DOSSIER / VERSION IN ENGLISH

The Venice Biennial of Bogotá

Objective: To spread or move the art production and circulation from its habitual places from and to a popular southern neighborhood in Bogotá, far from the historical district and the official places where art exhibits take place.

Strategies: To make an In Situ art exhibition by young professional emerging artists who simultaneously do art workshops and conferences about their work or any contemporaneous artwork for the community.

Initiative: The biennial is part of a neighborhood’s habitual events, to promote creativity and discuss critical elements, to appreciate, experiment, and evaluate art projects and their relation with the community.

Final Initiative: To create a physical and a mental space, to reflect about the contemporary thought, through art as the communication life media.


Preamble

In 1995 the biennial aroused as the possibility to spread art to new spaces and new audiences. The biennial could be seen as a movie interlude, as an open enunciate, a multidisciplinary lab or work in progress.

This event started as a word game which refers to the Venice, Italy biennial. It differs from its European references, it shows a different type of relationship with the spectators, tries to involve them in an active creative process and work exhibit.

The Venice Biennial of Bogotá is far from being a simple autobiographic artwork sampler or an everyday gallery or museum exhibition, it is an event that took the neighborhood as a basic theme, spread out today to the Tunjuelito location south of Bogotá. As time has gone by, it has become a window for contemporary art and its relationship with the local everyday neighborhood and urban activities.

This is not new. What it is noticeable about it is perhaps the community’s growing participation as well as making the artwork and their active collaboration in the workshops, speeches, and guided visits.

The In Situ character of the biennial has made sense for the biennial itself as well as the art projects.

Justification

The Venice Biennial of Bogotá (BVB) takes place because it is considered that through art expressions, pedagogical processes are developed from the community so that the neighborhood starts acquiring symbolic-cultural spaces. In this new context, the potential expressions and the cultural practice could develop from its insights.

Mission

The Venice Biennial of Bogotá (BVB) looks forward for the community and the artists to come closer together through a pedagogic strategy that takes art as its activity and articulates it in the neighborhood context.

When we talk in the framework of the biennial about pedagogy, we understand it as the space where a variety of knowledge circulates around art, its role, and its audiences.

The BVB tries to support and look for their own community to transform their ways of life, by way of exploring new everyday interpretation elements, new reading references, and experiencing their relationship with urban space, their neighborhood and themselves.

The BVB looks to contribute with new elements and strategies. The effort that has been done from different social, public, professional and academic areas to keep up-to-date new concepts and community practices.

For the artists, it means a different compromise with the consequences that their art work may cause, since the biennial proposes searching for “other” solutions, conditions, and action fields for their projects in a unique scenery: the neighborhood.

A little history…

The Venice Biennial of Bogotá (BVB) started in 1995 because of difficulties found by young national artists to have access to important exhibits worldwide. The group of “Graggers”, conformed by Plastic Art students from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, decided to open their own space with wide community support in the Venice neighborhood, a popular area of Bogotá. That is how the First Venice Biennial of Bogotá took place.
This first version used the image and concepts from the Venice Biennial of Italy, framed in our own cultural environment. The BVB started around a universal reference appropriation, and at the same time, it ratifies our own local culture.

The second Venice Biennial of Bogotá, D.C. continued with the same reference strategies from the Venice Italy Biennial, but the projects, contents and audiences were different. While the Venice, Italy Biennial is directed to one international plastic and social elite. The second Venice Biennial of Bogotá was the result of reducing the distance between the community of a popular neighborhood and the art manifestations.

This approach was developed in two ways. In one way the community approached the plastic expressions that were banned or did not belong to them, and on the other hand, twenty (20) or more, highly renowned artists from Colombia approached a specific area of our city, to interpret local reality and to return to the community their impressions as plastic expressions. The BVB will always emphasize the interaction between art with the community and their art projects, which should be inspired by the social, economic and cultural realities of our Venice.

From the third edition of the Venice of Bogotá Biennial, many proposals came about from international artists that adhere to the BVB philosophy such proposals sometimes from a foreign point of view, broaden out situations that for us locally were already known and invisible (not there).

Ever since the BVB was created, it has been part of highly important academic events in many cities around the world. Those are Medellin, Cali, Caracas, Madrid, La Habana, London, Liverpool, Buenos Aires, Quito and Cardiff.

About the summons

This Biennial differs from the former ones before a personal invitation was sent to each participant. Ever since the third Biennial, the invitation has been made through a letter of convocation, open to all and distributed through the mail, electronic media and print outs using the databases from different academies, universities, cultural and community centers. The Local Cultural Council and other cultural foundations that are on location putting out a list of possible participants decide the local artist’s participation.

The experiment is about allowing and maintaining contrasts between local artists, and the artists that emerge from the summons. Both are referred to the community in a diverse way: through documental approaches, position enunciations, personal and sometimes even public lectures facing the Venice neighborhood context.


