On Thursday, August 3, the XIV Edition of the Open Photography Encounters – Festival of Light 2006 was inaugurated. In this edition, ´ace Project is one of the spaces that are part of the photographic exhibitions that will take place from August 04 to 31 in museums, cultural centers, galleries and art spaces throughout Argentina.

At ´aceNITE we offer a private reception, among other important guests we have the presence of Wendy Watriss (Houston, Texas) Artistic Director and one of the founders of FotoFest; Juan Travnick, photographer and teacher; Rodrigo Alonso, curator, art critic and Professor at the University of Buenos Aires; Orly Benzacar, director of the Ruth Benzacar Gallery, art specialist.

Under the slogan Reality (i) Reality, 424 artists were invited to participate in the numerous exhibitions and parallel activities of the Festival. Only in Buenos Aires 91 samples are presented, 45 of them in private art galleries that join the Festival. It is a meeting place for photographers, curators, gallery owners, publishers, etc. The Open Encounters consist of various photographic activities, all of them free.

The exhibition Liquids and Footprints was inaugurated in the Polyglot Room on August 04, presenting the work of the Puerto Rican artist Víctor Vázquez, in the Transversal Space the work that Sebastián García Huidobro carried out during his residence Series of Politicians and in the Dialogue Space is presented Adriana Moracci Series of Embraces.

OPEN ENCOUNTERS – FESTIVAL OF LIGHT (by Elda Harrington)

The XIV edition of the Open Encounters – Festival of Light in Argentina, finds us once again immersed in the reality of art. A daily, ideal, intimate reality that was born in our spirit to stay and be flesh. to greet us every morning when we wake up, to give us a knowing wink before the mirror, reminding us that we are photographers and part of our essence is to capture this reality that often tries to elope to give us company with its clone: ​​unreality.

But as another part of our condition is curiosity, the need to see and explore, to experiment and catch, we allow ourselves to be seduced by the chimera of unreality, to the point of not being able to logically identify what experiences, what acts and what part of our creativity develop on the real plane.

If we stop to analyze in which context or passage we move, we lose the most important thing: our nature as creators. Our genius is limited and forced to reasoning that is alien to us, our prowling for everything that happens around us is restricted and limited, the hunger for images, which paradoxically is what feeds us, is satiated by a placebo.

We are artists, and in our world, reality and unreality are only an archetype of the same: our need to show through our works who we are, what we observe, what captivates us. And what do we indulge in.

On September 1st and under the name “VI Belgrade Encounters: Latin America meets Serbia” ​​will begin the sixth edition of the International Printmaking Workshop and Symposium 2011. The event has a packed agenda, which includes the residence of 6 Latin American artists, the production of a portfolio in collaboration with 7 Serbian artists, a guest artists exhibition and a symposium with lectures and demonstrations.

“Akademija” Research Center Visual and Graphic Arts “(Centar za grafiku i vizuelna istrazivanja” Akademija “) has been organizing on biennial basis these encounters during the past 10 years. The purpose of these meetings is to establish organizational and artistic links between different countries, helping to position Belgrade among the leading cities on the international map of new media and printmaking.

‘ace and Latin American artists related with our center will be the guest of honor at the 2011 event,  being the first time that the invited institution and region do not belong to Europe. The Argentinean artist Alicia Candiani, who is the founder and director of ‘ace, is in capacity of curator and liaison with the Latin American group of artists, and her colleague from Belgrade, the curator Ljiljana Tašić, is in charge of the selection of Serbian artists.

In addition,  Rafael Trelles (Puerto Rico) and Alicia Candiani will lead the symposium, hosted by the Instituto Cervantes de Belgrado,  that will focus on heterogeneity, multiplicity, connection and rupture as marks of contemporary printmaking. Finally, ´ace will increase its collection with one of the portfolios, which will be exhibited in Buenos Aires in the future as well as several projects will be launched inspired by these contacts between artists and art associations.

The “meetings” have taken place during the last 10 years on a biennial basis organized by “Akademija”: Center for Visual Research and Graphic Arts (Centar za grafiku i vizuelna istrazivanja “Akademija”), under the Faculty of Fine Arts of Belgrade El The objective of these meetings is to establish organizational and artistic ties between different countries, helping to position Belgrade among the leading cities on the international map of new media and graphic arts.

