that is fundamentally supported by the availability of my house-laboratory and my organizational work, project by project in agreement with the artists involved. Artists and curators are invited and I follow very closely the processes with them, sometimes combining residencies in the house. The documentation of everything we do is a firm commitment of production by the space and we share it with all artists involved, but we always recommend that they ensure the documentation of their works by their own means as well. The idea is to get along, articulate, exchange in solidarity, work with joy, recognition and mutual learning, with clear codes and loyalties to critical ideas, to what is shared and received, but not to generate dependencies; instead, to generate coming back for more gregarious challenges. My wish is for the space to be a stable reference of excellence for the practice of performance, for artists who identify with it and an open place for those who appreciate its spacial richness and scope as spectators and researchers.
“Gym Poltrónico”. Video installation. Colectivo Lxs Apoltronados. November 2011. photos: Peras de Olmo/.
“Santería DaDaísta del Ejército del Norte” / DaDaist Santeria of the Army of the North" (the "Army of the North" is a direct historical reference to the military and mostly civilian people that the revolutionary independentist General Belgrano, gathered in the Noth region of what would later become 'Argentina', to fight Spanish imperialist army. The insttalation-exhibit was composed by paper-based works from 25 artists from Tucumán and the north od the country. Curatorship: Graciela Ovejero Postigo. Partial view.
November 2011. Photos: Peras de Olmo/.
I believe that the spectator who goes to see a performance comes to an appointment with herself/himself, and those who go out of curiosity should know that nothing is casual or superfluous, and that they will have un unforgettable experience. Performance is a multimedia art historically linked to the field of visual arts, but it does not only enter through the eyes, it generates textures and psychic landscapes that we cannot always reduce with judgements and verbal assessments.
Pre-Open field, Café Mandrágora. Belén Romero Gunset and Leo Estol. Clips from video: Peras de Olmo/.
Intervention-Action. December 2011.
Peras/ is my current project and the most comprehensive, since in a way its archive, which does not stop growing, also includes the archive of my journey up to here and ongoing, as a road-movie of projects. Peras/ is my final home. It is installed here, and interacts socially/culturally with the world and the conceptions of art in general as well as with the city and the Argentine art system in particular from my own house, and constitutes the home as such. The house is an 'extranjería'/a foreigner's house, more foreign artists arrive here than Argentine ones, for now, maybe because I am also a foreigner in this context. But that does not worry me, I sincerely hope that those who are genuinely interested in contemporary art, can come and enjoy the living work generated by artists committed to what they do as those who as those who have been with us and continue to come to Peras/. I am very happy here in Buenos Aires and very much in love with this project, which for the moment I can sustain, it is my offering.
Pre-Open field, Café Mandrágora. Ernesto Romeo and Eliana Rosales,
Contemporary experimental composition. Visuals by Cecilia Cisneros and Valeria Caamaño. December 2011.
Open field/ Vol. I, poster. Performers: Tino López, Lorena Avallar León, Lorena Kaethner.
May 2012
Focusing on action and performance as a practice was not only a strategic decision in terms of the economic issues and a way of activating the space, but fundamentally a political, conceptual and passionate decision. Performance is the most political frontier of contemporary art and, as mail art was in its best moments before the virtualization of communications that is giving it the necessary changes and perhaps a generational passage and transfer to new media-based forms, it is a practice that is both "local and international" as Agnes Nedregard, who visited us last May, said, recalling the synthetic phrase coined by her Norwegian colleague Rita Marhaug. The practice is suatained by nomadic artists, autonomous organizers, through growing networks of festivals and independent meetings that generate an alternative inter-institutionality based on codes of solidarity, cooperation and self-management.
Headline of review of performances and conversations with Agnes Nedregard and Opie Boero Wmwinkielried in ASIES magazine, by Calixto Saucedo. Open field/ XI, Peras de Olmo – Ars Continua. June 2014.
To date (August 2014), we have produced 14 volumes of the Open field/ Series among other projects and exhibitions, showing original work by around 72 performers from Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Norway, USA and South Korea; approximately 44 visual artists and several creators of experimental music, video and experimental film. In November it will be 3 years. I am deeply grateful to all the artists who have been participating.
