This text was published in the ArtNexus blog aiming to make discussion of its content possible
will begin this critical overview of the Encuentro Internacional de Medellín (MDE11): Teaching and Learning: Places of Knowledge in Art, with a reference to the late Colombian artist Adolfo Bernal and the title of his last public-art work, Caballos de Hierro, No lugar, a lugar (2007), coincidentally presented at the precursor event, MDE07.
And I evoke him from the perspective of nostalgia and of pertinence: the nostalgic feeling of not having with us his lucid presence, and the pertinence for Latin American art of an artist who was also teacher and guide, a beam of light for new generations who, disconcerted, search for his signals. It was, and not by chance, the whole of Bernal's oeuvre that motivated José Roca in 2005—invited by the Museo de Antioquia to launch a wide-scope event in the context of contemporary visual arts—to define thusly the governing concept for the Encuentro under the abbreviation of MDE, 1 which situates and refers Medellin on the international map as a place of arrival or origin.
Under the concept of hospitality in all of its senses, the 2007 Encuentro fulfilled its purpose. The long-duration, low-intensity event (it lasted 6 months), extended in time and space throughout the city with the Museo de Antioquia and the Casa del Encuentro as exhibition foci, brought Medellin back into the international art circuit and fostered important reflections around the conflicting urban realities, both local and global, that confront citizens in their modes of cohabitation with and acceptance of others.
Comparisons are always odious, as it is commonly said, but a balance of the Encuentro de Medellín MDE11 requires us to look back at the preceding event and to build with that data, through an austere analysis, a mapping of trajectories and detours. From that perspective, some questions arise.
The place or pertinence of pedagogies as the axis for an exhibition component? Should art be valued as an autonomous aesthetic experience, or must it be necessarily assisted by a didactic protocol that ensures its interpretation? What do the museum institution or local institutionalities seek by launching an event of artistic and civic education where the desire to achieve massive participation crowds out the pertinence of an effective appropriation? Was the curatorial team able to seduce the academic community, the focus of the reflection, into participating directly and substantively in the event? Was the challenge of establishing a direct, non-hierarchical, reciprocal dialogue between expert knowledge and neighborhood knowledge solved? Was the challenge of using art and education to "foster a critical awareness of their situation among the oppressed", as demanded by Paulo Freire in his understanding of responsible social transformation through art? These are some of the questions left in the air by the latest Encuentro Internacional de Medellín MDE11, and they propose a more attentive, deeper national reflection on the curatorial concept and the reach of the most important visual arts event in Colombia.
While art itself is thought, and as such it becomes knowledge, its essence resides on its being apprehended and instructed, serving as a mechanism for the understanding of the realities inhabited by the subject and his or her community. To teach and learn, in sum, implied not only a method of curatorial work, but also a civic-interest conceptual structure that explored the potential of an event like this, which convoked all academic and non-academic strata to add their perspective to such knowledge-building process.
But, to what degree and at what level—to make a simile with the cooking of a pot of soup—must this idea be boiled by the curators bef...