The initiative “Wording the Trouble. Imaginaries of Transformation Amidst Social and Ecological Challenges” is based on an ongoing collaboration between four artists with overlapping concerns and approaches. From the invitation to participate in the festival SOHO in Ottakring 2020, they decided to document the paths and the conversations that led them to develop the exhibited projects. Their concerns revolve around how the criminalization of protest, and the increase in social discontent are symptoms of the civilizational crisis built on the basis of the exploitation of nature.
The blog tries to collaborate in reading the complex panorama of conflict and recent Latin American mobilization, since they consider that at the center of the demands of its inhabitants there is a strong criticism of the capitalist system that profits by destroying life in all its forms, oppresses bodies and subjectivities, extinguishing ancestral knowledge and forms of relationship that offer alternatives to the necessary transformations of the planet.
This is a project by Imayna Cáceres, Alfredo Ledesma, Eliana Otta and Hansel Sato, Peruvian artists living in Vienna. As in our brain and in our lives, this blog combines English, Spanish and German, more randomly than in an organized manner. Thank you for your understanding and acceptance that not all content can be equally accessible to everybody. Again, as in life!
Making Meaning With Other Beings. Resignifying our Ways of Living
Imayna Caceres
How do we exchange our points of view, our ways of being and experiencing the world with/through the other? What is at stake when the fragility of life comes to the front in a crisis? Through drawing, sounding, writing, connecting, I seek to make political meaning and to trace the common realizations of what we see inside ourselves as a narrative of the world to come.
Imayna Caceres, *Callao, Peru ist an artist, curator and independent researcher whose work focuses on the making of meaning in communities that exceed the human, futuristic ancestral heritages, and practices of regeneration and kinship amidst social, political and ecological crossroads.
© Imayna Caceres 2020
To Look After a Stranger’s Urge
Eliana Otta
Participants: Students of the course “Artistic collaborative art education practice”, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, guided by Hansel Sato
What feels urgent today and how we can express it, will be explored in this workshop it. How do we put in words what we would like to change, that which causes our indignation? How do we verbalize a very intimate desire or dream, which we don’t dare to reveal? And mainly, how do we relate to someone else’s ideas or hopes for transformation? How do we hear and perceive urgencies that are not our own? Could we pay close attention to them? Could we even take care of them for a while? This will be a moment for us to concentrate in each other’s ways of expressing, for us to look after a demand which is not our own. And to observe what can occur when we do so, with ourselves and with others.
The developed works will be presented in a blog on SOHOnline.
Eliana Otta studied art at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima and specialized in painting. She graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary program that focuses on how culture expresses, recreates and reshapes power relations in our society. She has exhibited her work widely, has diverse pedagogical experiences and co-founded the artist-run space Bisagra. Currently she is a PhD Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
eliana-otta.com
Hansel Sato, *in Peru, is a visual artist and cultural mediator. His artistic work includes figurative painting, comics, drawing and art interventions in public space in the context of postcolonial theories. Since 2013 he has been a member of the SOHO team in Ottakring and Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Artistic Teaching (IKL) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
hanselsato.com
Through the Textile
Alfredo Ledesma Quintana
In the pre-Inka, Wari culture, textiles and their symbolism are a testimony to their vision of the world. Textiles seek to act as a means of communication between different communities and beings, expressing their feeling – thinking about nature and their environment – leading to group expressions of collective intercommunication. Textiles have a ritual character that seeks to transcend and express the values and knowledge in a pure and intrinsic way that exist in nature itself.
Through a symbolic intervention with the textiles in the Andes, Alfredo Ledesma Quintana’s work focuses on reflecting and questioning how we know and understand “nature” and give space to nature to express itself and to articulate its own language.
At the same time, hearing voices of the population of the Valle de Tambo, who defend their living base of agriculture against the extraction of copper, the conflictive character of parallel existing perceptions and valorizations of nature become evident.
Alfredo Ledesma Quintana is a Peruvian artist located in Vienna since 2013. He was bornand raised in Lima, Peru and belongs to the third generation of a Peruvian artisan silversmith family. Through his artwork, he tries to close a gap, reconnect with, revalue and reactivate traditional Andean culture and his Andean identity. With his work he also tries to critically approach existing “modern” values and rework, decolonize, and de/re-learn through art.
© Alfredo Ledesma