Curatorial Series Open field / campo abiertO, posters. December 2011 – August 2014.
LINKS:
Blog of curatorial Series Open field / campo abierto – Laboratorio de acciones 100xSiento
Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA / PO-AC
https://perasdeolmo.wixsite.com/arscontinua
PO-AC PO-AC YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkEPf5PkgUzkF006ngke4NA
Returning to the name-idea Peras de Olmo and how it came about, supposedly some people, perhaps the wishful, delusional ones or poets “ask for pears from the elm tree”, that is what a certain ‘common sense’ tells us. Some time ago, in my 1st return to Tucumán, where I was born and where the basis of my formation and life took place until I was 29 years old, faced with the experience of the re-dislocation of that return --I had taken myself to California, to experience a different context and cultural distance from the one I new--, I felt the need to conceive and sustain a symbolic, personal 'non-place' that would allow me to resolve, locate and cultivated the heterodoxy of my life. The heterodoxy that was my experience as an artist, already a migrant, of non-conformist and unconvinced generational heritage, except for the responsibility to be suspicious of all conventions that dictate reiterative behaviors of largely oppressive forms and, as a woman, especially self-oppresive ones. This non-place already existed within myself and was in fact also in the collective imaginary suggested in the proverb or popular expressions such as 'peras de olmo', and for the same reason fascinating to me. That place where the elms would give pears or whatever you asked of them, even if it was from an insinuated impossibility and implicit cost. However, that anonymous and popular image of the impossible resonated activating and became functional with respect to the desire, the non-obsequence and the symtomatology perceived in the context of that return.
It was in a kind of eureka moment, in that particular crossroads of my biographical juncture back in 1991 and 92, after 5 years since my departure to California, while I was preparing a solo exhibition in a space of the Museum of Fine Arts of Tucumán, that I thought of "Elm's Peras" as a present and symbolic form of expansive existential power, an image that gave an account of a shift over the real and conventional, about a poetic and political 'be-ing' that does not 'ask' for pears but generates and gives them away, a step ahead of the classic formula of the utopian. The phrase became the name of the show but also a kind of re-foundational iamge in an ontological sense. Thus, the fruits of artistic making would be 'elm's pears', and the phrase as a statement of non-colonizable 'status' to the assumptions and implicitness of art, its 'local moments', genres, and above all in terms of the suggestive tensions of particular circuits of confirmation. Those were the times of the Glusberg's reign with his 'avant-garde' and 'vip' vision of contemporary art and its management; perhaps the 1st model of the curatorial figure that was beginning to take shapo in its new configuration in Argentina, in this case as a kind of principality.
Peras de Olmo, individual exhibition 1992. Entrance and opposite view from the back of the space. Calchaquí Dragon, photo-objects and blackboards with texts, acrylic on canvas. Spilimbergo hall, Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes. Tucumán.
So, when I returned to the country in the early ‘90s --from that moment on I was able to return annually--, I was confronted with what had been left behind, with previously imagined futures and presents, with echoes of generational narratives and utopias devastated by the dictatorship and also by the incipient democracy. The atmosphere among peers (in Tucumán) was one of being scattered, absent or distanced in various ways, among themselves and even with the artistic enveavor in many cases, and the more active within art or other activities were neutral or assimilated to a 'chenge of moment' that implied a defeat and denial or un-pronounceability of the previous revolutionary intentions. Of course, the moment was different, but in my opinion, the way of understanding it was of a fruitless ambiguity, without much attention to detail, perhaps to hide even the pain in so many dimensions inflicted, a hurried or rushed response I would even say "childdish", a form of passivity... in truth it was the infancy of our democracy and those who were in power abused that too.
In an article of the monopolic local newspaper --that knew how to absorb and domesticate many writers of the Tucumán's intelligentsia-- dated April 26, 1992 the following headline was announced: "Peras de Olmo, una muestra plástica del drama cósmico" / "Pears from the Elm, a fine arts exhibition on the cosmic drama" --there is no signature under the note to attribute authorship to such title and article--, it then continued with the following quotation of something I said: "To create is to define, to furrow, to decide, to play. I try to do it situated in the void, the interval, from the simultaneity of multiple possibilities. Why? Because I doubt everything and deep down I hope for the just and the great." I am a little surprised to discover that I have always thought basically the same way.
