Fundación Telefónica

Between the months of March and May, the Fundación Telefónica Space in Buenos Aires programmed the fifth edition of the MAMbA/Fundación Telefónica Award for Art and New Technologies.  It attracted 5,069 visitors.  Since its first edition in 2002, this award has been promoting avant-garde art works based on new means of communication, as well as encouraging experimental projects and recognizing electronic art produced in Argentina.  The 14 winning pieces contained in the collection are from the call for entries in 2006.  The Senior Award for New Technologies was given to Grupo Proyecto Biopus for its piece, “Sobre la Falta” (Regarding Scarcity), an interactive robotic installation. >

A brand new project by artist Mariano Sardón was exhibited at the Fundación Telefónica Space in Buenos Aires from September through December. The exhibit consisted of four artistic proposals: Peristalsis, Typewriters, Video Installation and Visualizing Data. In total, 6,944 visitors witnessed the personal performance, which for the artist occurs every time someone picks up the phone to make a call. Drawing from this premise, the project took three years of research and support from Argentina’s General Telephone Network Center. In the quest to make the invisible visible, Sardón used tinted liquids pumped through 3,000 meters of plastic pipes; videos recording modifications in the tangled cables around a telephone exchange panel; and projections of data transformation processes, among other things.

In the months of March and April of 2008 Fundación Telefónica’s Center in Lima presented the exhibit A/V: Automatic-Versatile, the third installment of BLIP! Recyling Robot, a project mixing the use of electronic devices and recycled computer operations in order to cerate new artistic pieces. The exhibit housed 26 experimental installations from young Peruvian artists who used digital technology and electronic junk in urban performance art based on self-contained technological units. Some 3,070 visitors came to see what became the first large scale avant-garde collection of electronic art micro-projects in Lima. The public was able to interact with the art works; through observation, analysis and reflection they discovered the artistic possibilities robotics can offer.

This exhibit, which contained 30 works of contemporary Peruvian art created from the mid-nineties onward, was held at the Fundación Telefónica Center in Lima in May and August 2008. Conceived as a space for experimenting, the collection presented the aesthetic experience as an event that occurs in each and every one of the viewing public. Can contemporary artistic production be defined? How do we approach the varied field of shapes and meanings that the most recent creations offer us? What, indeed, are the criteria we should use to understand these works? These are some of the questions posed by the exhibit. By way of conclusions, the exhibit claimed that each art piece offers endless opportunities to access the most complex and conflictive knots of everyday reality. The exhibit, which was organized by young researchers Sharon Lerner and Miquel Lopez, accumulated 14,213 visitors upon closing.

The Argentinean photographer Horacio Coppola opened the exhibiting season in April at the Fundación Telefónica Exhibit Halls in Madrid. This collection is the largest retrospective on the centenarian artist to date. Coppola, born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, has used his eye to capture in imagenes the advanced and prosperous metropolitan life in Argentina’s capital city. The exhibit consisted of 125 photographs taken by the artist from the nineteen -twenties through the nineteen-forties, four short films, and a bibliographic selection. One of the emblematic pieces in the exhibit is Coppola’s “Buenos Aires” series, commissioned by the capital city in 1936 to commemorate the quadricentennial of the city’s founding. In this series, Coppola traveled through the city, recording and portraying the urban landscape with a surprised photographic eye that sought out everyday life.

During the PhotoEspaña08 festival, the exhibit halls of Fundación Telefónica in Madrid presented the collection titled Cámara. In line with the themes of this festival’s 2008 edition, the artist dealt with “place” not as a physical and spatial concept, but as a lived space, in which the photographer’s experience is fundamental. Demand built life-sized models of architectural sites from significant or popular moments in history to then photograph them. His original technique and staging, conceived as a large dark camera, attracted 8,388 viewers. The exhibit contained pieces from the Poll, Yellowcake and Tavern series, plus a high definition video entitled Camera and two 35-mm. films, Recorder and Tunnel.

The work of German Axel Hütte (a disciple of Bernd and Hilla Becher), was on exhibit from September through November at Fundación Telefónica in Madrid. The collection held 34 photographs of Aranjuez, the Canary Islands, New Mexico, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador and Belize. Based on the natural and free style of nature exhibits, Hütte followed a geographical route based on the sights discoverers saw. The artist added to each photo texts written by Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, among others. Also included were various thoughts about each of these places written by Alejo Carpentier, George Millar, César Aira, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. The 12,659 visitors experienced the feeling of seeing the new world for the first time. However, even though Hütte’s landscapes might seem to be natural, none of them can be considered as such because they form part of a consciously manipulated cultural process

In 1969, Dressed in Red Cloth was the first photographic work by Helena Almeida. Under this title, Fundación Telefónica presented an anthology of this Portuguese artist’s work in November 2008. Photography has been Almeida’s media of choice to blend several disciplines –video, performance, sculpture, painting and design- into an artistic practice rooted in self-representation. More than a retrospective in the strict sense of the word, the exhibit became a unique opportunity to understand the career of an artist who reflects the central concerns in contemporary art. Although generally recognized as a photographer, her work is tied to other visual arts, such as painting and sculpture, due to a detailed process of creating the imagenes and the use of pigments and complementary materials in her photos. As of December 31, 2008, Dressed in Red Cloth had received 10,682 visitors.

From July through November 2008, the Fundación Telefónica Art Center in Santiago, Chile, in cooperation with Chile’s National Museum of Fine Arts, presented a collection by Chilean artist Magdalena Correa. Specifically, the foundation displayed the section “Gobi-Atacam”, with monumental photos in light boxes and audiovisual pieces showing the similarities and differences between territories as disparate as the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the Gobi desert in China and Mongolia. Her travels through these deserts allowed the artist to capture the unexpected impact of each on her. The exhibit basically reflects the vital need to experience and investigate geographical and human terrain that is completely abandoned and forgotten. It attracted a viewing public of 15,025.

TESLA is a modular meeting on digital culture, inspired by the work of Croatian scientist Nikola Tesla. For this event, renowned figures from around the world in the fields of convergent art, science and technology gathered in Chile from December through January. The goal of this encounter was to reinforce community awareness of Chilean artistic production. It also highlighted the technical and conceptual tools for research, production and promotion of work based on the convergence of these three disciplines. The exhibit was organized by the Digital Culture Platform, Fundación Telefónica, and the Chilean Video Corporation, and co-produced with the Contemporary Art Museum, Circuita Cultural, Matucana 100 and Industria Cultural. Throughout this encounter, numerous colloquiums were held, in addition to exhibitions, round-table discussions, and other activities. In the Fundación Telefónica Exhibit Halls alone, there were 5,200 visitors.