Tenth Cuenca Biennial. Reality and new times
Q & A with Head Curator. José Manuel Noceda.
The tenth edition of the Cuenca International Biennial –slated from Oct. 22 to Dec. 4 this year– will this time around have an expert from another country as the event’s head curator. In addition to the value added of the guest intellectual’s status, this increasingly common practice implies higher commitment to the biennials’ layout and tradition, as well as to its fast-paced inclusion and the professional conquest of spaces that, from the physical-urban to the spiritual and the social in a totalizing scale, could be alien to the event. Since his designation as Head Curator of the Cuenca Biennial back in 2008, Jose Manuel Noceda (Cuba, 1959) began to work in that project, even juggling his hats at the curatorship of the tenth Havana Biennial. To deal with the imponderables of his appointment –as a matter of fact and in his own words, “it’s a personal challenge far beyond the support of a team”– he relies on his own research studies on contemporary art from the Caribbean, Central America and three Andean nations (Peru, Bolivia ad Ecuador), ample experience under his belt as a juror, exhibit curator and collaborator in exhibitions and biennials at the Havana event and at the “Wifredo Lam” Center for Contemporary Art, where he’s been around since 1984. Given the proximity of the Cuenca Biennial, we present our readers with an all-embracing and assessing view of Jose Manuel Noceda, one of its key players. His judgments rule out any on-again, off-again gloating; on the contrary, they bear the virtues of someone who unearths the basics that come out of his own character: accuracy, restraint, objectivity. It’s been 22 years since the first edition of the Cuenca Biennial. If you were to make a brief historic sketch of that international event, how do you assess its evolution? The Cuenca Biennial is owed to the initiative of a small bunch of local residents interested in artistic and cultural expressions. After enormous efforts, they managed to have this initiative institutionalized in 1985 as an event in the municipality of Cuenca. It’s more or less as old as the Havana Biennial because its big break in the realm of international events happened in April, 1987 as the most outstanding event of the visual arts in both the host city and in Ecuador. Since its creation, the biennial homed in entirely on painting, focusing on esthetic questionings within this profile of the visual arts in the Western Hemisphere. It’s one of the few biennials that still dole out awards. The first editions were faithful to that profoundly pictorial outline and they boasted some boldface names from Latin America, like Julio Le Parc (Argentina), Carlos Colombino (Paraguay); Enrique Tabara (Ecuador), Ignacio Iturria (Uruguay), Myrna Baez and Arnaldo Roche (Puerto Rico), among many others. During the sixth biennial in 1999, some signs of change popped up with the addition of digital art. However, the following edition became the promoter of a sea change in the event’s orientation with its opening to other disciplines, formats and expressions, not to mention the start of installations, art objects, videos and the like, all this much in sync with the major transformations going on in the arts at that time. That’s the orientation the event has today. As a matter of fact, since 1999 painting began losing foreground in the awards and most prizes are now leaning to meaningful photography, video, environments and projections in urban spaces. Cuenca managed to enrich its foundational profile by clinging to renovation strategies in the pictorial field –what we now call expanded or hybrid painting. By doing so, it would have been completely consistent with its origin, yet it opted for the abovementioned variant, and that counts too.
As head curator, what’s your curatorial thesis and up to what extent this view of yours engages or breaks away from the history of this conceptual development line? I try to get inserted in a process and never ignore the biennial’s history and evolution. This is very important to me. In 2007 I collaborated with the ninth Biennial and I’d written an in-depth article on it for the Art Nexus publication. Now, I’m the head curator of the tenth Biennial, thanks to a collaboration agreement signed this year between the Havana Biennial and the Cuenca Biennial. I mean, the moment I took on this new role I already had approached the event. Now in its tenth anniversary, the theoretical proposal I’m sticking to –regardless of the fact that it’s a completely independent thesis– somehow sums up some of the aspects tackled in previous experiences. On the other hand, when it came to developing the “Intersections connecting the memory, the reality and the new times” summoned proposal, I’ve paid close heed to the organizers’ expectations, so I’m just trying to conciliate their interests with my curatorial foundations. Intersections is a key term to indicate the plural registries of thematic and symbolic associations. It’s a heading broad enough to trigger a multitude of reflections and questionings from the arts. In the first place, it presupposes the establishment of interconnections that start off from a specific historic and referential framework, that of a global, dollarized country enduring the same profound crisis that’s sweeping today’s world. Therefore, this takes a biennial that encourages and makes room for social, political and cultural reflections. Based on that, it tries to make some sense between the host city and its identity tegument and other contexts, between the memory and the reality zones. That is, it gives value to the temporal space categories, playing so active a role in memory that it draws interest on the whole curatorial discourse. I remember that French theoretician Nicolas Bourriaud once validated the work on heritage and strata, and used to put the time specific up to par with the site specific.