Peras de Olmo, solo show 1992. Sculptural group “Dragón Calchaquí” / Calchaqui Dragon, photo-objects, triptych in acrylic, text-objects. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes. Tucumán
“Blue”, partial from “Spectrum” (Installation of photo-objects and texts). Peras de Olmo, solo show 1992. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes, Tucumán.
It is inevitable for me to go over things... We know that historical traumas take a minimum of 3 generations to begin to be addressed, I believe that in our case as a country where one abuse followed another, the Menemist moment --referred to the presidencies of Menem in the 90's --an administration that was totally allied to the Bush's neoliberal politics and only with Kirshner something began to be un blocked. In 1991 the Soviet Union was dismembered, we were witnessing the definitive triumph of capitalism over socialism as projections arising from modernity. The cold war supposedly ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a fact that I experienced in Austria while visiting my younger brother, a cellist and composer who had settled in Vienna, by his own means at age 18, with the ideal of "perfectionism in the original center", a common path that many young artists within westernized world peripheries felt for, certainly a colonial model that imprinted its tensions and pains, even to the more talented.
In the 90's the Latin American utopia, as I perceived then in the country and more specifically in Tucumán, had moved to the frontier and fascination with technology, and /el menemismo fue eso aliado al liberalismo de los Bush y recién con Kirshner algo empezó a destrabarse. En el 91 se desmembraba la Unión Soviética, asistíamos al triunfo definitivo del capitalismo sobre el socialismo como proyecciones surgidas de la modernidad, la guerra fría supuestamente concluía con la caída del muro de Berlín en el 89, hecho que viví en Austria mientras visitaba a mi hermano menor, chelista y compositor que se había instalado en Viena, por sus propios medios con 18 años, con el ideal del "perfeccionismo en el centro original", un camino común por el que muchos jóvenes artistas dentro de las periferias del mundo occidentalizado se sentían atraídos, por supuesto un modelo colonial que imprimía sus tensiones y dolores, incluso a los más talentosos.
In the 90's the Latin American utopia, as I perceived then in the country and more specifically in Tucumán, had moved to the frontier and fascination with technology. There was a collective enchantment with the fiction announced by Menem (the president) that we had entered the 1rst world. The café of the intellectuals and young poets is replaced by the 'Shopping-Mall' model, the proliferation of mini-casinos in peripheral neighborhoods and a new parallel entrepreneurship based on the conviction that the moment allows for quick enrichment, the party and the mafia, the yuppies, the trivialization of everything that was critical thinking. Those were my impressions. The beginning of the era of the "cool", the cooling and distancing of the individualistic consumerist and "brand seeker" subjectivity that trapped the middle class, youth and from there gradually conquered down the desire of the rest of the social strata. That was one of the consequences of globalization, the evangelization of logos and cell phones. In that context, to think of utopias was to go against the grain. In the nineties, the art of Tucumán flamed between pop-under and pop-top, kitsch and self-declared "non-idealistic" conceptualism, assumptions that seemed to have overcome without major traces the "irregularities" and traumas of a decade before.
Perhaps it would be interesting to elaborate a little more on facts and contexts prior to my departure since in many aspects they resonate in synchrony with contents and manifestations investigated and shown in the project “Perder la forma humana / Losing the human form”recently exhibited here in Buenos Aires. A very important research and curatorial project that analyzes at various points certain responses and critical resistances assumed by artists and collectives not aligned to the dominant pulse during the 80's in Latin America without necessarily having a connection or news between them. The context of that exhibition and some of the talks by actors linked to those experiences that I was able to witness were very mobilizing and stimulating as they confirmed a sort of rebellious poetic force in trans-apparent synergy from Argentina to Mexico. In fact, I would say even California, because there, between San Diego and Tijuana, there was a powerful flow of coexistence and artistic production that wielded the experimental and the political, with collectives such as the Border Arts Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), el Lugar del Nopal, Las Comadres and others.
