Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The relationship between an artisan Guaraní-Nhandéva and a visual artist from Sao Paulo, in the Indigenous Reserve of Dourados, spontaneously gave rise to co-authored artistic-cultural projects. In order to reflect on the link that formed an interface, able to interact with both worldviews, an effort is made to apprehend what’s «cultural inherence» to Guaraní view. This exercise leads to assign «socio-political resistance» as a conductive element, perceived just as a symptom of an imposed historical conjunction. Even so, «discursive content» appears as a property more essential to Guaraní culture than «style» or «support», which allows identifying that the «backyard farm» theme is useful to represent Amerindians Kaiowá and Guaraní cultures in a non-stereotyped way in art projects.

During the development of the Palma Palmilla project, I was not aware of the human dimension, also anthropological, that it involved. But today, as I write these lines, I realize its full potential. Documentary photography moves and evolves towards a place that seems fundamental to me in order to continue exploring who we are and where we are going, a space where we know ourselves, as individuals, as a collective, as a species. This project started from an honest desire to discover, preserve and divulge the reality of Palma Palmilla, a territory that had been forgotten by everyone since its beginnings and that deserved to turn on the light that had been off for so long. We are nobody without our history, and this visual essay The neighborhood, the wound and the oblivion that we will be, speaks of that: of how we built the world in which we live, of the neighborhood as a habitat that is also home, of a lifestyle, in danger of extinction. A space-time that one day will serve to speak of the forgetfulness that we will be.

What collaborative artistic practices seek to place on the table is the importance of restoring the links between art and life, as an attempt to build the world regardless of economic and marketing issues. Understanding art as something far removed from individualistic postulates, oblivious to issues such as authorship or originality, an attempt has been made for the "Dialogues" section of UMATICA to show part of this production network with a horizontal and transversal sense, through three initiatives or projects fully anchored in the maxim "Public space and social fabric: collaborative art in times of crisis", the title that gives rise to this issue of the magazine.

The compilation of these three interviews are the result of a brief research stay developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2018, when I had the opportunity to meet three excellent artists who feed my passion for photography: Richard Misrach, Peter Goin and Jack Fulton. Those encounters motivated my desire to know more about their ways of seeing our altered world. Committed to creation and the environment, their photographs are powerful and mysterious. Our conversations were the starting point for these interviews, in which the authenticity and naturalness of their words are truly exemplary. Thanks to them I learned the importance of believing in what you do and taking advantage of every moment.

‘Sons of Relax’ aims to analyze how tourist activity has profoundly marked the Costa del Sol: its territory, its socioeconomic structures and also the identity of its inhabitants -as is my case-. This project presents the first part of the project: a catalog -a subjective archive- composed of architectural details of some of the most emblematic buildings of the so-called “Estilo del Relax” (term coined by Diego Santos). The proposal is based on an emulation of the trip that Diego Santos, Carlos Canal and Juan Antonio Ramírez made on the N-340 in 1986. This trip result in the book “Estilo del Relax”, book that was expanded in 2010 with “El relax expandido”, in which collaborated Pedro Marín Cots, Iñaki Perez de la Fuente and Maite Méndez Baiguez. Both trips in turn mimic the trip that Venturi, Brown and Izenour made on the Las Vegas Strip in 1968, from which “Learning from Vegas” emerged. In conclusion, the project uses the trip as a tool to learn -to analyze and criticize- that deep change in the territory and identity of the Costa del Sol, to understand the territory in which I have grown up and that has moulded the identity of its inhabitants.

This article debates some of the main categories of Complexity and Self-organization Theories analyzing them from the point of view of contemporary Aesthetics and Art Theory. Thus we shall discuss specifically three of the these categories, namely the autocatalytical processes of diffusion and reaction, the distinction between homeosthasis and homeorhesis and finally the dynamics of repulsion, atraction and repulsion in ferrofluid systems.

Bajo el título “Espacio público y tejido social: arte colaborativo en tiempos de crisis”, el equipo editorial de “Umática, Revista sobre creación y análisis de la imagen” y el proyecto de Investigación “El barrio como escenario de pedagogías críticas y arte colaborativo”(PGC2018-094351-B-C42), del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, presentan un conjunto de aportaciones críticas que revisan las claves teóricas, metodológicas y prácticas asociadas al empuje que desde el impacto de la crisis de 2008 han recibido aquellas políticas participativas o colaborativas en la gestión y en la creación artística vinculadas al barrio como contexto específico. La aportación de la portada del número por parte de Rogelio López-Cuenca supone, más allá del honor con el que los responsables de esta edición la reciben, toda una declaración de intenciones sobre el horizonte al que aspiran las revisiones mencionadas. La imagen se corresponde con la instalación Mapa de Valencia (2015) [1]. Una instalación que documenta el trabajo del colectivo implicado en el taller No/W/Here, coordinado por López-Cuenca y con la colaboración del IVAM y de la UPV[2], y que da cuenta de un cambio de paradigma en el que el impacto de la intervención artística se vislumbra en aquellos lugares que nuestro entorno capitalizado deja al descubierto…

Call For Papers Umática [nº4]