Arts Collaboratory

Moviendo el Mapa (Moving the Map) was conceived as an artistic platform that aimed at consolidating negotiation strategies between cultural organizations and independent initiatives as well as a space for dialogue and artistic exchange within the local and regional context.

Moviendo el Mapa (Moving the Map) revolved around four major axes: (1) Circulation of Local and International Projects, (2) Commission of Site-Specific Artistic Projects, (3) International Performance Programme, and (4) Regional Collaborative Symposium. It involved local as well as international artists and curators like Santos Arzú Quioto (Honduras), Humberto Vélez (Panama/UK), Pablo Helguera (Mexico/USA), Donna Conlon (USA/Panama), Marcus Ahlers (USA/Germany), Coco Fusco (Cuba/USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala) and Sebastián López (Argentina), among others.

The potential of this project consisted in the sustainability of the relational strategies prompted by Moviendo el Mapa which succeeded in engaging initiatives coming from artists, cultural agents and other art professionals in the exchange of dynamics that have generated the mobility of knowledge and artistic contexts towards new social and cultural spheres. In this sense, the regional insertion of this project consisted in moving beyond borders and supranational concepts to welcome interdisciplinary production and to promote the incorporation of new publics to the sphere of contemporary art production in our cultural contexts.

For local artists this was an important event. According to Honduran artist Santos Arzú Quioto, who participated in this project with an exhibition entitled “Espacio Irreductible: Exvotos”, “This is a great opportunity for Honduran artists… personally I feel happy and excited to be part of this great project which will bridge the art of all neighbouring countries.”

According to the artistic director, Bayardo Blandino, the exchanges generated by Moving the Map provided an opportunity for artistic development and informal education. In most cases, the artists participating in the different axes contributed with pedagogical and artistic strategies that emphasized interdisciplinarity and generated laboratories for experimentation. One of the most significant examples of these explorations was the project “Agua realmente azul” developed by Donna Conlon and Marcus Ahlers which overtook the margins of the artist-scientific field and achieved its pedagogical efficacy by putting into practice a sociological gesture within a specific community.

Within this project, Performance as an artistic expression was a special point of interest having as one of its objectives to bring international artistic proposals to the mise-en-scene and research practice of performance as a territory for the exploration of relations between temporal space versus physical space. Within this context, a video-performance event “Video/Transversales” took place featuring two internationally renowned performance artists, Coco Fusco (Cuba/USA) and Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), who besides showing their work engaged in a conversation with Argentine critic and curator Sebastián López. This event served as meeting point for both artists who until this moment had not had the chance of meeting personally. “Moviendo el Mapa is precisely about that relation of mobility, that relation which allows artists to articulate ideas and processes they would not be able to do in their own spaces and contexts.”, remarked Blandino an article related to this project.

Thus, Moviendo el Mapa constitutes an important initiative in its locality and in the broader Central American region because of the channels of transmission and circulation it opened, its practical vision and the creation of meeting points in facilitated. In this regard, the project will continue its trajectory thanks to the sustainable relations it fostered with institutions, cultural instances, artists and other agents who have seen that projects such as this one contribute to strengthen regional networks through the pertinence of its artistic proposals. “Dealing with commonly related topics such as migration, violence and contemporary urban phenomena, not as themes exclusive to a certain capital or region, but from this kind of platform, can bridge gaps and brings us together as we are living within transversal realities that relate to us all.”

In hindsight, the organizers agree that mobility, interdisciplinarity and artistic and professional exchange were the primary objectives and achievements of this artistic platform which took place between 2008 and the first half of 2010 and shall continue taking shape in the next five years.