As artists, we search for new decentralized chanels of contact with art.
We search for unoccupied or abandoned places and begin working on a series of binding experiences and new ways of access to art. Our work takes place being aware of the transient condition of our stay, empowering the place from its essence.
/Como artistas buscamos nuevas aperturas móviles y descentralizadas del arte.
Encontramos lugares olvidados y deshabitados por la actividad humana, para gestar un cúmulo de experiencias vinculantes y abrir nuevas vías de acceso al contacto con el otro .
Vivimos estos lugares sabiendo lo efímero de nuestro paso, potenciándolos
desde su misma esencia./
[FINDING THE PLACE AND START WORKING ]
This intiative goes back to 2016, where four artist of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, showed their thesis work in a house that was about to be demolished.
One of those four artists, Juan Camilo Jaramillo, willing to keep the project going, proposed a second version with the study group we had. This group, composed by six people, searches for new channels to show and move our art work. Everything came togehter when one of the group's member, David Reigoza, mentioned that his family had an unoccupied building that we could use for this purpose.
He gave us four weeks until the opening to the public. Three of us accepted the challenge: Juan Camilo, Daniel Marín and me, Carmela Cuéllar.
The moment we got in the building we realized we were not in a gallery, with its white walls and sterelized enviroment.
Unoccupied places like this usually come with a history. Materials, animals, personal objects and lots of dust. We had to start a dialogue with all of that. It wasn't as simple as bring our work in and just put it in an esthetical way for exhibit. We had to become good readers of the place (In this particular case, a two story black building with no walls), so that entering in it could feel like a whole experience, not just like an art "exhibition".
WEEK 1
The time of the year we started the project was rainy season and beacuse of the building didn't have walls to the patio, a big pool of stagnant water was taking over half of the first floor. Or as we liked to call it: The mosquitoes nest. At 5 pm you could start feeling their bites. So now every day we came to the building, and before start anything else, we added some chlorine and stronlgy moved the water around, so the mosquitoes could't breed in it.
And that was begining.
This first week was about clearing the space. There was an impressive amount of material everywhere. Wooden logs, bricks, doors, windows, floor ceramics, and a long etcetera. Most of this material was taken through a narrow staircase to the basement, wich was already filled with more material.
With the wooden logs, the three of us built this "floating" structure.
WEEKS 2 AND 3
The other two timidly started to bring some of their work to the building. The clearing helped uncover the magnitude of the space. Each of us selected the spots we wanted to work on.
A vague idea of what we wanted was starting to develope.
Me, I was decided I wanted to work with ceramics and spent most of the time these two weeks in my ceramics workshop developing my project
WEEK 4
We were all working very hard by this time.
One of the biggest challenges was the lighting of the place. By the time we got there, there was only light in the first floor, and very poorly in fact. So, with the help of a friend, we started conecting bulb after bulb until the whole building had these soft yellowish atmosphere.
The night before the opening day, everything was finished. We could not believe how much the place had changed. We had inhabited it to create a conection with art and everyone was invited to experience it with us.