Even though this curatorial thesis acts as the centerpiece of the whole concept, at the same time I try to avoid getting boxed in the polish of the general theme by antonomasia. I rather try to prop on four subtopics attached to it that show some kind of discursive autonomy. These four subtopics ponder more dialogue with the Azuay region Cuenca belongs to in such a way that the biennial’s role won’t boil down to that of a simple temporal importer of artworks or mediator between them and the public, but rather stand up from the bottom of the host city to make a call, to live and nourish from it, and to become a starting block for building communicating and decanting vessels for the world and toward contemporary artistic creations and processes. The first subtopic, “The poetics of water” –that could perfectly be entitled the problems of water– will focus on the natural foundations. Cuenca flourishes in the topography of the Andes and its waters, home to Andean civilizations and their offspring, and whose development hinged heavily on their mastery in the use and preservation of this vital liquid which, by the way, stands for a symbol of territorial sovereignty. Thus, “the poetics of water” is no doubt a local reference and a planetary environmental reference on the use and misuse of the natural resources. I think a visionary like Leonardo Da Vinci was the one who said water was nature’s blood. It’s followed by “Memories don’t go away with glories” that deals with the forms of implementing the past, with constructions based on the operating use of collective memories. Cuenca is a reservoir of memories. It’s perched on a pre-Inca settlement that belongs to the cañari culture that eventually evolved during the colonial rule. This is an opposite version to the popular saying that reads “Memories go away with glories” in a bid to express things all the way around and to explore the fields in a more in-depth fashion in terms of the review of historic and cultural processes. Then comes “The mazes of reality” that zeroes in on those artistic practices that draw a bead on the daily reality and its ripple effects; it’s a chance to rethink the present and the multiple realities we go through amidst a complicated international and local universe. The fourth subtopic is “The imaginaries on Cuenca.” This is about drawing all eyes on this city, whose historic core was declared World Heritage by UNESCO in 1999. It’s all about focusing on its history and its present on the basis of proposals for public and urban places, artworks in progress that interact with the public, or the readings resulting from this interaction. “Intersections among the memory, the reality and the new times,” could eventually be construed as a wink at the history of the Biennial and its development, at the need to recap on what has been going on in it up to now in the face of the future and the projections of the artistic practice. Its opening spirit still raises a few eyebrows because a handful of people are calling for a return to the event’s origins. This wakeup call hints at delving into the possible contradictions that can still be found inside of it, into the institutional mechanisms, its underpinnings and guidelines that remain anchored in the foundational pictorial conception. Let me give you an example; the ninth biennial planned on doling out two awards for painting and the rest of them among the other artistic creations. The jury ignored those regulations and gave the award to an installation-scale, to a shadow projection on the wall of the Convent of Concepts and to an environment.