"Autumn Candy (Western Made)” 1988. Window installation with soft sculpture. Commissioned by Installation Gallery for Street Sites. Balboa Theater, San Diego CA. 1988.
"Autumn Candy (Western Made)” 1988. Detail from window installation with soft sculpture. Commissioned by Installation Gallery for Street Sites. Balboa Theater, San Diego CA. 1988.
I left Tucumán for California, landing in San Diego a day before 1985 ended, two weeks after the cancellation of the annual exhibition of Grupo Crónica, the collective of which I was a member. This act of censorship took place the same night of its announced inauguration because certain contents of the works were considered "against morals and good customs" according to the director of the sponsoring institution in a document drawn up at the time. The document was signed by herself and some witnesses from among the spectators who came to see the exhibition, signing witnesses asked for the document to make explicit that they "did not know the character of the works", that is, they did not recognize that they were endorsing an act of censorship and that censorship is the act that prevents the contact of an artistic or testimonial expression, whatever its content or "character", with the rest of society. That report on the cancellation of our exhibition, issued by the director in the heat of the circumstances created by her poor consciousness, becomes an evidence of self-defeat as a public servant of a newly restored democracy and a sad identification with the violence of internalized patriarchy by a woman artist. It is a document of time and place! Tucumán did not stop "burning" since the 1960's.
The immediate post-dictatorship in Tucumán showed us how the mechanisms of repression installed in the citizen psyche were active and ready to find objects of punishment. There is a subsequent story of censorship that also involves the same director of the Cultural Center of the city's Municipality, Nora Castaldo, a lawyer and well-known actress of the milieu,who --I believe-- has held political positions sence then without interruption as a member of the Radical partu --a not at all radical political force in Argentina--. The evento took place the following year 1986, but this time she managed to be on the defensive side representing works of another artist invited by her, who's homoerotic paintings and drawings were presented in a section only accesible to spectators over 18 years old. The exhibition called "El enmascarado no se vence" del artista Sergio Tomatis, generated a heated public dispute between rival political representatives of the country's two major parties: Radicales and Peronistas, the latter manifesting strong rejection to the type of art in the show, labeling it as "apology of homosexuality". A spectacle of aberration of criteria and "ethical" judgments that culminated with the sinister result of the artist having to self-exile and the "laundering" of the director's record as a censurer. These facts were never reflected upon and when in 2007 a revisionist exhibition of the artistic productions of the 70's / 80's in Tucumán called Inscripciones Invisibles (reference links after the images), touched the subject of censorship, but never established this chronological relationship with clarity re-invisibilizing complex facts of political contradictions and speculations, abusing artists realities, in that provincial argentine context in its second and third year of democracy.
Grupo Crónica, “Tragamonedas Reyna del Terror” "Slot Machine Queen of Terror". Exhibition poster (partial). Archive of Graciela Ovejero Postigo. Tucumán 1985.
Grupo Crónica, “Slot Machine Queen of Terror”. Partial captures from a copy of the Cancellation document. Archive Graciela Ovejero Postigo.
3 Links con referencia a la muestra Inscripciones Invisibles:
Especiales & archive.planoazul: Inscripciones invicibles. Texto curatorial: Carlota Beltrame (Site no longer available)
planoazul.com. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Timoteo Navarro. Exposición: Inscripciones Invisibles. Curadora: Lic. Carlota Beltrame. (Site no longer available)
“INSCRIPCIONES INVISIBLES” Y “ESCENA POP”, EN TUCUMAN por Jorge Figueroa. Pág.12 Cultura y Espectáculo. 29/5/07
Going to the US was both a late consequence of the expulsion suffered by my generation, an unusual opportunity by way of an important friendship at the time, and a debt to fulfill old nomadic desires. This allowed me to take a cultural and energizing distance that was very revealing and at the time also a great existencial relief. As I said I landed in San Diego and there I found echoes of the concerns that mobilized the work done with Grupo Crónica of Tucumán, in the BAW/TAF collective's installations, the early performances of Guillermo Gómez Peña, and in general the collective's projects that worked with the daily data of the border and its historical referents, in a transdisciplinary way. Multivocal feminism in the actions and installations of Las Comadres, the work of artists such as David Avalos, Deborah Small, James Luna, Richard Lou among many others. Groups with whom I came in contact and participated through the Centro Cultural de de la Raza where I served as a member of the Artistic Recommendations Committee. The second half of the 80's through 1994 were very vibrant years in the Chicano and cross-border community in Southern California. But I always knew I would come back to throw my bones here. Beginning in 2011 I felt it was the year to move back south and started looking for the house that could become Peras de Olmo / Elm's Pears.
