kadist art foundation paris press release€¦ · maria luisa murillo (artist), laura ogden...

KADIST ART FOUNDATION PARIS

Kadist Art Foundation, Paris - 19 bis-21 rue des Trois Frères - F-75018 - Tél. +33 1 42 51 83 49 - www.kadist.org

Beyond the End curated by Camila Marambio

May 31 - July 30, 2014 Opening reception: May 30, from 7 to 9 pm With: Derek Córcoran (ecologist), Giorgia Graells (biologist), Émilie Hache (philosopher), Geir Tore Holm & Søssa Jorgensen (artists), Fabienne Lasserre (artist), Myriam Lefkowitz (choreographer), Carla Macchiavello (art historian), Camila Marambio (curator), Maria Luisa Murillo (artist), Laura Ogden (anthropologist), Amanda Piña (choreographer), Alfredo Prieto (archeologist), Maria Prieto (urban and biodynamic farmer), Bárbara Saavedra (ecologist), Carolina Saquel (artist) and Sofia Ugarte (sociologist).And Christy Gast (artist-in-residence)

Beyond the End is an exhibition dedicated to a research and residency program initiated in 2010 in Tierra del Fuego by curator Camila Marambio. Over the years, the Ensayos residencies have given shape to a dialogue between artists, scientists, local inhabitants and Karukinka1 Natural Park. Based on the premise that only creative collaboration can efface frontiers in the field of biocultural conservation, Ensayos enacts the complex interdependence of humans, non-humans and matter with the urgency of maturing aesthetic sensibility in the face of scientific discoveries. The work in the exhibition attempts to give form to this multidisciplinary, multispecies research-based project.

From Tierra del Fuego…

After observing and interacting with the methods used by a group of conservation biologists working in Karukinka1 Natural Park in Tierra del Fuego (Chilean Patagonia), Camila Marambio, an independent curator, was stirred to question the uselesness of art. That is why, in 2010, she convinced Dr. Bárbara Saavedra, the ecologist who directs the park, to include artists as researchers. Together they organized a meeting that took place in February 2011, during which eighteen people (artists, scientists, local islanders and park rangers) met in Tierra del Fuego to speculate on some of the pressing conservation issues with the intention of unveiling the potential of transdisciplinary research.This first inquiry residency trip to Karukinka was called ‘‘Ensayo #1’’, and later gave the whole initiative its name, ENSAYOS (Essays if we translate into English), due to the pragmatic trial-and-error approach which offers the possibility of rehearsing other ethics and worldings in search of novel ways to steward the environment.With this desire in mind, ‘‘Essayo #1’’ drafted some issues to be addressed by three different groups of researchers. These are: the handling of the castor canadensis (the beaver is considered an invasive species by the scientific community in Tierra del Fuego), the governance of the archipelago’s coastal areas, and the Island’s social history.

…To the exhibition at Kadist (Paris)

Given that the “beaver problem” is considered to be the biggest threat to the conservation of biodiversity in Tierra del Fuego, Ensayo #2 picked up on this issue. From a dialogue between artist Christy Gast, Bárbara Saavedra, Camila Marambio, anthropologists Laura Ogden and Melissa Memory, and biologists Derek Córcoran and Giorgia Graells, an initial inquiry arose: how could they, as a research group, include the beaver in the decision making process about its own future on the island? This led them to rehearse various ways of listening to the beavers on the island, and to hear the call of other non-humans that demand fair attention. The beaver issue,

Press Release:

represented in the first part of the exhibition Beyond the End at the Kadist Foundation in Paris, has broadened the scope of aesthetic viewpoints: in this dialogue between species and between disciplines there is an unexplored potential for action and reflection leading towards a practice of rhizomatic imagination that dissolves even the notion of species.

