1. Art and Diseño

Transhumance III
In contemporary culture and art
Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cáceres
Palacio de Toledo-Moctezuma
24 - 26 October 2014
The Deconstruction of the Landscape
FOROSUR_DEBATE and Gabinete foto
Friday 24 - Sunday 26 October 2014
WORKSHOPS
Wednesday 22 - Sunday 26 October 2014
EXHIBITIONS
Friday 24 October - Saturday 22 November 2014
PROGRAMME
forosur_debate
Conversations on: Contemporary photography and heritage. In search of
tomorrow’s artistic heritage
Centro Cultural San Jorge. Filmoteca de Extremadura. 25 - 26 October
forosur_exhibitions
GAIA, exhibition by guest artist Pierre Gonnord
Palacio Hernando de Ovando. 24 October - 2 November
Curated by Carmen F. Ortiz
Landscape as Contemporary Narration. Alcobendas Collection
Sala de Arte El Brocense. 24 October - 22 November
Curated by José María Díaz-Maroto
The Deconstruction of the Landscape
Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cáceres, Palacio de Toledo-Moctezuma. 24 - 26
October
Curated by Manuel Rocha Iturbide
forosur_workshops
The Photographic Personal Project. Thinking, developing and advancing the
photographic work of art in today’s world
Meanings of the Image. Analysing various approaches to reading the image,
starting out from the aesthetic experience, audiovisual literacy, the narrative,
cultures, politics, the body and biography
Escuela de Bellas Artes “Eulogio Blasco”, Diputación de Cáceres. 22 - 26
October.
Open Studio Cáceres.
Guided visit to artist studios:
Ana H. del Amo; Andrés Talavero; Sebastián; Matilde Granado Belvis; César
David; Hilario Bravo Maldonado; Roberto Massó.
24 - 25 October.
Gabinete foto
A selection of 12 projects dedicated to modern and contemporary photography
represented by renowned galleries and publishers in our art market
Centro Cultural San Jorge. School of Performing Arts of Extremadura.
24 - 26 October.
1. Centro Cultural San Jorge. Plaza San Jorge, 8
2. Sala de Arte El Brocense. Calle San Antón, 17
3. Palacio Hernando de Ovando. Plaza de Santa María
4. Fundación Mercedes Calles y Carlos Ballestero. Plaza San Jorge, 2
5. Centro de Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear. Pizarro, 8
6. Escuela de Bellas Artes “Eulogio Blasco”. Calle Ancha, 1
7. Museo de Cáceres. Plaza de las Veletas, 1
8. Filmoteca de Extremadura. Calle Rincón de la monja, 6
9. Palacio de Toledo-Moctezuma. Plaza Conde de Canilleros, 1
Off the map:
– Museo Vostell Malpartida. Malpartida de Cáceres
– MEIAC. Badajoz
www.forosurcaceres.es
The Deconstruction of the Landscape
This exhibition brings together the work of nine Mexican artists coming from two
different generations that are nonetheless not so far apart in concepts or styles.
The oldest of them was born in 1961 and the youngest in 1979. The exhibition
focuses on landscape, but understood in an expanded field, like Rosalind
Krauss applied to sculpture at the end of the 1970s.
Landscape art underwent a boom in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth
century. Dr. Atl was one of the few painters who managed to transcend the
hitherto realist quality of representation, as landscape began to open up in new
directions. Later in photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo was the first to break
away from the paradigms of photographic conventions.1 At the end of the
1920s, Álvarez Bravo captured with his lens not just scenes from the daily life of
the city or the countryside (which could be read as landscapes), but also
everyday objects that would soon be invested with new forms with the advent of
modernism and abstraction.2
In The Deconstruction of the Landscape, the term landscape opens up and
unfolds in many different directions. It is no longer addressed as representation
or as a referential form of communication, but rather as a container full of
polysemous meanings. The exhibition examines issues such as: 1. Landscape
as abstraction at the juncture where it meets painting (L. Toledo and A.
Dorsfman). 2. Found landscape, sometimes recalling the essential fact of
photography, the decisive moment (P. Silve), but also the encounter with the
Duchampian readymade yet without needing to retouch it or take it out of its
context (Rocha Iturbide and M. Alejo), and also the quest for and subsequent
discovery of geographies that had never been seen before (P. López Luz). 3.
Altered landscape, be it through invoking Land Art (A. de Stefano), be it by
artificial lighting an apparently inoffensive object within a nocturnal landscape
(O. Ruiz), or as a result of an action and transformation of mundane domestic
items that are then reinserted into their original context (M. Alejo), or finally,
through the insertion of odd fictional characters—taken from the cosmopolitan
metropolis—within different landscapes or in bizarre situations (D. Edburg).
All the artists understand landscape as an encounter, whether real or induced.
They build and transform it, and they unfold it in new conceptual planes to
produce different (poetic, politic3 and visual) narratives.
