In her work, Venezuelan artist Ana Alenso examines the global dependency on "black gold" and the tensions that it generates. C&AL talked to Alenso about her disquieting “Petrocultural Imaginary”.
1.000.000% de Ana Alenso o la inflación perpetua
Publicado por traficovisual el 03/12/2018
The Nominees
More information at:
green and yellow
boom and bust
Friday, July 20, 19:00-21:00
Ana Alenso builds an allegorical cosmos showcasing the economic, social and ecological risks and disequilibria implicit in natural-resource extractive industries, with a particular focus on those pertaining to hydrocarbons. During the cultivation phase of TIER.space, she will create a sculptural intervention that combines plants, water and industrial elements. Objects such as an oil barrel and glass water bottles—familiar shell-like traces of destructive global consumerist traffic—are brought in conversation with living plants. Light, heat, growth, moisture, will transform the sculpture over the course of the following months.
The opening of this project will be accompanied by an installation of works: La enfermedad holandesa tropical and The future of oil, both of which are related to the speculative and metaphorical contents found within certain political economy phenomena, most specifically those associated with boom-and-bust cycles, the Dutch disease and the resource curse. Such phenomena occur predominantly in natural-resource-rich nations where corruption and violence become commonplace, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to rise to power. An example of this paradox manifests itself within the artist’s native country, Venezuela, which has the world’s second largest oil reserve, and yet is submerged in one of the worst humanitarian and economic crises of recent history.
The current moment is marked not by an ecological crisis, as a temporary state of emergency, but by an irreversible mutation of the global climate and planetary habitability of Earth. It is a process driven by environmental pollution, ocean acidification, resource extraction, the burning of fossil fuels, agrochemical industries, and warfare, to list but a few of the anthropogenic, human factors. The term Anthropocene is commonly used to describe this very condition, giving name to a new geological epoch, defined by the significant human impact on Earth's biospheric stability.
But this term is not undisputed. It places humanity as a major geological agent, rendering invisible the structural responsibility of neoliberal financial elites and corporations. The Capitalocene –the age of capital– in contrast, draws attention to global financial systems, highlighting the climatic impact of the capitalist political economy. Being aware of the biophysical costs of capitalism and its unequal distribution of human and ecological expenses, the current debate concerning how to think about humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity is a core theme of this exhibition.
Human and non-human actors are entangled in complex and tentacular networks, a myriad of ongoing connections extending across biotic and abiotic processes. The Chthulucene is the age of multi-species interactions and generative collaborations in a damaged world. Chthonic or earthly entities entwine with speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact and speculative feminism to think of possible worlds and times in unexpected company. It is a rich terrain of muddled alignments that compose more livable stories beyond catastrophist and determinist discourses.
In an attempt to reject essentialist propositions and engage with postcolonial ecological thought, Capital, Chthulu, and a Much Hotter Compost Pile shows artistic positions that consider alternative ontological politics, reflect on environmental questions and speculate on possible narrations for our precarious times. These are stories of life (and non-life) told from the other side, to rethink how humans can fit, co-belong, co-produce, co-weave and com-post within this web of life.
Today in Paris participating in the exhibition and seminar CARACAS RESET at La Colonie organized by Rolando J. Carmona and hosted by #KaderAttia / Showing my video Tropical Curse, 2015 http://www.lacolonie.paris/agenda/caracas-reset
Photo: La Chatarra, Juan Loyola, 1980
Tropical curse, 2015 @anaalenso
video screening for the public space
‘The One Who Teeters on The Brink Of Disaster’
curated by Eli Cortiñas, a Spanish video artist based in Berlin
In Homi K. Bhabha’s famous essay “The Commitment to Theory” culture emerges as a problem at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the articulation of everyday’s life, between classes, genders, races, nations. The intervention of the Third Space of Enunciation as he describes it, destroys the mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open and expanding code. It is exactly in this space that video artist Eli Cortiñas situates the group of international artists presented in this program. An urgent search of extravagant and exuberant mysteries, an autonomous staging of possible violent scenarios, tropical economic values, stripteases of one’s own soul, lost of commodities and the fall of ideal projects of long gone futures go hand in hand to establish an unknown space, a new order between signifier and signified.
