30.10, 31.10, 01.11 and 02.11
10am-5pm
Building A
Route des Franchises 2
CH-1203 Genève
Universität / Haute École
for student applications
Helvetropicos is a platform created for a collective exchange between artists living in different cantons in Switzerland and abroad, who share a genealogy of affection with Latin America. As an artistic group, it may adapt to different formats depending on the situation proposed, being able to be an itinerant project, of research, support, fiction, exchange, and articulation of with external-internal agents, that could parasite a known or foreign context, questioning it.
The workshop proposal is based on the act of “activating” in the frame of the current exhibition ¿Desde donde miras el sol?, recently opened at CAN Neuchâtel, organized by Helvetropicos and curated with Adriana Dominguez. During the workshop we will try to blur borders regarding the sense of belonging, re-interpreting layers of information, identifying clichés, territories, peripheries, taking on uncertainty, tracking influences, considering human aspects and creating flexible-fluid relationships, within our bodies, surroundings and fictions.
It will include forms of mestizajes*(mixing, diversity and inclusion), to identify how to think about ourselves, our common stories, and contradictions. Juxtaposing aesthetics, by interacting with other places, besides “the center”, confronting to the neoliberal multiculturalism.
Some of the proposed collective moments will include: visiting the exhibition ¿Desde donde miras el sol? at CAN, Tackling the ancestral background of certain music instruments and rituals; mapping an unfinished project, sensible economies, marginal works and B sides; and preparing herbs whether for health, for love, for luck, for evil spirits, for business, for concentration and inspiration.
Members of Helvetropicos activating the workshop:
Veronica Casellas Jimenez is a Swiss-based Venezuelan interdisciplinary artist, she lives and works in Valais . She received her BA of Visual Arts from EDHEA(CH), with a Prize of Excellence and her MFA in Public Spheres from EDHEA(CH) with a distinction. “Vero’s interdisciplinary explorations often originate from interrogating the “poetics of the circulation of a thing.” By examining the starting points, evolution, movements, and cultural understandings of things and using anachronistic methodologies and the non-linear presentation of her findings, she creates a proto-scientific gaze that merges myths, reality, and fiction. Recurring themes in her work are the complex relationships between philosophy and the historical, computer, and musical sciences. Her projects are often presented as interactive, sound and multimedia installations, sculptures, and performances.”
https://veronicacasellasjimenez.com
Jorge Raka is a Peruvian artist living in Valais. Raka studied painting and sculpture at the Art School of Pucallpa, his hometown, in 2003-2005. He obtained a scholarship to study at the School of Art of Cali-Colombia, in 2006-2011, and later moved to Switzerland, where he completed a Master of Arts in Public Spheres at ÉDHEA in 2016-2018. His artistic practice is characterized by an aesthetic of “bad taste”, which begins mainly in the development of actions, in which multiple references and obsessions are mixed, expanding to other media such as painting and video. His work is combined with a certain comicality and black humor, references from popular culture and the “ordinary world” that absorb and reconfigure his work and, despite its frivolous, crude or lighthearted appearance, explores deep, social and personal territories, which are unified with sensations of theatricality/ tragic-comic and macabre, using humor as a vehicle and not so much as an objective. Raka has shown his work at the 8th Mercosul Porto Alegre Biennial with Lugar a dudas, Bogotá International Independent Film Festival, ICPNA Lima Award, Biennial of Independent Spaces of Geneva with MACACO Press, Cantonal Museum of Art of Valais, Art Center of Neuchâtel, Museum of Modern Art la Tertulia, Backslash Zurich Festival among others.
Patricio Gil Flood (Argentina 1977) has lived and worked between Geneva and Valais since 2013.
Before living in Switzerland, he studied in Argentina at the Universidad Nacional and was part of the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas de Buenos Aires, among many other collaborations. He has a Master’s degree in Public Spheres from EDHEA and a PhD from ESAAA Annecy. Currently, he is in charge of the EDHEA Editions Lab and he has been a founding member of the MACACO Press collective based in Geneva since 2015.
“My practice is not linear, it appears as a constellation for a contribution towards an expanded art field. As a form of permaculture, I perform different roles, as artist, teacher, researcher, editor. Roles that complement each other, which helps me to develop various forms of knowledge in hybrid combinations.
For some years I have been doing projects that confront the paradoxical relationship of western dichotomies such as: nature and culture, myth and history, material and immaterial, fiction and function, text and action, work and leisure.
This modus operandi relies on the help and complicity of collaborators to create new forms of enrolment and co-agency. Some examples of these are: Escuela del no trabajo, Prácticas de Periferia, Filfilfil, MACACO Press, Los Individuos Radio, La Dispersión, AAS (Agencia de Asuntos Subtropicales), Artistas Organizados, Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, and the micro society of artists ProyectoV.”
http://www.patriciogilflood.com
More information: https://can.ch/project/desde-donde-miras-el-sol/
This workshop is accessible to wheelchair users.
Participants must bring their lunch.