Fundación´ace
Fundación´ace and Proyecto´ace residency program
About ´ace
Mission | Vission
FUNDACIÓN´ACE PARA EL ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO
is a non-profit private organization, registered at the IGJ-General Inspectorate of Justice, Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of the Argentine Republic in 2010.
Its MISSION is to stimulate all kinds of initiatives or activities related to contemporary art, be they educational, artistic or social.
Its VISION is to create a platform that contributes to the promotion of art and culture in general, as well as to develop initiatives in the community looking forward to build values through art.
Its ACTIONS seek to build bridges that connect foreign artists with Argentine artists and all of them with the urban and social environment of the city of Buenos Aires.
The foundation has as GENERAL OBJECTIVES to contribute to the professional improvement of the artists; to motivate the generation of ideas and innovative practices and to promote international cultural exchange and, as PARTICULAR OBJECTIVES, among others, to give continuity to Proyecto´ace, an international artist-in-residence program and cultural exchange.
Within this general framework, ´ace offers residencies, exhibitions, open studies, projects with the local community, international projects (both in our house and in foreign institutions), portfolios reviews, seminars, workshops. The foundation also provides scholarships and exchanges agreements that give the Argentine artists opportunities for an international career.
From Alaska to Tasmania, ´ace has connected the international artistic community with the art, the artists and the city of Buenos Aires, symmetrically promoting a network of global relationships with foreign artists and institutions participating in our programs and activities.
PROYECTO´ACE |´ACE PIRAR
is an Artist-in-Residence International Program founded by Alicia Candiani in 2005, located in the Barrio de Colegiales in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The program acts as both, a platform for production and reflection on contemporary artistic practices and a link between the invited artists and the City of Buenos Aires´ rich cultural community. Through production, research and urban-community intervention residencies, it fosters interrelationships t with other artists and contexts, promoting exchange, discussion, experimentation and collaborative work. At the same time, the program generates and expands artistic-cultural networks at national and international level.
Although Proyecto´ace is open to all disciplines of the visual arts, performance and curatorship / research, it is interested (and has specific equipment) in proposals that question the singular art object and experiment with the multiple in print media, photography, new digital media and / or design, investigating their interferences and diluting their borders, as well as proposals to intervene with these languages in the urban environment.
History
From ideas to practice
In the late 1990s, based on her professional training and her own experiences as an artist-in-residence in different parts of the world, Alicia Candiani began to imagine a new independent space for contemporary art production located in Buenos Aires, her hometown.
Her inspiration came, first of all, from her education at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. During her school years, Alicia was part of the “Total Workshop” of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism in that university. It was an unprecedented political and pedagogical experience in Argentine and Latin American higher education. The “Total Workshop” took its name from its objective: to approach knowledge from a non-hierarchical and participative perspective, incorporating participants (teachers and students) in a team structure as dynamic parts of a whole. Many years later, as an artist, she had the opportunity to participate in similar structures of artistic creation in the collaborative graphics workshops in the United States and in the Atelier Collectifs in Canada.
These experiences, even thought Alicia was not completely aware of it at the beginning, helped to found a unique way of artistic research and production, in which all artists involved work in an unusual and collaborative way. It works without artistic hierarchies on equal basis in which each participant (the team, the volunteers and the artists in residence, be they emerging or established) contribute to the same subject but with different degrees according to their knowledge and experience. Working in ´ace means to be in a space of creativity in which everybody is heard, those with the most knowledge and skills are responsible for the final synthesis and all of us for a reflective and critical vision. Finally, the program was conceived as a bridge to unite artists of different nationalities, races, religions and generic identities from different artistic disciplines and levels of career development, relating all of them to the local community.
The opportunity to buy a nearly 100-year-old house, and make her vision truth , came in 2000. In 2004, ´ace moved to its “new” home in Colegiales. Its establishment in the area contributed to the neighborhood recovery process that began in the 90s with the installation of several independent television studios and producers, artists’ workshops, art galleries and spaces that functioned as a breeding ground for emerging designers and contemporary artists.
TIMELINE
_ An old house (1914) is bought in the Colegiales neighborhood, which has the necessary structure to house the project.
_ Artistic production projects began in associated spaces in Buenos Aires.
_ Proyecto´ace is invited to participate in “Interprint”, an international printmaking symposium, organized by a network of international print spaces and led by the Maastricht Academy of Arts in the Netherlands. The meeting is held at the University of Connecticut in the United States. Printmaking spaces from England, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Poland and the United States also participate.
- In this event, Alicia Candiani meets Malcolm Christian, founder and director of the Caversham Center for Artists and Writers in South Africa, who, with him experience, would be an adviser and inspiration for the design of the residency program.
_ Proyecto´ace is invited as a new emerging space to the 50th Anniversary of the Ljubljana Graphics Art Biennial in Slovenia. Directors and curators meet in Ljubljana to design the biennale and discuss objectives at a symposium. The MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the National Calchography in Madrid, the National Calchography in Italy, the Tate Gallery in London and the main international biennials of graphics and new digital media in the world are invited to it. This is a baptism of fire and an opportunity of great visibility for Proyecto´ace.
_ Anita Jung, artists from the United States, is our first artist-in-residence as well as the first to produce a complete project with us. Anita's exhibition opening "Fairy Tales", in the Poliglota Room, on October 25, 2005 is the date that we would later set as a celebration of our "birthday". The exhibition deals with the social consequences of Hurricane Katrina a few months after the disaster. The exhibition moved the public due to the chronological proximity of the disaster. It was produced entirely in Buenos Aires as part of the artist's residence.
_ Our first website is launched.
_ The program is selected among the 90 best artists-in-residence centers worldwide in the book "We Love Artist: artist-in-residences around the world" edited by Someone's Garden and published in Tokyo, Japan by BNN International . The book includes our programs, projects and activities as well as an interview with the artist Mia Pearlman (USA), in which she talks about her experience as a resident and the production of the prototype "Voluta" made during her stay in ´ace
_ ' ace launched a 2nd website, which better organizes our database and the processes of the residences. 10 years later, this database gathers 25,000 genuine contacts of artists who have come to look for information on activities and programs being a very important engine for our international networking.
_ As a result of the fruitful meeting between Isabel Elorrieta -director of Spanish art magazine G&E) and Alicia Candiani in Madrid in September 2012, the latter was invited to make a series of collaborations for the magazine. Among them stands out, in the "Wide Angle" section, an article on the history and development of the International Program of Artistic Residences ´acePIRAR carried at No. 36. She also was "To take into account" section curator for issue No. 37, where art experts s (artists, curators, gallery directors or graphic centers) select emerging artists to be presented to the general public.
