Volando Hacia la Tierra (Flying Down to Earth). Winning project of the MARCO/FRAC Lorraine Award for Young Curators

Volando Hacia la Tierra (Flying Down to Earth) became the winning project of the most recent award for young curators, jointly organized in 2009 by the MARCO in Vigo, Spain, and the FRAC Lorraine in Metz, France. The winner will develop an exhibition project that will be shown in both institutions. This is not the first time that MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, and the FRAC Lorraine have collaborated in the production and promotion of a contemporary art project that expands beyond their respective national territories. On this occasion, these institutions' shared interests in supporting new generations of professionals became the inspiration for the third edition of this award for young curators. The winning project is a proposal by Colombian Inti Guerrero (Bogotá, 1983), an independent art critic and curator living in Amsterdam. From Vigo, the exhibition will travel to the FRAC Lorraine, where it will remain on display from September, 2010 to January 2, 2011. Volando Hacia la Tierra includes works by artists who approach the processes and forms of religiosity surrounding politics, the collective memory, and popular culture. The exhibition proposes a dialogue among parts that share an iconoclasm action and describe the way in which religious beliefs expand into the social hierarchies, idiosyncrasies, and imaginaries of people. Both the exhibition project and the mounting of the works in the exhibition rooms are articulated around three central concepts: the relationships among religion, rituals, and territory; the ways in which religion influences individuals and their social behavior, and a third section that deals with acts of iconophilia and iconoclasm. The exhibition begins with aerial photographs of sacred places from around the world taken by Marilyn Bridges during the Seventies. Bridges contemplates forms and structures created by mankind that evoke celestial archetypes, such as the Nazca Lines. Her photographs would appear to reclaim the relevance of a sacred past, but at the same time, they disrupt the basis of communication with the beyond, in that the images are actually photographs taken ¿from beyond.¿ This idea of operating from belief systems ¿ while also attempting to deconstruct them ¿ is what is shared by the works on exhibit by these various artists. The artworks connect beliefs and religiosity with politics, the collective memory, and idiosyncrasy as it pertains to each artist's context. Some of the artists point to the political and symbolic meanings of the physical territory ¿ to actual geographic demarcations ¿ where they created their works, whether actions, performances, videos, or films. An example of this is the work entitled Sarita (1980), an astonishing intervention carried out by the neo-vanguardist Peruvian collective E.P.S. Huayco in the desert on the outskirts of Lima. There the collective created a huge portrait of the Saint Sarita Colonia, a patron of Peru's poor who is yet to be beatified by the Vatican. Another example is the performance entitled V¿c¿re¿ti (2006) by the artist duo of Mona V¿t¿manu and Florin Tudor and created in a vacant lot ¿ the site of an Eighteenth-Century monastery that was demolished in 1985 by the Communist government ¿ in Bucharest. This work conveyed the complex negotiations that exist between identity and the collective memory. Likewise, the short film entitled Step by Step (1977) by Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed interconnects the ideological battles that exist in the rural parts of his country, where the merging of religion, poverty, and a military state generates subjectivities of soldier-citizens rooted in an Islamic tradition.