“Aire de Buenos Ayres/Air of Buenos Ayres *liberated and federalized by tucumano lungs* from the Vitruvian Acts Series [Something is in the air - art and citizenship by the lungs (arte y ciudadanía a pulmón)
Still from video-documentary narrative of Urban Intervention and socio-poetic actions. Durational drift work that took place
throughout iconic places in the city of Buenos Aires, during 7 consecutive hours, carried out on November 25, 2010, bicentennial year and International Day against Violence to women.
Photografic documentation:
Martín Guiot. Video documentation and editing: Martín Rodríguez Sánchez.
Concepts, Performance,
Image Preparation de Imágenes and General Direction:
Graciela Ovejero Postigo.
Acknowledgements:
Friends of Centro Cultural Borda (Mental Hospital).
“Apple Pie Order or G$D Trusts US / El Orden Pastel de Manzana o DIO$ Confía en US”. Installation I made in the context of the annual exhibition of .Border Arts Workshop BAWTAF collective at Centro Cultural De La Raza, SD, CA 1991.
"Border kitchen / Cocina fronteriza”. Las Comadres Collective. Contemporary Art Museum of San Diego CA. 1993.
2- In your cv we can read that you have been living and working in California, ¿what do you think are the possible nodes and profiles of performative practice here and there?
Look, in principle as "possible", all 'profiles', both here and there, considering the conditions of accessibility and traffic of ideas and images currently offered by globalized virtuality. In this sense contemporary artists (cognitive class) coexist in multiply worlds, they are children of nobody, or descendants of ideas that move through intermittent currents of fragments of images, which also exhibit precariousness because today everything is precarious, for everyone. But neither ideas nor images in this apparent multipolar chaos of globality participate in the supposed "free will", the theological principle of meritology that tries to make a preconceived (Judeo-Christian) moral will prevail as "ideal", which in any case is understood as a concession of the 'supreme Being' towards the human as the seed or DNA of its creation, to prove its own political and hierarchical narrative. The narrative that has given rise to patriarchy as a civilizing principle, and that continues to generate colonizing empires and genocides. Ideas and images also coexist as almost all "user-consumers" --subjectivities shaped in modern-informational capitalism, or affected by its globality--, with certain deterministic games and buffets of identities, nodes and readymade profiles, of the systemic substratum (algorithms, bots) of power dynamics, which of course generate antidotes, where the questioning creativity of poetry, artistic expressions, or philosophy, generate deconstructive 'substances', by their connection with the perceptual and emotional centers of the body, the gastric juices of the symbolic functions can become very powerful, and in that there could be some hope.
Contemporary art faces something very serious, late capitalism is an omnivorous and penetrating chamaleonic mirror, it has become largely 'in the image and likeness of', it colonizes us by advocating our needs and preferences through an empire of syncretic visualities that iconologize reality in instantly servile prototypes, processes of abstraction indebted to the artistic and visual thought developed since the western avant-gardes of the 20th century. Art / narcissus has been swallowed by the mirror, its "being" comes from outside. All possible configuration of nodes and profiles in the individual dimension would be within reach and susceptible of appropriation through the virtual, technological system of communication and of 'being in the world' today, which is with a cell phone to the body, and the web to the unconscious.
“Kalifia (Transcontinental adventurer)”. Photo-performance. Graciela Ovejero Postigo. 1995.