Proyecto´ace has been invited as one of the participating centres for the international project EL PLIEGO / doble desdoblado, the 3rd Project of creation and international exchange between universities and educational centres in the graphic arts and international edition, organised by the Grupo dx5 of the Universidad de Vigo in Pontevedra, Spain in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and the Arts, University of Quebec in Canada.

This project aims to continue the promotion of cultural movement across borders that printmaking allows (such as multiplication, versatility and transportability), revaluing the book format from its base module: the fold.

Artists, teachers and art students participate in a project that aims to reflect on the idea of the fold, taking the space of a sheet as the starting point and the encounter that these fold causes.

COLLABORATIVE WORK (by Adriana Moracci)

What is The Fold and how to approach and shape not only an image, but a concept that called Proyecto ´ace to be part of an International Project.

During intense days of work and reflection, 19 artists were selected to work collaboratively in the ´ace workshop, creating editions of the works that made up what was sent.

The themes that were developed from the simple and profound idea of ​​The Fold were enriched and shaped by the most varied visions in this regard. Thus, the specification referring to the body, the identity, the memory, the absence, the infinity, the prayer, the plots, the trace were all giving shape to the works produced. The meetings and video conferences prior to the edition days in the workshop were a stimulus and reason for reflection for the group of artists called.

The project opened the possibility of collaborative work not only between the participating artists in each venue, but also provided the opportunity to extend the communication networks between those who participated in it, showing once again that from the simplest ideas, multiple voices can emerge.

The international project CROSSOVER [KC-Bs As] was exhibited from October 17th until November 14th, 2014 at the Mallin Gallery, Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, USA. Organized

ALEJANDRO THORNTON I WRITE / I DRAW

PLACE AND MEMORY – Kansas City Art Institute students participated in the Foreign Travel Led Program to Buenos Aires. Upon their return they created a series of works made in response to their experiences in Argentina and Uruguay. These visual sources, or tokens are being adapted and processed around notions of the found print and memory recollection.

CROSSOVER [KC-Bs As] is an in-progress international collaborative printmaking project between artists questioning the established norms of the original production and authorship of artistic works. In this project one’s work, property and egos became irrelevant, as artists have to trust each other allowing themselves and their counterparts to place their hand-marks, images and matrixes on one’s previous works. In April 2015 the project will be received by the Western Gallery at Western Washington University in Washington States, United States, completing a successful project carried out as an initiative of ‘ace in 2013.

Check pictures of the exhibition here
Check catalogue on line at issuu

This exhibition, presented in the July 19th, 2017 ´aceNITE, was the result of the 3rd International Project of Graphic Interaction and Printing, The Fold / Double Unfolded, with the participation of 17 artistic, training, creation and research centres from 11 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Spain, United States, France, Mexico, Portugal, Serbia, Taiwan). With a total of 224 artworks in the form of a sheet of paper, this project seeks to promote the cultural circulation that allows graphic editing across borders, revalorizing the format of the book from its basic module: the fold.

The Fold/ Double, Unfolded was organized by the dx5 Group of the University of Vigo in Pontevedra, Spain in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Quebec in Canada. Proyecto´ace was one of the participating centers of this project. In 2016, ´ace invited 19 artists to produce their works by intervening a sheet of paper folded in 2, using print media and / or other resources that generate multiple images and editing them in several prints.

STATEMENT The Fold/ Double, Unfolded 

The space of The Fold is meant as a whole fragmented into four separate linked spaces, in which opposition relationships, reflexivity, contiguity and sequencing are established. The fold, like the book, opens and closes, withholds, shows and hides at the same time. The bonding of different folds makes a book; a device that works as a nest through its emergency zone and the matching that is the fold, which acts like as an unfolding hinge.

[CYCLES] Portfolio exchange – Caja Gráfica is an initiative that seeks to open spaces for the creation of graphic work, the interaction of artists of all nationalities with our neighborhood, the opening of places for exhibition and dissemination of work as well as interact with international artists. In this way [CYCLES] proposes the creation of a graphic portfolio-box with engravings / graphic pieces of each one of the participating artists and guests and offers the opportunity to exhibit that work both in Argentina and abroad.