selected films:
Stine Marie Jacobsen Do you have time to kill me today?, 2007-2009, 2:50 min
Ana Alenso Tropical Curse, 2015, 3:33 min
Elodie Pong Je suis un bombe, 2006, 6:28 min
Glenda León Inversión, 2011, 3 min
Chrischa Venus Oswald Mother Tongue, 2013, 4 min
Agnieszka Polska Ask the Siren, 2017, 10:25 min
Pauline Curnier Jardin Grotta Profunda (the moody chasm), 2011, 30 min
pozo muerto by Carlos Rebolledo
how does the world breathe now?
FILM SERIES
Session N°34: Oil Files presented by Ana Alenso
September 6, 2017 | 7 PM
SAVVY Contemporary | Plantagenstraße 31 | 13347 Berlin
For our 34th screening Ana Alenso presents Oil Files, a compilation of 7 video-art works of Venezuelan artists from 1968 to 2016. The selection focuses on the relationship between oil production and Venezuelan culture, especially as it relates to structural problems of social inequality and corruption, seeking to give the audience insight into Venezuela’s contemporary history and its current deep-scale crisis.
Part I
Pozo Muerto (1968) by Carlos Rebolledo.
Part II
BLACK GOLD FIRE (2015) by Rolando Peña.
Tropical curse (2015) by Ana Alenso.
Prototipo de vivienda en país petrolero (2004) by Alexander Apóstol
Panorama Miraflores (2014) by Iván Candeo.
The dogs keep barking (2016) by Erika Ordosgoitti.
Reconversión (2008) by Marco Montiel-Soto.
The event will conclude with an open discussion with the Venezuelan artists Ana Alenso and Marco Montiel-Soto, the Doctor in Latin American Studies Manuel Silva Ferrer, and writer Alberto Morreo.
First, we will show the short film Pozo Muerto (1968, 30’ min. long), directed by Carlos Rebolledo, and produced in collaboration with the Venezuelan avant-garde literary and artistic group El Techo de La Ballena. This raw narrative, or “crude history”, of three residents of a town transformed by the discovery of an oil well in 1922 is set amidst black and white landscapes. It presents the drama of a population abandoned in the ruins of a recent past, a period once described as a bonanza, when foreign oil companies promised prosperous economic futures.
The second part (40 min. long) brings together the work of six contemporary artists. The video Black Gold Fire (2015) by Rolando Peña, otherwise well known as The Black Prince, zooms out a focus on Venezuela and recognizes Oil in its most universal sense, as an object of scientific inquiry and a symbol of wealth and power. Ana Alenso’s Tropical Curse (2015) presents a collage of found and archive images, where social and political economical phenomena juxtapose the brutal fact that the world’s largest oil reserves exist alongside the highest rates of murder and poverty.
Prototipo de vivienda en país petrolero (2004), by Alexander Apóstol, follows. A plaza in the city center has a monument dedicated in 1975 to Oil, the year of the nationalization of Venezuelan oil. By the year 2004 it had become a shelter for the homeless, where peasants and beggars build their “rancho”, shelters under the rocker of the oil’s monument. Oil and slums, gather here to be represented under the same monument.
The political repression and persecution to diverse sectors who oppose the government has been brutal, with over more than 600 political prisoners and more than 120 people killed in these last four months during protests. The abuse of force has been documented and has gained international visibility surpassing different media state control and censorship.
In the current social and political crisis, the video Panorama de Miraflores (2014) by Iván Candeo commands us to observe vigilantly the building belonging to the Presidential Guard of the Miraflores Palace, where a certain ‘tense calm’ reigns mixed with state paranoia, and a general uncertainty typical of the events surrounding a state coup.
Venezuela has recently registered the highest record of inflation of not only its own economic history but of the entire region. Marco Montiel Soto’s Reconversion (2008) and Erika Ordoisgoitti’s The dogs keep barking (2016) confront us with the financial terrain of the crisis, approaching money directly. Each artist manipulates the material trappings of value, interrogating the increase of inflation, the symbolic violence inherent to it, and its impact on the collective body.
