Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 14-18 - Production Blur

Days 14-18 were a production blur. This 3-country Fulbright has offered dislocation-as-catalyst in profound ways, but planning for travel to three countries is a challenge. Furthermore, I feel paralyzed by all this change without my family. This program is excellent for making connections and doing preliminary research, but is not ideal for production. Just FYI for all future applicants. Know your stage in the process.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 14 - Open City 2

More about Open City of Amereida: https://youtu.be/3cafU80anPE

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 13 - Open City

Open City of Amereida, https://www.archdaily.com/872185/graham-foundation-awards-2017-grants-for-72-innovative-architectural-projects

A heartfelt thank you yet again to Peter Kroeger Claussen, a Malcolm Gladwell type of connector. I’m sure that these experiences will feed my work for decades.

http://wiki.ead.pucv.cl/Documenta_14_-_Taller_de_Amereida
https://www.ead.pucv.cl/temas/open-city/
https://www.ead.pucv.cl/temas/open-city-of-amereida/

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 12 - Burly Men at Sea

This morning, inspired by this interview with Brooke Condolora from Brain&Brain, makes of the 2016 game Burly Men at Sea. More at https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/09/29/burly-men-at-sea-art/

Brain&Brain. Burly Men at Sea. 2016. Game. http://indiemegabooth.com/wp-cargo/uploads/2015/08/03-village.png

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 11 - Saltpeter Posters

Early 20th century posters advertising Chilean saltpeter for markets overseas.
Used for gunpowder and fertilizer.
Video on saltpeter from the National Archives of Chile where I'll be next week.

Undated, unsigned poster. 75 x 53 cms. National Archive of Chile.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 10 - City of Murals

Walking around Valparaiso, a city of murals.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 09 - César Hidalgo

Busy touring about city and nearby valley, but using blog to make note of MIT Professor César Hidalgo’s recent talk at Microsoft about the Observatory of Economic Complexity with Chile as an example.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 07 - Latin American Art

Visitors to the Museo Jumex in Mexico City attend an opening-night party above a series of pill sculptures by art collective General Idea. http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-mexico-city-art-scene-20170601-htmlstory.html

Today I’m going through some culture shock. After a quick glance at the Fulbright’s reminders about culture shock, I think, yes I know this and can handle it.

Yesterday at PUCV’s architecture school, I met two staff from Documenta, one in exhibitions and the other in communications. They are in Chile for a month and then will stay Mexico City. Everyone’s talking about Mexico City, they said. I remember this from my time at UCSD when some artists in the mid-2000s were starting to connect to Jumex for funding. This morning, I read the following update from the LA Times.

A PUCV student asked me what North American artists think of Latin American art. Having gone to school in San Diego, our connection to Mexico was always strong. Beyond Mexico, I think of the modernist architecture and vivid use of color from Brazilian artists like Lygia Clark. Having known many Chilean artists at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1990s, I know the work of Juan Downey and painter Roberto Matta, who studied at my host school PUCV, and his son Gordon Matta-Clark, born in New York City. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Allora & Calzadilla, Pia Camil, Jose Davila, Gabriel Kuri, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Analia Saban, Alex Da Corte and my friend Ricardo Miranda Zuniga. I could keep writing many names, but the Getty currently has an amazing survey up right now called Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA about the connection between art in LA and Latin America. More here: http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/ Highlights for me are the exhibitions at the Hammer (https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2017/radical-women-latin-american-art-1960-1985/) and LAXART (http://laxart.org/exhibitions/view/pacific-standard-time-lala-video-art-in-latin-america/#press-items). I write all this here so that I can remember the next time a Chilean student asks me.

Today I am wrapping up grades and hopefully moving onto my research here. Future global scholar awardees, this is not an ideal time to schedule part of your Fulbright, especially when you have to leave your six-year old daughter in the States (a detail that is quietly breaking me). Still, I’ll get the work done.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 06 - PUCV Architecture

A visit to PUCV’s architecture program with PUCV Professor Peter Kroeger Claussen.
https://www.ead.pucv.cl/
Their Open City program was given a grant from Graham Foundation this year.

Workshop and Digital Fabrication Space (Laser cutter, CNC machine, 3D printer)

Exam exhibition

Patio overlooking the Pacific

Travel to build temporary structures and experiments outside of Valparaiso. 

First-year class experiments coming out of their travesia

Rain in the region caused them to rethink the way they touched the ground.

The class was led by Michèle Wilkomirsky.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 05 - Income Inequality

http://aqicn.org/map/chile/#@g/-33.1633/-71.4722/10z 

I’m aware of the air pollution today in Valparaiso.

But look, Charlotte has sections that are worse. Is that from traffic?

This local detail reminds me of the Container podcast, Episode 6: And They Won, They Won Big.

Additionally, Chile is and is not the place I visited in the 1990s. I don’t remember watching a young man take garbage from a public trash can and throw it violently to the ground. Or an angry woman with a child yell superlatives. Chile’s economy has gotten stronger, but it’s a complicated picture, according to this 2014 New York Times article from Eduardo Porter.

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 04 - Visiting Artist Talk

Today...

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Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 03 - Solitude

Agnes Martin. “Summer” (1964): Synthesizing both Abstract Expressionism and minimalism. From Peter Schjeldahl’s 2016 article in the New Yorker titled “Agnes Martin, a Matter-of-Fact Mystic.” By Peter Schjeldahl, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/agnes-martin-a-matter-of-fact-mystic

Leave it to brainpickings.org by Maria Popova to remind me of the importance of being alone.

“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,” young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. Even if we don’t take so extreme a view as artist Agnes Martin’s assertion that “the best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” one thing is certain: Our capacity for what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has termed “fertile solitude” is absolutely essential not only for our creativity but for the basic fabric of our happiness — without time and space unburdened from external input and social strain, we’d be unable to fully inhabit our interior life, which is the raw material of all art.

She’s talked about it through the lens of many artists and writers. I’m especially attracted to the following posts:

Agnes Martin: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/22/agnes-martin-1997-interview/
Louis Bourgeois: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/15/louise-bourgeois-solitude/
Virginia Wolfe: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/16/virginia-woolf-loneliness/
Adrienne Rich: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/27/janna-levin-reads-planetarium-by-adrienne-rich/

At a time when I am happy in my Davidson bubble, I know it’s good for my soul, artwork and everyone in my life to slow down a bit and escape into a productive state of solitude. But I miss all the ease of routines and the love of my family, but I’m trying to make the transition to Chile as fearlessly and efficiently as I am able. In the meantime, a few good reminders about adapting to a new place and adopting the right mindset: https://www.goabroad.com/articles/teach-abroad/5-tips-for-traveling-alone

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