The selected artists developed a one-week micro residency to develop their work in the Foundation’s ´ace workshop. Each of the artists will have a portfolio box with the work of all the participants at the end of the project. The works carried out and the box-portfolio will be exhibited at the Foundation in 2014. Some boxes will be donated to international collections and will start a traveling exhibition.

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For the Royal Spanish Academy [cycle] it is a period of history that is considered finished, the set of phenomena or operations that are repeated in an orderly manner, a group of epic traditions concerning a certain period of time or a series of phases through which a periodic phenomenon happens. On the other hand, the prefix “cycle” means “spins”, “spins”.

All disciplines, from anthropology to engineering, have cycles. As well as the cycles appear as processes that always follow the same phases in the same order. In this project we are inspired by the idea of ​​[cycles] from multiple perspectives, alluding to the idea of ​​movement, of turning, of beginning and end, of mythical return, of what left and ended, of what opens and It flourishes or repeats indefinitely giving rise to multiple visual interpretations. Beginning and end, return, stages, movement … will be some of the possibilities that artists can visually explore in this portfolio.

Objetivos Móviles/Moving Targets-Buenos Aires was a co-curatorial project co-organized by the artist John Hitchcock (Director of the Printmaking Department and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) and the artist Alicia Candiani (Projecto´ace Director) framed in the residence that Hitchcock made with us from February 15th to March the 6th, 2008.

With the institutional support of the Ministry of Culture of the Municipality of Buenos Aires and Metrovías company partnership, Objetivos Móviles/Moving Targets-Buenos Aires results in an urban artistic action involving Colegiales neighborhood and displayed on the Metrovias Trains System in Argentina on Friday February 29, 2008 (a unique day in a leap-year!). The print action took place between the Federico Lacroze Station in the City of Buenos Aires and Fernández Moreno Station in Buenos Aires Province of the railroad Gral. Urquiza. These two stations united Proyecto’ace in Colegiales, Buenos Aires City and Centro de Edición. Directed by Natalia Giachetta, this is a litho workshop and gallery located in Saénz Peña, Buenos Aires Province. A group of 25 Argentine artists lead by John Hitchcock and Alicia Candiani, carried large banner prints through the train cart system. Each banner had several images of North America, South America and Caribbean artists’ works. 50 young up and coming artists (25 from South America and 25 from North America) and 50 established artists were invited to participate.

The banners, as large flags, were exhibited in two spaces in Argentina: the Proyecto’ace Studios and the platforms of the General Urquiza Train in front of Centro de Edición in Buenos Aires Province. Later they were exhibited in Pyramid Atlantic Art Center´s Main and Kunst Vault galleries from August 1 – October 3, 2009 in the United States.

ABOUT MOVING TARGETS INTERNATIONAL PROJECT

As a concept, Moving Targets involves presenting the print medium in a specific and meaningful way. It ties to the rich tradition that printmaking serves as a vehicle for expression of discontent and critique.

As an international print project reflecting social concerns moving via public transportation across borders, it aims to address on how public transport can become a means of cultural dissemination while emphasizing the historical tradition of graphics as a democratic vehicle for the communication of ideas.

The first action-exhibition was originally presented as Cultural Transport / Moving Target on a train between Berlin (Germany) and Poznan (Poland), co-organized by Keith Christensen and John Hitchcock within the framework of IMPACT IV in Germany.  The title Moving Targets, expresses the difficulty in stopping something (shooting down–in military terms) that exists when trying to stop something or destroy it when it is in movement. The project uses trains, means of public transport, to disseminate cultural actions, thus the vehicle is literally the means of expression. Under the metaphor of what is in motion cannot be shot down, actions have been planned on the trains with printed works, also referring to the capacity of prints as agents that promotes reflection and change.