Tierra del Fuego in the city of enlightenment2

Beyond the End, at Kadist Paris, gives researchers and artists the opportunity to gather for a one-week work session to discuss the matters that will concern ‘‘Ensayo #3’’. Articulated as a series of attempts to reach beyond questions about the subject and its identity, ways of knowing and how we know, humanity as the only form of culture, the work-week will aim at new types of questions: What is beyond us? What is non-human (within and around us)? or What is human from the perspective of the other? To inaugurate an inquiry into a post-human geography of Tierra del Fuego. This work-week will take place after the opening (from June 1st to Saturday 7th), and include a series of presentations, screenings, performances and public actions, presented at Kadist, Musée de la Chasse et la Nature, Ciné 13 and Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.

You can download the program here: http://www.kadist.org/en/programs/all/1867

Más Alla del Fin, the inaugural edition of Ensayos’ newspaper, will be released on the occasion of the exhibition. Editor, Art Historian Carla Macchiavello, invited Chilean researchers to contribute hyper-local, first person accounts of their encounters and impressions of Tierra del Fuego.

1- Karukinka means Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) in the Selk’nam language.2- In 1889, to celebrate one hundred years of “Freedom, equality, brotherhood”, Paris hosted a Universal Exhibition that had amongst its “attractions” a gleaming Eiffel Tower and a “Human Zoo”, where nine Selk’nam from the Tierra del Fuego Island were on show amongst four hundred other indigenous people.


PRESS CONTACT:Léna [email protected] +33 (0)1 42 51 83 49

Opening Hours:From Thursday to Sunday, from 2pm to 7pm or by appointment.

This project is supported by:

Pictures for the press

Christy Gast & Camila Marambio, Being, video still, 2014

Documentation Ensayo #1, 2011


Presentation of the curator: Camila Marambio

Camila Marambio (born 1979) is an independent curator and private investigator. After completing her studies in Aesthetics at the Universidad Cátolica de Chile, she received an MA in Modern Art and Critical Studies from Columbia University. While in New York she held the post of Assistant Curator at Exit Art and then in 2006/2007 attended the Curatorial Programme at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam. As Chief Curator of the Visual Arts Department of Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile, she curated a series of projects that tackled the question: How to do of one thing into another? The results of which from an agricultural experi-ment to a magic festival. A fruit of the inquiry into magic lead to the performance lecture «What is he Building in There?» in collaboration with the theater director Manuela Infante.After participating in the construction and development of numerous residency programs (as interim-Director of New Pacific Studios in New Zealand in 2005, as founder of the educational experiment Proyecto Piloto in Valparai-so in 2008 and as resident of Sørfinnset Skole/ the nord land in 2009/2010/2013), Camila recently initiated Ensayos, a research program in Southern Patagonia.

About EnsayosEnsayos is a research and residency program focused on the locality of Tierra del Fuego, in Southern Patagonia. The program is driven by the strong sentiment that this specific locality, while extremely remote, can function as a geographic and cultural center with the potential to generate reflection on the direction and exercise of cultural production. Ensayos is designed to facilitate collaborations among artist, scientists, and humanities scholars and locals inhabitants.

Initiated by curator Camila Marambio, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society Chile, Ensayos was inspired by WCS Karukinka Natural Park’s model for biodiversity conservation, as well as by the social history of Tierra del Fuego.

From September 2011 to September 2014, Ensayos has consisted of three concurrent interdisciplinary research residencies focusing on issues raised during the first Ensayo: the control of invasive species and the region’s biocultural landscape. A third group will soon begin to deal with costal habitation and management. Each group is invited to study their specific issue using creative research strategies – experimental, collaborative, inventive, and pragmatic.

http://www.ensayostierradelfuego.org/en/essays/3/

Karukinka Natural Park, 2011



The Exhibition

An immersive video installation conceived by Christy Gast, Laura Ogden, and Camila Marambio will attempt to recreate the sensorial tensions present in Tierra del Fuego and present the findings of the multidisciplinary research group Ensayo#2 (loosely incorporated by Christy Gast, Melissa Memory, Laura Ogden, Bárbara Saavedra, Derek Córcoran, Giorgia Graells and Camila Marambio).