Amid the profound crisis the region and the rest of the world of going through right now, how have potential visitors responded to this call? What criteria have prevailed in the selection of guests and nations? By and large the responses have been marked by understanding and solidarity toward the summoning, from the institutions involved in the decision-making process and the planning of the Cuenca Biennial –the Mayor, the City Hall and the Biennial director– to the specialized entities. The working system rests on the general curatorship that dictates the event’s thematic and conceptual guidelines and handpicks the guest artists. However, it gets some valuable help from the indispensable contribution of national curators. Cuenca has inked collaboration agreements with entities and curators from different parts of the world taking part in this biennial. These curatorships work once they’ve been summoned and are entitled to propose up to six artists and projects before that process narrows their choices down to two, three tops in only a few exceptional cases. As far as the host country is concerned, there must be 20 proposals for a final selection of 10 –this time around as many as 11 Ecuadorian artists have been invited. Some of those curatorships include the Sao Paolo Biennial Foundation, the Goethe Institute (Germany), the Brownstone Foundation (France), the Havana Biennial, the Barrio Museum (New York), the Lima Art Museum, and such curators as Alfons Hug (Germany), who has directed both the Sao Paolo Biennial and the MERCOSUR Biennial; Adriana Almada (Argentina-Paraguay), who works with Ticio Escobar in Chile’s first Triennial; Orlando Britto (Spain), Victoria Verlichak (Argentina); Adrienne Samos (Panama), with a tremendous influence in his country’s visual arts and all over Central America; Maria Luz Cardenas, from Venezuela. Representing Ecuador, there’ll be a curatorial team made up of some boldface names in the business, like Jorge Davila, Ana Rodriguez and Carlos Rojas. Many of these national curatorships are synonymous of a job well done and guarantee an excellent turnout of guests –contestants– with such standouts in the world scene and with great recognition in their countries and regions as Frank Thiel, Germany; Laura Vinci and Rochelle Costi, Brazil; Eduardo Ponjuan, Cuba; Gao Shiqiang, China; Laurent Grasso, France; Alex Burke, Martinique; Humberto Velez, Panama; Francisco Mariotti, Peru; Jorge Francisco Soto, Uruguay, Alexander Nikolaev, Uzbekistan; Magdalena Fernandez and Luis Molina Pantin, Venezuela; Ana Fernandez, Saidel Brito or Maria Rosa Jijon, Ecuador. These talented figures rub elbows with fledgling artists like Adrian Villar (Argentina), Sila Chanto (Costa Rica), Duvier del Dago (Cuba), Beatriz Lecuona and Oscar Hernandez (Spain), Oscar Acuña (Nicaragua), Francisco Barsallo (Panama), Carlos Ruiz Valarino and Marxs Rosado (Puerto Rico), Raquel Paiewonsky (Dominican Republic), or Geovanny Verdezoto, Carolina Alvarado and the Tranvía Cero, El Bloque and La Vanguardia collectives from Ecuador.
What criteria have prevailed in choosing guest artists and countries? As I said at the top of this interview, guest selection does not depend on the head curator’s exclusive criterion because I worked on the conceptual and esthetic premises of putting together a heterogeneous group of national curators. In spite of that, the basic foundations for the selection were in line with the event’s summoned themes and the quality of the contesting projects.
What will the new stuff be this time around, given the diversity of today’s contemporary art and its increasingly closer linkage with technology and the quest for new languages? This biennial will cling to the openness provided by previous editions. I don’t believe there’ll be a dramatic renewal in anything. In fact, I’m working on traditional categories such as poetics, memory or imaging, but always putting some sense into their interaction with the contexts. In any case, the event strengthens and legitimizes that spirit of openness and contemporariness. I don’t see a substantial prominence of the technological factor, either. I think the lineup of artists and projects that have been picked strikes quite a balance. There are 61 guests from 30 countries in all. The public will find expanded painting-painting, installed drawing-drawing, sculpture-object, art vivant sculpture, photography, photographic installation-installation, documental installation, appropriations of traditional expressions like textiles or fabrics used in the configuration of very contemporary artworks, graphic-based pieces, video-video projections and video installations, performances and actions, site specific works, contextual art. In a word, a diversified exhibit. Perhaps the possible new stuff to the show is a greater interaction of the Biennial with the urban scenarios, and that implies more focus on that environment, that is, a more urban-oriented event. But the Biennial might have huge repercussions on the streets and on the local population. Countless projects will work in unconventional places, in bars, parishes, along the river banks, in the streets, with ripple effects on the social and cultural fabrics of Cuenca rather than on the physical and constructive spaces. I mentioned the bar because there’ll be a runway with models and costumes that will take their glamour to the daily residents. There’ll be a procession, a beauty contest with llamas, alpacas and vicuñas –animals of great significance for the Andean civilizations. There’ll interventions in buses, performance with portable soft sculptures, a workshop on gardening and urban ecology, the making and sale of espumilla, a traditional local pastry… All this much will be aimed at enhancing the biennial’s outreach and at portraying scenarios and locations never taken into account before, like the locality of Baños in the outskirts of town, or the Cuenca airport, for instance. There’ll also be a number of parallel exhibition projects, like an Africa Pavilion featuring paintings, video installations and performances –something completely new to Cuenca. We’ll have the collective Playlist: the Greatest Hits of Ecuador’s Contemporary Arts, curated by Rodolfo Kronfle for the Procesos galleries, and a number of personal exhibits by Raquel Rabinovich (Argentina-U.S.), Lee Man Soo (South Korea) and Luis Morales (Nicaragua), among others. Another element worth highlighting is that the Cuenca Biennial will no longer be a hemispheric event because there’ll be artists from Europe, Asia and Africa.