In the cultural and social dimension, temporality assumes conditions that are more opaque, slower, more dependent and conditioned to historical legacies. Attractions are collated and will finally acquire form and matter in the context of specific geopolitical and symbolic territories, although their spacificity has entered into the greatest crisis since the '90s. Within this panorama, the practice of performance and action art have in their constantly reflected specificity the particularity of resisting, for the most part, the seductions of "the society of the spectacle". I have already mentioned that "performance is local and international", the system of production and exhibitions of the practice if fundamentally the responsibility of organizations generated by the artists themselves, an endless number of festivals and encounters. Specific venues in central cities or not, towns and houses attended by artists who cross ll kinds of distances to be present as witnesses and presenters.
Clearly, the most mobile artists are those from richer countries and/or countries where there are governmental or other funds to which they can have access to develop individual projects inside and outside their territories, something that does not exist in our country. This network of exchanges, the one that goes from virtuality to corporeality, is the most decisive in terms of influencing practices. Performance enters though the skin. People begin to make performance from 'seeing', above all in person. There is also the intentional and political line of "responding to", exhibiting from the particular pressures and tensions of a cultural and social history that crosses subjectivity. From this, perhaps we can point out nodes as impulses that inform a way of putting the body and the word, that thematize issues in suspension, or stir up disturbing sedimentations within the discursivity and particular tensions of a country, region, city, neighborhood, social class, gender, sexuality.
“Bichito colorado / Little red bug”, urban intervention, LoLas Crónicas: Elizabeth Cárdenas, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Magdalena Postigo, Hugo-Abril Velárdez. Plaza Independencia, November 25. Tucumán, Argentina 2005.
Performance works from and into personal biography, the social and the political is also subjetivity, this is a concept that contemporary art owes to feminist thought. It is true that both in reflection and in doing we still ask ourselves the question of whether it is possible to identify "nodes and profiles" geopolitically or regionally speaking, and in particular about 'the Latin American', that which we consider our own, this continues to have enormous value and meanings to develop. Preciselly in the framework of the reconfigurations and mutability of economic power, of transnational capitalism and "financial democracies". I don't have a clear or more descriptive answer to your question: "possible nodes and profiles of performative practice here and there", I would love to know! More or less, that is pprecisely the question that triggered the curatorial invitation plan for this and next year with the Open field / campo abiertO – Laboratorio de acciones 100xSiento series of Peras'.
As I mentioned, the basic idea for ‘Peras de Olmo’ plus ‘ARS CONTINUA’ is that the space-home is a laboratory and an observatory --in the field of contemporary artistic making-thinking-feeling with focus on action art and from there to other thresholds of crossings. And the city of Buenos Aires is for me the ideal location, from personal psicho-geographic issues, its cultural and intellectual magnetism has always been remarkable but in the current times this is evidenced as much more accentuated and the interesting thing is that its current cosmopolitanism is mainly Latin American and remarkably young and informed. New waves of immigration from countries like Colombia or Venezuela --expelled by complex historical and social violence stemming from the malignancies of hyper-capitalist colonialism in its phase of systemic mafias, power as literally exposed cruelty, linked to stalked and/or corrupted gavernments by the same colonial-extractivist logic and an accompanying mutant vassalage--, people who arrive with and education under their belts in search of productive dialogues, postgraduate studies, experiences and challenges. This migratory phenomenon, which oscillates between trauma and resilience, when it manages to open itself up to intersectional analytical critisism, contributes a great deal of creative cultural force. I personally enjoy these diversities in a city that imagined itself umbilically linked to Europe. But I should clarify that as someone who has experienced migration and the racializing and ambiguous scrutiny of foreignness, in my case between Argentina and California, I am not so interested in the comparison "here - there" as an organizing principle, in this case involving the south and the north of the continent, but in a networked search clearly from "here", that is Buenos Aires, and through connections from close to distant ones, into other places where there is evidence of production and commitment to a located practice of performance art in countries, regions, cities of what we call "Latin Amarica" and beyond, because our peoples are part of an wide disporic experience that moves in many directions in search of better horizons.
