el despacho
Country
Mexico
Profile
The artist initiative “ el despacho” is set up in Mexico City in 1998 and organizes since then collaborative community based projects, in which the videocamera and documentary-making play a central role. The projects take place under varying circumstances of locality, setting, configuration and partnership. Central to the concerns is the search for the reformulation of systems of artistic undertaking and collaboration, organized around the urge to modify the artist-spectator relationship. All the projects have involved collaborations between individuals from inside as well as from outside of Mexico and between visual artists and people coming from different artistic disciplines, and different communities and backgrounds. El despacho wants to relate visual artists with documentary filmmaking. The videocamera used as a tool to help to come closer, as instrument of pretext, as door and as bridge. El despacho implements different ways to generate and distribute the outcomes of its projects and builds networks, set into motion by this process, transcending the traditional mechanisms of art distribution. Important is the educational vision; through the projects, through work-shops and lectures and visits to art schools and centers, el despacho tries to sensitize students and visual artists, by involving them in more human and social aspects of life and art-making. The projects are about human contact, and about exploring human networks as a valuable tool for exchange. To create contact between people and more understanding for others through art-making and to put aside prejudices are valuable attempts to make a better, and friendlier society. Visual arts have no borders or specific limitations and the abilities and talent of visual artists should be used to create a more interconnected world.
Supported by Arts Collaboratory for
BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER
¨Breakfast, lunch, dinner¨ is a broad collaborative documentary project spread out over 12 months, consisting of a series of lectures, workshops and documentary making stages with art students from Mexico, Morocco and the Netherlands. At the end of the 12-months experience, three independent, but closely connected experimental documentaries around the subjects of breakfast, lunch and dinner will be released through public presentations in these three countries and by distributing a DVD featuring them;
“Breakfast in Mexico City”, “Lunch in Tétouan” and “Dinner in Amsterdam”.