mARTadero
Theme:"Identity, Eradication, Dislocation, Context, Gazes, Encounters, Senses"
Conductor:Fernando Garcia
Through AtWork format we entered in a real and interior journey of the 20 artists travelling through Bolivia. AtWork was at the center of the third edition of Conart, an artistic event, organized in Cochabamba by mARTadero, the organization that sustains culture for social innovation. For the 2014 edition of the event they chose to adopt the Moleskine Foundation format and to apply it in a form of a journey.
“Traveling is an exercise with fatal consequences for prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”
Conart 2014
The adventure started some months before the event: the artists began their tour from the mARTadero headquarters at Cochabamba, after being selected through the international call. On September 26th, the workshop conducted by Fernando Garcia, the Bolivian artist and the director of mARTadero, led the participants through a retrospective on the use of the notebook in the history of art and creativity. The following day each of the artists started his own journey across the country and confronted the 7 themes suggested in the call: identity, eradication, dislocation, context, gazes, encounters, senses. Each journey has been a mental, physical and geographical process, the experiences have been recorded through creative gestures on the pages of Moleskine notebooks. The notebook became the witness of the dialogue between the authors and the cultural and human context that they came in contact with.
Having obtained a Master Degree in Culture and Development and in Cultural Goods Development and Management Fernando also holds postgraduate degrees in Project Planning and Evaluation, Cultural Management, Architecture and Development, High Education and Arts and Technology for Education. He worked in Syria, Spain, Italy and Bolivia on the projects related to education and cultural heritage. Currently he is Executive Director of mARTadero, a comprehensive and multi-dimensional project in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is self-managed, with the focus on social transformation and conceived as a nursery for arts. Fernando is also an editor of El Guía, an independent cultural agenda of the city. He teaches classes on History and Theory of Art, Artistic Expression and Cultural Management in various universities of the country, having previously been a professor of secondary education, alternative and technical.
At the end of the journey the notebooks have been exhibited for a month at mARTadero’s headquarters, together with the on-line collection. You can flip through the digital versions of the produced notebooks on the festival’s website and see the videos that tell the artists inspirations behind the notebooks on a dedicated YouTube channel.