“Curáte / Curate-heal yourself”, Urban intervention, LoLas Crónicas; Graciela Ovejero Postigo and Elizabeth Cárdenas. Obelisco, Buenos Aires Argentina. 2005.
“Curáte / Curate-heal yourself - Pericón Nacional / Pericón National dance”, urban intervention, LoLas Crónicas: Graciela Ovejero Postigo y Elizabeth Cárdenas. Obelisco, Buenos Aires Argentina. 2005.
Open field/ XII. Noel Langone, Isabel de La Fuente, Luis Bravo. June 2014. Curated by Mariana Picart Motuzas. Peras de Olmo – Ars Continua. Photo documentation: Claudio Braier.
Open field/ XIII. Calixto Saucedo, Daniel Acosta. Invited artists. July 2014.
Photography: Robert Paredes.
“Peña”. Documentation of a spontaneus action in situ, upon finding a sacrificed bird. El Mollar, Valles Calchaquíes. Argentina. Graciela Ovejero Postigo. Documentation by Angela Sappia.
Grupo Crónica. Photo-performance, 2 panels written by me in the spaces where the director's venue deemed it necessary to extract images in order to allow the public to enter, on the night extraer imágenes para poder dar entrada al público, la noche de su inauguración, hecho ante el cual decidió elaborar un acta y “clausurar” la muestra. Performance de Eli Cárdenas, Ricardo Bustos, Graciela Ovejero Postigo. Tragamonedas Reyna del Terror. Fotografía de Hugo Heredia. Tucumán 1985. Registro de paneles censurados Tito Mangini. Noviembre 1985, Tucumán.
Grupo Crónica, photo-action (parcial from a sequense) 1984. Exhibition Crónica del Aplastamiento / Chronicle of the crushing. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes. Tucumán, Argentina. Archive Graciela Ovejero postigo.
Note about Peras de Olmo – ARS CONTINUA in the quarterly magazine Arte por Excelencias. By Alejandro Chang. Nov. 2013. La Habana, Cuba. Febrero 2014.
“ORANGE ALERT in Madagascar / Docu-fable”. Autoanthropologica action and colective portrait. Work composed as guest participant to "Investigar la acción", FLOW encounter directed by Eric Scott Nelson. Lezama Park, Decembre 2013. Buenos Aires Argentina. (Opinions expressed in the video are documentary material that does not necessarily reflect those of all the artists portraid in it).
Video en: https://vimeo.com/user1480111/channels
3- ¿What do you think about the death of "genres" that is so widely discussed today? ¿How does your practice relates to the intersection of the arts?
Sign in the access corridor to the house-lab Peras de Olmo – ARS CONTINUA.
“Self-portrait with foreign city”. San Diego, CA. USA 1993.
Info about my 1st solo show in BsAs, Barraca Vorticista. 2009 and visual review of exhibition in Ramona magazine.
"Buenos Ayres & Ready-Maiden Mind". Solo show BsAs, Barraca Vorticista. 2009
“The death of the animal”, video performance 1994. Part of Video-diptych APACHETA.
“Offer of the month. Special for neighbhors” Dialogic project with neighbors and artists. La Punta 2008. Villa Além, Tucumán. Argentina. Link from blog documenting the piece: realizado: exclusivoparavecinos.blogspot.com
Detail of the interactive installation "The advantages of Being a Woman Artist" Guerrilla Girls collective (curatorial interpretations in consensus).
Subjugated Culture Interruptions and resistances son the feminine. Itinerant internacional exhibition in Argentina, three museums and halls of the FNA/National Funds for the Arts 2006-2008.
Curatorial artistic project by Graciela Ovejero / G. Ovejero Postigo.
Catalog (color) in PDF, with curatorial text abstract published by FNA. The complete text along with texts by three other authors from India, China and Japan, was included in the Cuaderno de Textos / Texbook editaded and published independently by Peras de OLMO. Argentina 2008
Tapestry-Collage Installation. "On Genocidal Purposes - We will unbirth them all." Exhibition Crónicas del Aplastamiento / Chronicles of the Crush. Piece of my authorship in the context of the 1st exhibition of Grupo Crónica. Provincial Museum of Fine Arts 1984, Tucumán. Argentina. Photo: H. Heredia. G. Ovejero Postigo's Archive.
