“Movement does not explain sensation; on the contrary, it is explained by the elasticity of the sensation, its vis elastica. According to Beckett’s or Kafka’s law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates. The true acrobat is one who is consigned to immobility inside the circle. The large feet of the Figures often do not lend themselves to walking: they are almost clubfeet (and the large armchairs often seem to resemble shoes for clubfeet). In short, it is not movement that explains the levels of sensation, it is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement.”
– The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze.
It has been 10 years since the beginning of the NOmade Biennial project, and after tracing an itinerant map spanning over 20 nomadic settlements (with several site-specific interventions including a slaughterhouse, an abandoned prison, a war zone space, an abandoned hospital, a pirate fortress, the outskirts of the ghetto, a Gothic church and more), and 14 cities (Cuenca, Guayaquil, Santiago, Lodz, Fortaleza, Kosovo, Gdansk, Uppsala, the Canary Islands, Lima, Valdivia, among others) in 8 countries (Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Kosovo) and two continents, now a selection of artists is presented at the AAL Museum, including 9 of the 120 nomadic artists (of 58 nationalities) who have worked on in-situ interventions over these 10 years.
The selection reflects the results of some of the artwork they have created for the project. Framed in an aesthetic program, this edition of the NOmade Biennial, a transitory space, features artwork from this multitude of artists that stems from an autonomous and independent production, and lead to a series of reflections on the systems, programs and visibility of contemporary art.
Mariela Leal
This itinerant and thought-provoking collective approaches liminal, fringe or institutional exhibition spaces, holds workshops, publishes books, holds congresses, builds mobile residencies, settlements and multiple interdisciplinary alliances as a platform, a sort of biosphere with an independent economy. These alliances articulate other ways of human interaction founded in utopias, experimentation, trial and error, and reflections on the state of the world with a political and emotional perspective, creating new social communities anchored mainly in collective and loving work. Through the creation of multiple networks, work hubs arise, enabling new spaces and grouping people under the same ideological umbrella, thus fostering possible scenarios for communication through artistic creation.
The program of the NOmade Biennial aims to reconfigure what we have come to expect of the format of biennials with new concepts under this ideological umbrella, pushing traditional biennial paradigms to a corner till the point of implosion. Artists dare to craft new deconstruction strategies that in turn give way to an event that –as a biennial– brings forward critical and aesthetic devices which ultimately question the dogmatic biennial formula and its cloistered and fiercely institutionalized system.
The NOmade Biennial refuses to settle in any sort of base or city –it shall travel across several countries; it rejects any exact constraints for its schedule –its nomad format allows for multiple simultaneous events in distant locations. Likewise, awards are of no importance for the biennial, along with many other ideas that spark reflection on the current situation and the absurd need to set improvised stages that uplift jet art, toasts and show business, more than artwork.
Angie Bonino
Ultimately, these new formats expand the mechanisms of the NOmade project to activism through images, critical thinking, and horizontal relations and collectivity. It represents an alternative path towards configuring a utopia, a different world, which understands artistic practice as the shaper of these new pathways for transformation, shifting towards new ways of creating art collectively thanks to the resonance of aesthetic proposals, thus breaking away from the dominant perspectives by exploring different disciplines and divergent positions. To achieve this, NOmade uses creation and an elevation of disruptive-thinking communities, nomad communities.
Marisa Caichiolo & Hernán Pacurucu