The Deconstruction of the Landscape is an exhibition of work by contemporary
Mexican mid-career artists. Representing new generations, these artists
continue the legacy of cornerstones4 in the history of photography in Mexico,
exploring unbeaten paths that are nevertheless destined to meet up again.
Manuel Rocha Iturbide
Curator
1. Hugo Brehme was one of the landscape photographers that A. Bravo
admired at the beginning of his career as a photographer.
2. Like what happened with his famous photo of a rolled-up mattress in 1927.
3. In the case of Oswaldo Ruiz, his anti-monument series is based on
inoffensive objects he found in public spaces in Santiago de Chile. The light
shining in the night has a historical-political load: the imagery created by the
military coup and its continuous curfews.
4. For instance, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and Gabriel Orozco.
artists
Oswaldo Ruiz Monterrey Mexico (1977)
With his Anti-monumentos, Oswaldo Ruiz creates various mise-en-scènes in a
variety of public spaces in Santiago de Chile, a city where lighting devices have
a historical-political load because of the imagery put in place by the military
coup and its continuous curfews. When elevated to the condition of monuments,
apparently insignificant objects acquire a paradoxical quality.
Laureana Toledo Mexico City (1970)
In her series Naive Melody, inspired by Talking Heads’ song This Must Be the
Place, Laureana Toledo captures the variations of space created between the
buildings of the Barbican Centre in London. The artist expanded the contact
sheets and accentuated the “empty” spaces, the non-places, then painting them
in red acrylic paint to emphasise the silences. For Toledo, this project is like
humming the same tune over and over again.
Mauricio Alejo Mexico City (1969)
These four photographs contain domestic objects whose meaning shifts when
they are altered, or when their place in the home is changed, or perhaps simply
as a result of the title of the work. For instance, in Leaning several objects are at
rest while being recharged in one of the walls, whereas in Fluid, a sheet on a
mattress represents water in movement. In this way, Alejo plays with metaphor,
humanising objects and turning them into the sole focus of his work.
Pablo López Luz Mexico City (1979)
In his work, Pablo López Luz views landscape as a social simulacrum, seeking
out and questioning its political, aesthetic and historical implications. In this
case, he addresses urban landscapes of Mexico City with its constantly
changing physical, social and demographic conditions, representing the
profound geographies defining the complexity and contrasts of Mexican society.
Manuel Rocha Iturbide Mexico City (1963)
In Rocha Iturbide’s Composiciones I series we see a number of urban objects
engaged in dialogue through their geometric arrangements. With the title of the
series the artist makes a synaesthesic allusion to music to emphasise the
connection between the parts, as if underscoring the counterpoints where the
different voices interact.
Patrick Silve Mexico City (1962)
In Patrick Silve’s three photos the artist engages in a relationship with three
different settings in China, highlighting the contrast between the smallness of
human beings and the monumental. Here, the photographer redefines himself
before the architectural, questioning its belonging to the artificialness of the
urban space, which is nothing but a new type of landscape struggling to replace
nature.
Daniela Edburg Houston, Texas (1975)
Daniela Edburg’s images confront the urban individual with nature. In two of her
photographs, two women seem to have knitted objects they come from the
depths of their psyche, while a third one seems to be awaiting something, but
something that has already happened. These scenes inevitably conjure up
surrealist spaces in which the laws of time no longer rule.
Alfredo de Stefano Monclova Coahuila, Mexico (1961)
Alfredo de Stefano ascribes to the tradition of the Land Art movement that
emerged in the US in the late 1960s. De Stefano invariably engages with desert
landscapes as the conceptual framework for a type of intervention that takes
him a step further from modernist photography, inserting it in Minimal painterly
abstraction and at once in Conceptual Art.
Alex Dorsfman Mexico City (1977)
In 3 pausas rumbo a Nikko, Dorsfman explores the micro-universes of four
found landscapes, where ambiguity opens his discourse to abstraction as well
as to the field of the poetic and the uncanny, thus unleashing the beholder’s
imagination. This series may also be ascribed to the realm of the painterly, but
undertaken from the discovery and appropriation which can only be reached
through photographic experience.
DEPT. OF EDUCATION & CULTURE
Trinidad Nogales
Head of Dept. of Education & Culture
Pilar Merino
Director-General of Cultural Heritage
PROJECT & MANAGEMENT FOROSUR_CÁCERES_14
Rosina Gómez-Baeza
Curator
Lucía Ybarra
General Coordinator
ygbart Art Advising and Management (www.ygbart.com)
Director of Gabinete foto
Chema de Francisco
COLLABORATORS
Coordination:
Directorate-General of Cultural Heritage
Visual Arts Officers:
Ana Jiménez
Fernando Pérez
FOROSUR_CÁCERES_14 is an initiative of the Government of
Autonomous Community of Extremadura
the