“Freedom ghost / Libertad fantasma”. InSite ’92. General view of Installation and detail. Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, California. Graciela Ovejero Postigo 1992.
"Regional Product / Producto Regional." Graciela Ovejero Postigo, selfportrait 1997 (for catalogue). Souvenir of Tucumán - Nomadic Anthology of Objects, 2nd. installation of itinerante project. Exhinition "Veredas Argentinas - Argentine Pathways" contemporary Argentine and Californian art 1999. The Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture (1998-2012). Los Angeles, CAMuseo de Historia, Cultura y Arte Latinoamericano. Los Angeles, CA.
“nocturnal song and spring time. a rumor of power (PEWMAN – KIMUN)”
[from the Series GROUNDING (IV) / Ejercicios Symptomatic Exercices < SPECIAL SERVICES >]
EPI V Independent Performance Encounter, Los Alamos-Chile. Sept. 22-26, 2014.
"nocturnal song". 1st of 2 instances of poetic actions within EPI V Independent Encounter of Performance art, Los Alamos-Chile. Photography: Gonzalo Tejeda. Sept. 23, 2014.
"spring", composite 2. Stills from video clips captured by artists Gabriel Montero and Héctor Canonge. Sept 25, 2014.
Note on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/graciela-ovejero-postigo/2-instancias-de-acción-poes%C3%ADa-epi-v-encuentro-independiente-de-performance-los-a/10152439901748174
4- ¿How do you see the the panorama of contemporary art in relation to performance? The much talked about dissolution of the artist object, the relationship with the market, the biennialization of artistic practices in relation to the perfo?
“S/T[iempo]. Alias la vie en rose”. Objeto III de la Serie Los Colgados. Readymade impuro / grupo escultórico — en Mundo Dios, Mardel. Julio 2012, con el grupo El INgenio Arte, iniciado por el artista tucumano Sandro Pereira.
“88 segundos sin señal”. Grupo Objetual I de la Serie Los Colgados.
Intervención sobre el tiempo (futuro). Tríptico-único, objeto intervenible. 2010
Link: https://vimeo.com/58057853
[] [] PAUSA – universal [work-in-progress]
Producción estética imperecedera
_para la vida cotidiana! \Contenido universal en envase local, reciclado/
1ra Serie: Post-Pop. 2012
un Producto BABELIANICO del 1er PoliLAB
eje (4) del Plan BABELIANICO:
_La Gran Bóveda / lo múltiple potencial > lo universal del Dolor / lo universal de la Alegría.
“Atlante”, foto-acción. PoliLAB BABELIANICO II. 2012
Links: vimeo.com/58057852
5- ¿Artists you find stimulating? Souces? Influences?
6- ¿Upcoming projects? ¿Dreams you would like to fulfill?
“Spirit Boat-house. Rdos. de Tucumán y Sris Sa Ket”. Construcción in-situ. Womanifesto Residency, Siri Sa Ket, Tailandia. 2008
AtAsian Art Archive
Photos, Docs at AAA/Asian Art Archive
https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/search/actors-id:43582
Catalogue from Subjected Culture –Interruptions and resistances on femaleness Argentina 2008.
Curator Graciela Ovejero (Graciela Ovejero Postigo)
http://www.cyman.net/subjected_catalogue.pdf
UPDATE
In June 2022, during my participation in Overlapping Kassel, an international gathering of performance artists organized by Chinese artist Cai Qing in the German city of Kassel, during the opening of DOCUMENTA 15, while visiting the exhibitions at the Friedericianum Museum, one of the first buildings in the world to be designed as a public museum since 1779, and the main building of the big contemporary art event DOCUMENTA, which animates the city every 5 years since 1955, I discovered by pure coincidence that my work realized in the framework of the last Residency of the international collective WOMANIFESTO based in Thailand, was mentioned among the exhibited documentation on WOMANIFESTO's archive, which is part of the Asian Art Archive of Hong Kong since 2020.
feeling blessed with Tomasz Szrama and 23 others.