Emerging Argentine artists participating in the performatic action |Buenos Aires Daniela Karol, Magdalena Arnaud, Lucía Miranda, María Julieta Arnaut, Félix Torrez, Carolina Sosa, Josefina Zuain, Federico Signorelli, Juan Natch, Sofía Quirno, Fernanda Castelo, Valeria Zamparolo, Ignacio Luis Ravazzoli, Nicolás Monti, Isabel Gruppo | Córdoba Sergio David Alvarez, Gisele Rodriguez Polich, Maximiliano de los Ríos, Lucia Mendez, Ana Belen Saldias Lopez, Mariana Pavan, Iván Vianello, Micaela Damico Bossio | Santa Fé Javier Cazenave | Tucumán Martín De Negro.

The World IS a Handkerchief : El mundo es un pañuelo
A Wandering Genealogy curated by Claudia DeMonte & Cecilia Mandrile
The World IN a Handkerchief : El mundo en un pañuelo
Guest Curator, genealogy Proyecto’ace: Alicia Candiani
Exhibition of pieces
selected from the Fundación´ace´s collection and Alicia Candiani’s personal collection of the participating artists in “The world IN a handkerchief”

For a month and a half, the Políglota Room is hosting three exhibitions on a rotating basis. From March 23 to April 1, “The world IS a handkerchief” and “The world IN a handkerchief: the genealogy of ´ace” were exhibited simultaneously, paying special tribute to the Argentine artist Graciela Sacco. While the original  series returned to New York from where it will soon travel to England, the ‘ace genealogy collection was joined by a new exhibition of  large format pieces of the participating artists, some belonging to the Fundación’ace collection and others to the private collection of Alicia Candiani.

The World IS a Handkerchief is a travelling exhibition rooted in the Spanish saying ‘el mundo es un pañuelo,’ which translates into English as ‘this is such a small world’. The project traces serendipitous encounters, moments of discovering personal connections in distant places or unexpected contexts. The project began with the meeting of Claudia DeMonte and Cecilia Mandrile as a mentor and student respectively at the University of Maryland, United States in 1995 and has expanded through an international collaborative network between mentors, students and
peers.

The World IN a Handkerchief is a new chapter of the project, a graphic, soft and traveling portfolio curated by guests artists from the core genealogy. Artist and curator Alicia Candiani, essential mentor of this genealogy, Founder and Director of Proyecto´ace, has been invited to curate this new collection that reflects her close creative family.

ABOUT THE WORLD IN A HANDKERCHIEF  by  Cecilia Mandrile

Handkerchiefs have accompanied people in celebrations and farewells in many cultures for centuries, offered bodily protection and coverage, and sustained expressions of political tenets and spiritual beliefs. In this project, handkerchiefs become vessels of memories and itinerant narratives; containers of emotions; translators of wounds, signals of ideological resistance. Each piece epitomizes a soft space that holds disappearing recollections of homeland as well as reflections on displacement and identity that can be carried as a tangible memento. In times when touch appears as a dangerous sense, every single printed handkerchief means a meaningful testament of the continuous nurturing mentorship among artists and educators, reminding us that the soft touch remains both an intimate and universal need of communication.

To celebrate this constant and sustained creative dialogue, in 2019 the curators developed a portable exhibition of 50 handkerchiefs that explored the meaning of belonging and interconnectedness that this Spanish saying so tangibly evokes. In the reconstruction of this alternative family made up of artists and collectives from different latitudes and generations during the last two decades, both printed an edition of 25 handkerchiefs, and sent a printed handkerchief along with a blank handkerchief to 50 invited artists to intervene with their own reflections
on home, identity and belonging. From this exchange a “wandering genealogy” was born, a tribute to the strong threads that have woven this shared territory as itinerant artists and educators.

A limited edition catalogue including the work of 50 invited artists was published by Impact Press, Bristol, UK and includes an essay by Gill Saunders, Senior Curator of Prints, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Currently, the catalogs of workshops and portfolios remain as digital publications, thus allowing to document the constant growth of this genealogy. Chris Knollmeyer, a sound artist in residence at ´ace at the same time, composed for this exhibition a special piece: “Sound of the Handkerchiefs”. The piece is a piano study made up of 25 melodies. Just as the handkerchiefs are tied to each artist’s history and sense of home, Chris feels a connection to the piano.