LINK: http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/projects/filmseriespast/
Money Laundering
Albano Afonso, Ana Alenso, Lehman Brothers,
Alejandro Gómez Arias, Kristian Touborg,
and Andrés Vial
Curated by Rodolfo Andaur
16 June - 8 July, 2017
Gothersgade 167, st.th. Wednesday-Friday 11-18, Saturday 13-17
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Im Bereich Bildende Kunst werden im Jahr 2017 Recherchestipendien à 8.000 € an 52 in Berlin lebende und arbeitende bildende Künstler*innen und Künstler*innengruppen sowie an acht Kurator*innen und Kurator*innengruppen vergeben. Die Stipendien sind für die künstlerische bzw. kuratorische Weiterentwicklung im Bereich der bildenden Kunst bestimmt.
Der Jury für das Recherchestipendium Bildende Kunst gehörten in diesem Jahr an:
Stéphane Bauer, Boris Buden, Elodie Evers, Adrienne Goehler und Nanna Heidenreich.
Insgesamt wurden 575 Anträge gestellt, von denen die Jury folgende 52 Stipendiat*innen aus dem künstlerischen Bereich ausgewählt hat:
Al-Badri Nelles GbR, Ana Alenso, Ulf Aminde, Patrizia Bach, Mareike Bernien, Ana Bilankov, Tina Born, Thomas Bratzke, Nele Brönner, Andreas Bunte, Alyssa DeLuccia, Ruben Dhers, SuperFuture, Katja Eydel, Larissa Fassler, Azin Feizabadi, Constanze Fischbeck, Moritz Frei, Simone Gilges, Lisa Glauer, Lola Göller, Sarah Harrison, Naomi Hennig, Klara Hobza, Annette Hollywood, Birgit Hölmer, Kerstin Honeit, Imri Kahn, Joachim Lengerer, Angelika Levi, Bernd Lützeler, Wouter Osterholt, Andrea Pichl, VIP (Künstlerinnenkollektiv), Merchan Pol, Marcio Emanuel Rodrigues Carvalho, Andreas Rost, Susanne Sachsse, Katya Sander, Romana Schmalisch, Maximilian Schmoetzer, Henrik Schrat, Maya Schweizer, Miloš Trakilović, Sencer Vardarman, Ivar Veermäe, Rui Vilela, Julien Villaret, Michael John Whelan, Gernot Wieland, Ina Wudtke, Miriam Yammad.
Von den 575 Anträgen wurden folgende acht Stipendiat*innen aus dem kuratorischen Bereich ausgewählt:
Pauline Doutreluingne, Katia Hermann, Bettina Elisabeth Knaup, Jürgen Köhler, Tina Sauerländer, Mavra Berlin, Anna Voswinckel, Florian Wüst.
Kulturstaatssekretär Dr. Torsten Wöhlert dankt der Jury ganz herzlich für die Unterstützung und wünscht den Geförderten viel Erfolg in ihrer künstlerischen bzw. kuratorischen Arbeit.
http://www.berlin.de/sen/kulteu/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2017/pressemitteilung.608689.php
REVIEWS AND TEXT ARCHIVE
Exhibition review Ana Alenso: Tropical curse by Kenneth Heyes CMAGAZIN, CANADA
ARTE EMERGENTE EN VENEZUELA 2000/2012 by Felix Suazo, VE, 2015
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Solo project en Swab, Entrevista por Carolina Ariza. 2014
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"Trafico Visual" sobre Jovenes Con FIA, 2014
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" El Nacional" sobre el Premio Eugenio Mendoza 2013
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" El Universal" sobre el Premio Eugenio Mendoza 2013
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" El Nacional" por Lorena González 2012
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"Trafico Visual" , Conversa con Ana Alenso, Esto no es una clinica = Esto es un cuarto de
" El Nacional" por Carmen Victoria Mendéz. Ana Alenso hace poesía con las cosas que giran. 2012
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