02 May 2011

Meridianos: Casa Daros presents a program of research and debates on art, communication and education

In partnership with MAM-Rio, Oi Futuro and CCBB/RJ, Casa Daros inaugurates Meridianos [Meridians], a program of research and debates on art, communication and education. All through 2011, artists represented by the Daros Latinamerica collection will meet together for a public debate on the paths of their respective visual poetics, as well as discussing the influences that they have created or undergone by opening their professional trajectories to new latitudes, metaphorical or not. One aspect of Meridianos is a cycle of five meetings with ten artists representing different generations. The first meeting is a conversation held between Carlos Cruz-Diez and Waltercio Caldas.
 
The idea of the program arose in 2008, when Cruz-Diez explained at a round table during the Face to Face exhibition at the Daros Museum in Zurich (Switzerland) that when he was looking for a bridge between experimental art movements in the 1960s, he moved from Caracas to Paris, 'a city crossed by one of the meridians of art and experimentation'. That attitude led not only to a geographic but also and principally to an intellectual change. The cultural baggage that he brought from Venezuela, together with the ebullient modernist ideas of Paris, produced in the artist a new corpus of thinking.
  
Incorporating the idea of crossings, Casa Daros has set out to sew relations with other cultural institutions, acknowledging the important role of these spaces in the city. Itself a collection of Latin American art based in Switzerland, Daros Latinamerica spontaneously subscribes to the concept of Meridianos, which foresees space-and-time displacements and the exchange of ideas.
  
In this way Casa Daros fulfills one of its chief objectives, which is to lend the artist a voice and offer the ensemble of his/her work to an open debate. All the debates will be recorded and gathered together in a DVD and a printed publication for later distribution among libraries so as to stimulate research.
  
To celebrate the inauguration of the Meridianos program, Cruz-Diez has created an ephemeral mural applied to the boards surrounding the renovation work being done on one of the side walls of Casa Daros. The kinetic piece, entitled 'Inducción Cromática a Doble Frecuencia' [Double–frequency chromatic induction], will be seen at Lauro Sodré Avenue.
  

Programming


MAY
Wednesday 4 May, 4:30 pm
Venue: MAM-Rio
Address: Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, 85 – Parque do Flamengo – Rio de Janeiro
Carlos Cruz-Diez (Venezuela/France), in conversation with Waltercio Caldas (Brazil), debates on the themes of color, space, temporality and observation points.

JULY
Tuesday 5 July, 7:30 pm
Venue: OI FUTURO
Address: Rua Dois de Dezembro, 63 – Flamengo – Rio de Janeiro
Teresa Serrano (Mexico) and Lenora de Barros (Brazil) debate about identity, gender, body language and the word.
  
AUGUST
Tuesday 9 August, 4:30 pm
Venue: MAM-Rio
Address: Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, 85 – Parque do Flamengo – Rio de Janeiro
Gonzalo Díaz (Chile) meets José Damasceno (Brazil) to speak about political art through the tensions between concept and metaphor, systems of representation and the indeterminate.

OCTOBER
Tuesday 4 October, 4:30 pm 
Venue: OI FUTURO
Address: Rua Dois de Dezembro, 63 – Flamengo – Rio de Janeiro
Leandro Erlich (Argentina) and Vik Muniz (Brazil) meet to discuss reality and artifice in building the image. They will also speak on the theme of illusion and metamorphosis. 

NOVEMBER
Tuesday 29 November, 6:30 pm
Venue: CCBB
Address: Rua Primeiro de Março, 66 – Centro – Rio de Janeiro
Two ways of looking at space and movement converge in the chat between Julio Le Parc (Argentina) and Iole de Freitas (Brazil), volatilizing physical and symbolic frontiers.

  
WORKSHOP

KINETIC KITES: COLORS IN SPACE!
Saturday 7 May, from 2 pm to 5:30 pm
Under the pillars of the Modern Art Museum (MAM-Rio)

Meeting with the French-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez for the intervention Colors in Space. The public will be invited to assemble kites with kinetic drawings created by the artist and fly them in the vicinity of the museum. This activity is part of the programming for DouAções of the Experimental Education and Art Nucleus of MAM-Rio and is designed for families, young people and adults.