The curatorial process of Arte Nuevo InteractivA is closer to a Latin America neo-conceptualism that can be observed in the work of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles who, incorporating local currency, dollars bills, and bottles of Coca-Cola into his work and sending them into mass-circulation, recycles the signifiers in order to establish new conceptual grammars enunciating the economic dominance and historical loopholes of the art system. Through the process of selecting themes, artists, projects, artworks and curators, the biennale interconnects these elements in a fluid variable geometry that articulates the dynamics of economic production of art in the Americas. In addition, the biennale allows a discursive formation of new artistic practices that are constantly erased by the enacted art history and underlines the difficulties of curatorial practices outside the museum and institutions supported by governments and corporations. The grammar evolving out of the curatorial process has its own discursive flow, as a final result the biennale emerges; the conferences and an experimental-lab transform that accompanied the display of pieces produce a new body of work. As in a work of art, the moment when the physical interaction takes place denotes new possibilities even among the artists, scholars and critics involved in the project.  

  

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet (Havana, Cuba 1958) MFA in Multimedia and Video Art, University of Iowa (1992). He is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and scholar who has exhibited his work at the 9th Havana Biennale, Cuba; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; Brisbane Powerhouse, Australia; Video IN, Vancouver B.C., Canada; Museo de Arte Actual, Bogotá, Colombia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Centro de Cultura Contemporánea, Barcelona, Spain and Museum of Contemporary Art (MACAY), Mérida, Mexico among other venues.

 

Ferrera-Balanquet is executive curator of Arte Nuevo InteractivA, a leading exhibit in new art practices in Latin America. He has organized exhibits for the Java Museum in Cologne, Germany; the Museum of the City of Queretaro, Mexico; the Museum of Sound and Image, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Video In, Vancouver B.C., Canada; N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago and the “New Latin American Cinema in Iowa II”, an international film festival and conference for The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. In addition to a Fulbright Fellowship, Ferrera-Balanquet has been awarded grants from FOECAY, US/Mexico Cultural Fund, Moon Radio Web TV Commission, The Australian Network of Art and Technology, the National Endowment for the Arts and The Lyn Blumenthal Video Foundation. His writings have appeared in Artpapers, Radical Teacher, Cinematograph, Felix, the Australian based The Media Circus Reader, the Mexican literary magazine Navegaciones Zur, the Miami based Perra!, La Revista, the British/German art magazine GUESTROOM, the Portuguese art magazine Biblia and the on-line publications Netartreview, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, and My Millennium Project at trAce.

 

More about the event:

Arte Nuevo InteractA is an art biennale and interdisciplinary lab that started in 2001. At the beginning it was a space for art produced for the Internet from a perspective of a horizontal communication. InteractivA was renamed in 2005 as "Arte Nuevo InteractivA" (New Art Interactive) which employs a curatorial strategy to underline art practices, pedagogy, and critical writing. The goal is to create a cross cultural dialogue, a

knowledge production, and audience interaction highlighting the issues, ideas and struggles faced by artists and audiences in the Latin [Luso] American and Caribbean contexts in relation to other areas of the world in the post local/global/post colonial information age (the US, Australia, India, and southern territories of Europe have participated before).

In the third staging (2005) the biennale included artists from India, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Israel, Mexico, Turkey, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Australia, United States, Canada, Chile, Belgium, Iran, Germany and Singapore.

InteractivA'07 will take place from June 14 to July 31 at the Centro Cultural de Mérida Olimpo, and related cultural spaces in Yucatan, Mexico (Golf of Mexico).

In words of the Director Raul Ferrera-Balanquet: "The Biennale is an interdisciplinary laboratory that employs an alternative vision of art. How is it made? Through collaboration and thanks to the working team and the "Interactivos" (the participants). I couldn't define anything, I don't consider myself an authority, but a curator with a vision closer to the production of a proposal like a work of art; a vision that consider the economic reality of artistic production in the region where I live; and, one that tries to create communities of exchange to enrich our social process of apprenticeship and development. As you see, the definitions of traditional exposition say other things."

 Many discussions about the event had taken place in [-empyre], netart, rizome, netreview, among others. As a matter of fact, InteractivA'05 was featured as one of the best exhibitions by the Whitney Museum web-page in 2005, it is also featured in Unesco's site on new art events.

 Visit Arte Nuevo InteractivA'05 www.cartodigital.org/interactiva