ARTEXPARTE

The Ministry of Culture and Education of the Municipality of Berazategui announces an international encounter of visual artists to intervene the "Roberto De Vicenzo" Cultural and Sports Centre. The purpose of the call is to revitalize the building, energize the public space, and reflect -from a contemporary art perspective- with regard to the cultural, social, and political environment. The idea behind the intervention is to create a collective work from individual spaces, a visual grid formed by forty equally sized and shaped panels arranged to allow for the creation of a weft over the building. This initiative aims at improving the urban landscape and the quality of life of the citizenry by reclaiming the public area as a social space for interaction, participation, and action and by building the set of features that bestow upon a city its identity by merging functionality with urban, civic, communicational, critical, spatial, and emotional values. The Ministry of Culture and Education of the Municipality of Berazategui will select 40 national and international visual artists to work in the city of Berazategui for a period of ten days on a collective project that elicits a socio-cultural exchange between the artists and the community. Each artist will work on a panel that will then be placed in a predetermined place of the building¿s façade. The panels are fibrocement sheets, a material that will enable each artist to create his/her work by gluing several kinds of materials (stone, glass beads, mirrors, plastic, ceramic, iron, nails, etc.) onto the sheets, and to resort to mixed techniques (collage, contemporary mosaic, and the traditional tessarae mosaic, trencadís, etc.). The proposal centers on the use of collage as a metaphor for a society built around the singularity of its parts to form a harmonized whole. To achieve this, the Ministry will summon the community and will set a place in each cultural center of the party for the citizens to bring small materials such as ceramic, glass, or any other small and meaningful elements that can be interpreted and included in the artists¿ work. Taking into account that Berazategui is the national glass capital, the works may apply glass in conjunction with other materials.