About the artists

It is very curious to see, how in a particular way the artwork of an artist changes in a non “habitual” area.

Having a far away neighborhood from the classical art circles as a reference can expose the artist to new spectators, and lectures. Because their artwork is collective, and it cannot be evaluated immediately, it gives them less personal responsibility. It is something that is perceived as time passes and then makes an impact.

On the fourth edition of the BVB, foreign artists that belonged to the Nexus project participated through the Convenio Andres Bello. Thanks to the exchange program they were able to visit the neighborhood previously. These artists lived in Bogotá for about a month. Starting from their own experience in the Venice neighborhood they made their artwork. As well as some international artists, they will have the same approaching process to the neighborhood before they make of their work in future editions of the Biennial.


The plastic value

The Biennial acts as an information channel, in which experiences are exchanged; the art in such case shows evidence of particular behaviors that affect individuals in this context; or simply highlights similarities and brings up a difference, which many times paradoxically is the one excuse to get together.

The artwork or better yet the projects start assuming compromise in each and every participant. The risk is reduced to the access to documentation and the exhibit level that the participants have had in the context. The codes pile up to say things, to translate realities. What are left are the results, which are in the eye of the beholder who “feels” or does not feel. The artwork approaches to the neighborhood reality, and the abilities of the artist and its good judgments.


About the audiences

After seeing many modernist museums and art galleries, organized under chronological or stylist parameters, between the lines something can be seen that could be the first justification; the museum didactic aspect.

From the Biennial’s first version, the neighborhood people participation was looked for; speeches, conferences, guided visits that in a way or another approaches surprisingly the spectators that have a global idea about art, or at least of what a sacred and impermeable museum is.

Today the Biennial of Venice continues with its didactical intention trying little by little to optimize the processes, and to call upon the intervention of people specialized in this area.


New projects emerging from the BVB

The Venice Biennial has been the inspiration and the motor of many private artistic initiatives as well as official ones for more than ten (10) years in Bogotá. As a matter of fact, new art practices have changed the way they saw the far away communities, centering themselves in their cultural potential and their abilities to convert such practices in creation, tolerance strategies.

Inside this context the biennial has created two “extensions” that surely optimize from its central axis the new versions, and that will give the needed tools for it sustainability: “Linking communities through the Arts” and the Piccolo Aperto.


Linking communities through the arts

The basic intention is to offer and execute a series of experiences in a particular place with a determined group of people to create links, optimize processes, bring communities together, increase tolerance and promote team work, all these through art.

In general the process includes a series of projects, independently stated, yet related and interactive. Looking in that way to create an activity “kit”, that could be transported to other contexts and shown to other audiences, enriched and continue this versatile nomad strategy.

With these ideas, more than 500 didactic activities have taken place during 10 years of the Venice Biennial of Bogotá, the implementation of a stable and active center near the neighborhood’s Communal Room will be proposed.

The training of local leaders for different activities is applied accordingly to their particular needs and they take place at the appropriate moment. We look forward to build an artist’s database as well as agents, leaders, and general public to generate a useful system and constantly keep it up-to-date.

Planning, making, and evaluating this project will be in charge of TÄI – The Art Incubator, a multidisciplinary collective that is in charge of the logistics of the Venice of Bogotá Biennial.


The Piccolo Aperto

This events objective is the presentation interesting art proposals from all over the world that go along with the independent and urban philosophy of the Venice of Bogotá Biennial. These proposals have a relationship with the urban side, the living in the city dynamics and the images of a neighborhood, we consider inviting similar proposals to enrich and broaden the strategies, to state other ways to make art having those as a reference.

We would like to bring into the country modern proposals; interesting and inspiring that promote a similar setting up as to the one of our context. At the same time it will allow the artists, agents, administrators, sponsors, partners, gallery owners and spectators interaction closing the existing gap between contemporary art and its audience.

A year ahead of time of each Venice Biennial or in the time when its effective, a version of the Piccolo Aperto will take place; it will involve international artists (not necessarily from the invited honor country) artists or artists collectives from other cities of the country.

This event will have two locations. One will be the Location of Tunjuelito and the other one will be a regular exhibition centre to achieve the interaction from both ends of the system in one way.


Vision

The work will be done looking forward to strengthen local cultural projects that are already in progress. The objective is to make the local artists have active and dynamic participation in this art spaces, filling them with every day activities. That way we will be getting closer to their entertaining or information interests or simply we will be establishing links with the community from different perspectives.

It is a goal for years to come that the Biennial of Venice becomes the favorite spot for artists to develop themselves as well as cultural agents who will be in charge of promoting and broadcasting the event in the not too far away future.


© 2006 / Franklin Aguirre / Bogotá, D.C. Colombia