Art, Digitality and the Politics of Memory

What is it we preserve? Files, memories, heritage, figures? Through these questions, the participants will discuss preservation and its relationship with their own projects and artistic practices.

They will share the strategies that they have followed in the present day as well as during the emergence of the so-called new technologies in the nineties. The speakers will place special emphasis on the challenges they have faced in the recovery, preservation and diffusion of these early digital art and media practices.

Arms Manifesto

Andrew Roberts

Visual Artist

mExico

Andrew Roberts lives and works in Mexico City and his native Tijuana. His practice takes on the form of multimedia narratives and speculative fiction, materialized in space through digital animation and immersive installations. He has shown his work individually at Pequod Co. and the Tijuana Cultural Center and collectively in exhibitions at the Museo Jumex, the VII Athens Biennale, galería kurimanzutto, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Tlatelolco Cultural Center and the San Diego Art Institute. His videos have also been shown at festivals such as the Whitstable Biennale at the Tate Modern. He has won two Acquisition Prizes at the National Young Art Encounter in its XXXIX (2019) and XLI (2021) editions, the Acquisition Prize at the III National Landscape Biennial (2019) and First Prize at the VII International University Art Biennial (2018). He has received grants from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts’ Young Creators Program in the Alternative Media category (2019-2020) and from the Baja California Creation and Artistic Development Stimulus Program (2016-2017). He is also the codirector of Deslave, a curatorial platform and exhibition space. He’s represented by Pequod Co. (Mexico City) and House of Chappaz (Barcelona).

At the center of my family history, there is a coincidence originating in war. In 1968, while my maternal grandfather, Pedro Barrios, worked manufacturing bullets for Remington on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, my paternal grandfather, Samuel Roberts, was fighting in the Vietnam War, using weaponry made by the same company. Decades later, my maternal grandfather lost his factory in a fire sparked by explosive chemicals and my paternal grandfather—in mental decline due to his years as a soldier—burned down his house in a failed attempt to kill his family. My maternal grandfather eventually rebuilt his factory in Tijuana, where it now manufactures mechanical parts for U.S. Air Force planes, while my paternal grandfather spent the rest of his life in a veterans’ home. Arms Manifesto is based on the story of my grandfathers as parallel figures in the arms industry—the manufacturer and the executor, the engineer and the soldier—to investigate, dismantle and critically analyze the larger narrative of war, penetrated and reconstructed by personal accounts in a complex lattice of affective relationships, mental health policies, labor-driven migration, war technologies and the cross-border market.

AR(t)CHIVES // Recovery and Preservation of net.art Pieces: Context and Case Studies

Brian Mackern

Sound Artist

Uruguay

Brian Mackern has been developing digital and hybrid web-based artistic projects since 1995. He is a musician, composer and creator of self-generated and reactive audiovisual structures and environments. His artistic practice explores spheres defined by memory and recollection, urban geographies and cartographies, noise, mixtures, error. His work is principally related to processes and structures that run through digital and physical environments, the design of interfaces, the creation of sound toys, digital transpositions of representations, audiovisual objects, net.art, sound art and digital archaeology. He has shown his work and given workshops and talks throughout Latin America and Europe, with exhibitions at major art festivals and awards from many institutions. He also works as a curator and coordinator of projects related to art and education based on contemporary technologies.

Mackern directs the project AR(t)CHIVES, which has recovered net.art pieces from the nineties, including Loop (1999) by Alejandro Sequeira, sitios by Alcides Martinez Portillo (1995-2000) and his own pieces, among others. His last reconstruction was Epithelia (1999) by the Argentinean artist Mariela Yeregui, an emblematic piece that had been lost, which was exhibited alongside an important piece by Mackern, the Netart Latino Database (1999-2004), at the New Museum in New York in an anthology of net.art pieces curated by Rhizome titled The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics (2019). http://netart.org.uy/.

Archive, Unstable Media and Curation

Tania Aedo

Coordinador of the Max Aub Extraordinary Chair (Department of Cultural Promotion, UNAM)

MExico

Tania Aedo currently coordinates the Max Aub Extraordinary Chair in Art and Technology at the UNAM. She previously directed the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (2007-2018) and the Multimedia Center at Mexico’s National Center for the Arts (2004-2007). She has a Bachelor’s in Artistic Education from the Yucatán Advanced School of the Arts and completed the Advanced Museum Administration Program (Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, the Museum Leadership Institute and the Getty Leadership Institute). She has received grants including the Rockefeller-Ford-MacArthur Foundation’s Media Arts Fellowship and participated in the Creative Residences program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, granted by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts. She has participated in selection committees in the fields of art and new media for institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Symposium on Electronic Arts. Her curating work includes Surrounded (2009) at the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Media and Design in Singapore and Archeology of Autonomy (2018) at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, where she also curated the exhibition Fiamma Montezemolo: Dreaming of Buffalo (2019). As a curator and cultural producer, she has a long career developing projects at the intersections of different forms of knowledge, especially art, science and technology.

Abstract: With the idea of reflecting on the role of curation in memory at the intersections between art, science and technology, Tania Aedo will provide an unboxing and guided tour for two projects consisting of a book, an exhibition and a digital archive: (Ready) Media: Toward an Archaeology of the Media and Invention in Mexico (2010) and Ways of Hearing: A Heterophony on Art and Sound in Mexico (2019).

Sol Henaro

Curator of the Arkheia Documentation Center (University Museum of Contemporary Art, UNAM)

MExico

Sol Henaro has a Bachelor’s in Art from the Claustro de Sor Juana University and a Master’s in Museographic Studies and Critical Theory from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona’s Independent Studies Program. Her field of specialization is in the critical historiography of artistic practices over the past four decades; she researches productions and artists “within the folds of memory,” generating and intervening in micronarratives, an interest that has impacted her work as a teacher, academic and curator. She has formed part of Red Conceptualismos del Sur since 2010. Her research on Melquiades Herrera was published by Alias Editorial in 2014 and she has served as the director and curator of the University Museum of Contemporary Art’s Arkheia Documentation Center. In 2017, she received the UNAM’s Young Academics Distinction in the field of Artistic Creation and Cultural Promotion.