For the past three years this group has occupied itself with the consequences of the introduction of Canadian beavers into Tierra del Fuego in the1940’s. The beavers’ uninterrupted reshaping of the landscape contributing to widespread forest decline and a reduction in key ecosystem services- and the current eradication plan motivated Ensayos #2 to begin by asking the simple question: how can we listen to the beavers so as to include them into the decision making about their own future on the island?

Christy Gast, Batty Cave, 2010, video installation. Exhibition viewfrom the Gallery Diet.

For the initial public event, Camila Marambio, Christy Gast, Laura A. Ogden and Bárbara Saavedra will introduce the biological, anthropological, aesthetical and political aspects of the project Ensayos, initiated in 2010 in collaboration with WCS Karukinka.

Presentations and discussions


Introductory Lecture

Bárbara Saavedra is the Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society-Chile since 2005. She has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the Universidad de Chile and served as the president of the ecological society of Chile until 2013.http://www.wcs.org/

Bárbara Saavedra explaining to the group Ensayo #2, the ecological disaster caused by the beavors on the territory of Karukinka.Video by Christy Gast (2012) https://vimeo.com/30902708

Laura A. Ogden is associate professor of anthropology at the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University. Her research seeks to understand the ways in which human and nonhuman processes interact to create landscapes, with a particular emphasis on the politics that shape our landscape practices. Her work bridges the social and bio-physical sciences, both drawing from social and ecological theory and making contributions to these literatures. She has published many peer-reviewed articles in professional journals, took part in government reports and conducted fieldwork in the Everglades National Park. She also wrote two books: Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers with Glen Simmons (University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1998) and more recently Swamplife: The Entangled Lives of Hunters, Gators and Mangroves in the Florida Everglades (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011).

Christy Gast in an American artist, she lives and works in Florida. Christy Gast is known for conflating the landscape and the body (often her own) through folk performance conventions. Deeply engaged in the role of landscape in both art history and politics, most of her large-scale projects start with the notion of “public land,” in both practical and romantic senses.She studied women’s studies and sculpture at the Ohio State University and received a MFA in visual arts from Columbia University, New Genres program (2004/2006). She also attended the Fine Art Video Seminar with Valie Export at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst, Salzburg, Austria in 2004. Her work has been shown in institutions such as the Miami Art Museum (The Wilderness, 2011), the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach (Night Shift, 2009), and the MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (Day Labor, 2005).


Friday June 6 from 2 to 4 pm Émilie Hache invites Camila Marambio and Laura A. Ogden to present Ensayos to students in the framework of the Seminar on Politcal Ecology organised by the Sophiapol laboratory. Exceptionally, the session will take place at Speap, Experimental program in Arts and Politics at Sciences Po, Paris27 rue Saint-Guillaume75337 Paris Cedex 07http://blogs.sciences-po.fr/speap/presentation/

Critical commentary by Émilie Hache

Émilie Hache Emilie Hache in a philosopher, she is associate professor and member of the Sophiapol laboratory at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. She is also a research fellow at the Groupe d’Etudes Constructiviste (GECo) at the Université libre de Bruxelles and takes part in the Environment workgroup of the Athenaesearch project (Al-liance nationale des sciences humaines et sociales). Her work treats of ecologic issues and pragmatic philosophy. She has published Ce à quoi nous tenons, propositions pour une écologie pragmatique (éditions La Découverte, 2001) and is also the coordinator of the first anthology of texts in French dealing with political ecology: Ecologie politique (éditions Amsterdam, 2012).


Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen Parallel to individual work that includes video, photography, sculpture, sound art, performance and installations, Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen have mediated, written on and been teaching in contemporary art. By initiating Balkong in 1993, using their apartment as exhibition space, they brought up questions about what art can be. The contexts of artistic practice and work with art as dialogue in practice has been central issues. The homebased experiences led to many other activities. In 2003 they initiated Sørfinnset School/ the nord land in Gildeskål, Nordland. This ongoing project includes focus on exploitation of nature, exchanging of knowledge and small-scale architecture. They continue to work in the field of broad aesthetical understanding of realities of society, man and nature. For example, in 2005, they took part of a ‘travelling’ seminar entitled ‘Transbord/Rajis Radjaj’: a group of cultural producers investigating the cultural situation of the Sami minorities by moving across the state boundaries of Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. They have also been invited in 2009/2010 to a temporary exhibition project called COMMON LANDS in Bjørvika to create new works taking the transformation of this former harbour area of the City of Oslo as a stating point. They are part of an ongoing project called Kirunatopia: where with other international artists, they have been invited to work and do research on site, in Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, in relation to issues that are specific to the area. Geir Tore Holm (b. Tromsø, 1966) is currently a research fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Søssa Jørgensen (b. Oslo, 1968) is doing an MA in Landscape Architecture at Norwegian University of Life Scien-ces (UMB), Ås. They live in the farm Ringstad in Skiptvet, Østfold.

Performative lectures

Amanda PiñaShe is a theatre maker, dancer and choreographer. She originally studied theatre following the Jacques Lecoq method in Santiago de Chile and then specialized in contemporary dance and choreography in Europe. She studied theatre anthropology in Barcelona, contemporary dance in Salzburg and choreography in Montpellier. In 2005 she received the support of the Chilean government for studying in France with a Fondart Scholarship and in 2006 she was awarded the Scholarship for Young Choreographers by Tanz-quartier Wien, and the DanceWeb Scholarship. She lives in Vienna where she founded nadaproductions international in 2006 with Daniel Zimmermann.

Screening of Paris is Burning (1990) directed by Jennie Lingston The film Paris is Burning portrays the ball culture in New York in the late 80s, early 90s. These were elaborate competitions in cross-dressing and gender impersonation, in which the contestants «walked» (much like in a fashion show) and must adhere to the requirements of specific categories and themes. Fabienne Lasserre’s presentation relates these contests to the Hain ceremony, a complex and multi-faceted initia-tion rite held by the Selk’nam people of Tierra del Fuego.

Fabienne Lasserre was born in Canada; she lives and works in Brooklyn. “Breaking down boundaries—between masculine and feminine; reality and fantasy; and different artistic discipli-nes—Fabienne Lasserre creates deliberately uncategorizable works that are both painting and sculpture (or perhaps neither). As she explains: “I make works that are in between sculptures and paintings, as representations of an ‘excluded middle,’ the part that is left out when things are divided into categories.” The truth-bending genres of science fiction and mythology underpin Lasserre’s practice, and the amorphous forms of Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, and Franz West inspire her. (…) For Lasserre, tactility is paramount. She uses it to draw the viewer in to her works and to the malleable vision of reality they represent”. She received a MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2004) and also studied Interdisciplinary Arts with Milan Knizak at the Akademie Vytvarnych Umeni v Praze, Prague, and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Mexico City. She is an Assistant Professor at the Painting department, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

Thinking through films


Screening of El chacal de Nahueltoro (1969) directed by Miguel Littín. Post-screening analysis by artist Carolina Saquel, speaking of the relationship between crime and landscape.

Born in 1970 in Chile, Carolina Saquel now lives and works in Paris, France. Using the moving image as medium for altering perceptions of temporality, her work has transited from reflections on painting - the frame as a window to the world- to what could be considered a sculptural use of the moving image. Saquel’s current work observes nature as hard material, playing with the textures, tonality and rhythm of the image, that through camera movements and perspective turn its matter into narrative. After her Bachelor in Arts at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, she completed her studies in Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France, from 2003 to 2005 and also obtained a Master in Arts, Theory and Practice, mention Contemporary Arts and New Medias at the University Saint-Denis Vincennes, Paris. Her work has been shown in various places in Chile and in France in exhibitions such as Pentimenti (CRAC Alsace, 2008) and Un certain regard (Maison populaire de Montreuil, 2012).Her work Pentimenti is part of the Kadist collection.