What is the theoretical event’s main theme and what scholars will dissert in it? The same theme basically stipulated in the biennial’s concept. Yet we’ll have a turnout of critics and curators with paper works tackling things likened to landscapes and the environment –including urban and human ecology– the local scenes, their dynamics and projections; the role played by museums in the contemporary art; the ongoing ways of deconstructing the historic memory; the memory and its ties with contemporary building of heritage notion from anthropological, archeological and ethnographic standpoints. This is something very special in the case of Cuenca right now due to the ongoing debate on the revalorization of the urban architectural heritage. And last but not least, the alternatives to the institution or about exposition studies. Some of the keynote speakers will be Kevin Power, Julia P. Herzberg, Adriana Almada, Rodolfo Kronfle, Orlando Britto, Lupe Alvarez, Angel Emilio Hidalgo, Leonor Amarante, Eduardo Perez. There’ll be a session of lectures and conferences on art and culture in Africa and its diasporas, featuring some first-string experts in the field like Simon Njami, Fernando Alvim, Sindica Dokolo, Simao Souindula, Doudou Diene, Antonio Monteiros Nunes.
Based on what you mentioned earlier about the award presentation during the ninth biennial, how has the jury’s work been laid out for this edition and who are the jurors? An international jury made up of renowned experts will work on the head curatorship’s selection and will judge with complete autonomy al the artworks in display. The jurors are Kevin Power (UK-Spain), Julia P. Herzberg (U.S.), Leonor Amarante (Brazil), Cristobal Zapata (Ecuador) and Maria del Carmen Carrión, also from Ecuador. They will implement whatever methodology they see fit for determining the prizewinners and the mentions. Both artists and disciplines contest in equity, on equal footing, because unlike the previous edition, the awards don’t carry a “tendentious” label.
In addition to the professional privilege contained in an experience like this, I assume the practice demands something not as pleasant as unifying the not-always-alike curatorial interest of private institutions and state-run entities taking part in the planning effort… Now that the event is so near –in early September- how have you seen this circumstance going on? You’re right about that. At the “Wifredo Lam” Center for Contemporary Art and in the Havana Biennial, where collectiveness is the name of the game, you always count on the support and the opinions of the other curators who act as such in their own countries. But it’s a complete different ballgame when you have to get inserted in a different ambience and carry on your shoulders the burden of a curatorial process under conditions and rules others than those you know. It’s quite a complex task. You must respectfully join that ambience and get acquainted with it. However, I’ve been under no strains at all. Regardless of the logical differences of approach in some aspects, the Cuenca Biennial has been very respectful about my views and has given plenty of wiggle room to do my job. I think we’ve put together quite a good team; we complement one another and I see myself as part of that teamwork. Led by its chairman, René Cardoso Segarra, this event banks on a small team of nearly a dozen people capable of organizing and planning everything. I must say Cuenca has taken a major step forward by turning, a few months ago, into the Cuenca Biennial Municipal Foundation, a move that puts the event on solid ground and gives it more institutional leverage, let alone it puts it in a better position to cope –in the mid and long terms– with research and promotional strategies for the benefit of the fine arts in Ecuador and for the sake of its international projection. On the other hand, the national curators have paid heed to my suggestions. I know most of the curators and from the very beginning I set out to stay out of the harm’s way and avoid falling into coldhearted, distant approaches. Instead, I decided to touch base with all the colleagues on a regular basis. I think I’ve handled that quite well up to now.
