Policy file: comparative analysis of the ICAA and Networrkprogramas Southern Conceptualisms

Abstract

The "archive" is one of the main issues of contemporary art today, both as a practice of many artists, as in the development of initiatives, directed from either public or private institutions, that tend to generate archive policies that preserve and give visibility to the practices they deal with.

In the case of the Latin American practices, there is a significant development of programs willing to search for, originate and promote art archives. This paper aims to establish a comparative analysis of the archive policies carried out by two of those programs which have different positions regarding reactivation strategies of artistic practices, from which they draw a map of Latin American art practices through strategies of inclusion and exclusion, while outlining several different artistic and political ideas about Latin American art.

One of these programs, launched in 2001, is the Documents of 20th- century Latin American and Latino Art Project. A digital archive and Publications project, directed by Mari Carmen Ramirez and promoted by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The objective of this program is to transform the appreciation and understanding of Latin American visual arts in the US and the rest of the world. For this, the ICAA has developed a series of exhibitions and publications, and built a digital archive which offers free access to thousands of documents of Latin American artistic practices of the 20th century.

Another program is promoted since 2007 by the Red Conceptualismos del Sur. The network is an international working platform, composed of Latin American and European researchers, which is a response to "the need to intervene politically in the process of neutralizing the critical potential of a set of 'conceptual practices' that took place in Latin America from the 60s" (Red Conceptualismos del Sur, 2009). To this end and willing to generate instances of public visibility and conservation of these valuable documentary collections, Conceptualismos del Sur -in collaboration with various institutions-developed several archive initiatives: "Cartografías", "Archivos en Uso", curatorial experiments, etc.

The present work is part of the partial advances obtained in the framework of the research entitled "Politics / poetics of the critical art archives of Latin America. Strategies for the reactivation and construction of artistic-political stories about Latin American art archives. Study of three current cases. " It is developed under the direction of Fernando Davis and co-director of Florencia Suárez Guerrini within the framework of the Master's Degree in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts (FBA, UNLP), and is a beneficiary of the Type A Scholarship, granted by the UNLP.