Interventions and Discussions by each of the following participants (details on demand)

Sofia Ugarte is a sociologist that has collaborated on numerous investigations in the fields of visual arts, economy and rural studies. At the moment she is working on several projects, both collaboratively and individually, seeking to explore the social and material circumstances involved in the spatial construction of rural life in Chile, its landscape and wilderness.

Alfredo Prieto is a Ph.D. candidate in Prehistoric Archeology from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. He holds a M. Phil in Archeology from the Univiersity of Cambridge. He currently teaches and conducts his research at the Instituto de la Patagonia, Universidad de Magallanes. Alfredo is also coordinator of the Centro de Estudios del Hombre Austral, Universidad de Magallanes.

Giorgia Graells and Derek Córcoran created together Ciencia Autral, a society dedicated to bringing science closer to society through a variety of educational and touristic activities. They also work for the Wildlife Conservation Society-Chile. They live in Punta Arenas, in the Region of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica.

Myriam Lefkowitz is a performer, born in 1980 and based in Paris. She has created choreographical projects questionning the relation between motion and gaze. Since 2009, her work has been focusing on the project Walk, hands, eyes (a city), a perceptive experience working on the relation between walking, seing and touching in the urban environment.

Maria Luisa Murillo was born in Chile in 1979, but based in Barcelona for 8 years. She develops her photographic projects as cartographies of the traces that human beings leave in the world that surrounds them.

Maria Prieto born in Chile, lives in Switzerland. She is an urban and biodynamic farmer. Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming that employs what proponents describe as «a holistic understanding of agricultural processes». One of the first sustainable agriculture movements, it treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks, emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.

If you want to attend these sessions, please send an email to : [email protected]


The Parisian exhibition will be accompanied by the first issue of the newspaper ENSAYOS Fueguinos, a serial publication dedicated to reflecting on the direction of the circulation of information to and from Tierra del Fuego. “Fueginas” will be a trilingual publication (English/Spanish, with the third language changing according to the specific desired audience, for the first issue it will be French). Making Ensayos research and alternate proposals on political ecology public is its core mission. The first issue of the newspaper will introduce crucial questions unearthed during the first three year residency period in Tierra del Fuego, such as: the native/non-native dichotomy, the inevitable interdependence of humans, non-humans and matter, and the urgency of maturing aesthetic sensibility in the face of scientific discoveries. It will gather three main texts authored by Camila Marambio (initiator and curator), Carla Macchiavelo (art historian), Bárbara Saavedra (PHD in Ecology) and Laura Ogden (PHD in Anthropology), and visual or written contributions from a number of local inhabitants of the island.

Carla Maria Macchiavello is in charge of the publication.She is an art critic and contemporary art historian. She was born in Santiago de Chile and currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia. She received a PhD. and a Master’s degree in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University. Her work has revolved around contemporary art, performance, video art, and conceptual practices, and has been published in journals in Latin America and the United States of America. She has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York (Unlikely Savages, AC Institute, 2011) and Santiago, Chile (Operación Deisy, Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura, 2007). She taught History of Art at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.

The publication: ENSAYOS fueguinos


Kadist Art Foundation encourages the contribution of the arts to society, conducting programs primarily with artists represented in its collection to promote their role as cultural agents. Kadist’s collections and productions reflect the global scope of contemporary art, and its programs develop collaborations between Kadist’s local contexts (Paris, San Francisco) and artists, curators and art institutions worldwide.

Upcoming Program:

Meiro Koizumi, October -December, 2014Working in video and performance, Meiro Koizumi (Japanese, b. 1976) has built a compelling body of work that deals with power dynamics on scales from the familial to the national, and examines questions of political and psychological control.

CONTACT:Léna [email protected] +33 (0)1 42 51 83 49

Kadist Art Foundation

kadist art foundation paris press release€¦ · maria luisa murillo (artist), laura ogden...

Documents