IBA 6th General Assembly: Statement from Enrique Rivera

Dear colleagues of the association,

I very much regret the delay in writing these lines which was caused by a series of factors, such as the expected situation in Chile, and by the activities of the biennial, which have not stopped, quite the contrary, have taken on a meaning which I hope can resonate in you thanks to the development of our 6th General Assembly. The delay in these lines was mainly due to the fact that internally, in my own internal debate, I was trying to honestly balance my position in the face of this situation of political, economic but mainly cultural crisis.

The street has become a great canvas with the demands of a community that resisted for 30 years the Constitution made during the dictatorship. The struggle of my country today is centered on changing it, and our biennial was aligned through two great pillars to this process of transformation; the understanding of an indissoluble relationship between humans and ecosystems, in a large integrated body that inhabits the earth, where plants, minerals, animals and every living organism, has the right to be recognized in legal structures, and to be respected from a non-extractive logic. The other great pillar on which our curatorship is based is the abstract right of art and science to exercise a non-commercial function, even though its results may be part of a cultural economy.

It is clear to me that these two factors have been structural for many movements, and they come from a long time ago. Our specific contribution is in the situated application of strategies that involve in this case, more than 20 museums in Santiago, with exhibitions, ephemeral programs and educational strategies applied to deepen and put into practice a tactical strategy where these concepts, known and practiced by the artistic community, can be incorporated in the practices of the community in general. This, as a determining factor, with the advent of socio and bio technologies, such as internet, chemical industry and artificial intelligence, which have on the verge of obsolescence what we understand by democracy.

This instrument of precision, our curatorship, was named “The 4th World”. Inspired by the sculpture of Carlos Ortuzar, installed on the front of the building built in the government of Allende, in 1972, to house the United Nations Convention for Trade and Development “Unctad III”. The sculpture disappeared after the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, but we managed to rebuild it and install it in the same place in August 2019. The reconstruction is a symbol of the recovery of the need to explore and apply other ways of development determined by the first world, capitalist, second world, communist, third world, underdeveloped, and to find in the notion of fourth world, a way of understanding our relationship with the earth far from anthropocentrism.

We conceive the biennial as an instrument of conceptual and practical precision, where our 6th General Assembly is fundamental at various levels. On one hand, it allows us to have the honour of hosting this meeting for the first time in Latin America, inaugurating what we hope will be the constitution of a balance between the already existing force between the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere in the biennial system. On the other hand, the proposed theme, based on the non-epatant relationship between art and nature, situates us as biennials from a role in which to take a position, becoming an opportunity to face the socio-climatic crisis from a global perspective.

A third factor is the possibility of establishing, in a context of transformation, a position that strengthens our ties as an association, by participating in a process where the role of biennials is determined not only as a system of exhibition, but also of putting into practice what we often announce in our curatorial texts, but which, when manifested in the body of exhibitions, remains only in the act of contemplation.

The invitation is then to meet in Santiago de Chile, in a city that has opened its portals to transform itself, and where the knowledge of each one of you can become a determining factor to help to understand, through our encounter, that art and culture are fundamental in the constitution of a country.

I invite you to overcome any doubts you may have. This is the right moment to install the importance of culture and art in this new process, through a series of activities that seek to strengthen us as an association, establish practical positions on issues that will positively transform our practices, and to explore artists’ workshops, collections, institutional and alternative spaces of Santiago’s cultural scene.

Thanks for your attention and greetings,

Enrique