Based on your condition as a researcher and viewing this event within the possible cosmology of the contemporary arts in the Americas and the Caribbean, how would you label Ecuador and Cuenca in particular? Ecuador’s contemporary visual scene is one thing, so active and rekindled in recent years, eager to win back the lost ground within the art context of Latin America, with major figures who study and document everything going on in this realm, like Lenin Oña, Rodolfo Kronfle, Carlos Davila, Cristobal Zapata, Lupe Alvarez, Ana Rodriguez, Trinidad Perez. And the Cuenca Biennial, a rock-solid event with 22 years of experience under its belt and penciled in as one top-five cultural biennials of the subcontinent is just something else.
Within the country’s artistic scenario, how does the development of the Biennial exert influence on the city of Cuenca which, as a matter of fact, is not the nation’s capital? This is quite a major development. It’s funny, you know, because biennials are usually held in the capitals of the countries or in other highly-developed cities. Some say the biennials hide non-artistic interests that seek to give both the city and the country more international hype. Logic has it this biennial was supposed to take place in Quito or in the economic powerhouse of Guayaquil. But it didn’t turn out that way and Cuenca took the lead. Perhaps this has to do with something in the field of knowledge because this is city is known as Ecuador’s Athens. Not only the biennial thrives in this city, but also the local poetry biennial, the theater festival and a rich cultural life that flourishes. During the ninth biennial I had the chance to see the extraordinary acclaim this event has, especially in a very diverse national public, as well as the effectiveness of the promotional programs implemented by the organizers in a bid to draw in potential spectators.
Where do you stand when questioning the usefulness and the sense of the biennial concept? This is quite a controversial topic nowadays. Indeed, I believe the model ought to be reformulated. We’re dragging along the old biennial model of the late 19th century, like the Venice Biennial. Then, its followers came up and the biennials went through a period of crisis. Right here in Latin America, we witnessed the biennial boom only to see many of them vanish altogether, all at once. Only the Sao Paolo Biennial, the San Juan (Puerto Rico) Polygraphic Triennial, the Cuenca Biennia and the Havana Biennial survived. But despite the trumpeted obsoleteness of the model, we also witnessed the rebirth of these cultural spaces scattered all around the world: Istanbul, Turkey; Seville and Valencia, Spain; Sydney, Australia; Kwangju, South Korea. Eastern Europe churned out its own bevy of biennials in Moscow and Prague. In Africa –alongside the traditional Dakar Biennial– we now have the Bamako (Mali) Photographic Biennial and the Luanda (Angola) Triennial. In South America we have the Mercosur Biennial, the Ushuaia Biennial –also known as the End of the World Biennial. Brazil’s Curitiba-Vento Sul International Biennial and the Chile Triennial. Perhaps the crisis is now only gnawing at the model and we should also take a closer look at the curatorial practices, the reiteration of a handful of artists you can find in virtually all catalogs. I share the view of Fumio Nanjo about one having to think not only of the experts, but also of the public the biennials are made for. We should come closer to the daily going of the contemporary art and generate knowledge from it. As long as a new alternative to the current model doesn’t show up, this initiative is still garnering great recognition and acclaim.
Are you pleased with the decisions you’ve made as head curator, aware of the fact that a considerable chunk of the balance –positive or negative- of the event will inevitably fall on your shoulders? As hackneyed as it might sound, I’d lie to you if I tell you I’m pleased. There’s still a long way to go. Moreover, there’ll always be things susceptible to being better imagined and conceived. I’ve done my best the best way I know how, armed with the best experience I’ve acquired in the Havana biennials for the sake of the Cuenca event. Yet I’m pretty enthusiastic about the end result come late October. Above all, I believe in the possible gains this edition might have for the development of the institution, for the city and the public walking past the turnstiles.
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