¡n[s]urgênc!as
Roadmap

 

insurgencias.net is a professional network for immigrant cultural activists of Latin American origin in Berlin. The platform facilitates meeting, orientation and connection formats with local experts of the sector with the aim of integrating newcomers into the professional network of Berlin, and helping them to position their artistic expression in the creative context of Germany.

By the term cultural immigrant, we refer to creators from politically unstable environments that due to the critical nature of their work or their political activism are impaired their ability to develop professionally in their countries of origin. The geographic location of the network responds to the socio-political and economic situation that currently crosses the continent, together with the communicative advantage offered by the proximity of the language, without trying to highlight a single identity or assume starting positions, biographies or homogeneous trajectories. Thus, insurgencies.net arises from the desire to open spaces to share the resonances that manifest the diversity of processes, strategies, and approaches of mobilization, visibility, resistance and representation under the broad name of an agency art meeting under the theme of ” insurgency”. Under this title with an assemblage vocation – ¡n[s]urgênc!as, we call attention to a sense of urgency and emergence of socially conscious artistic practices and decentralizing activist positions of the [s]outh, perceived through the lens of “art as a reliable indicator of the psychological mood of a time “(Aby Warburg).

The first edition of ¡n[s]urgênc!as (September 15-30, 2018) emerges as a professional networking event among 12 artists who arrived in the last three years in Berlin, selected by public call and 12 representatives of the Berlin artistic scene, to talk and share lines of artistic research in a portfolio review, preceded by two artistic communication workshops and critical tutoring culminating in a public presentation where participants showed works in progress. Funded by the program of the Berlin Senate “Weltoffenes Berlin”, the participation in the program was granted as a scholarship and recognition of politically committed artistic trajectories. The 2018 edition put the accent on a body of insurgent “collective” practice.

The second edition of ¡n[s]urgênc!as (March – November 2019) evolves in the form of an orientation program for a single artist, facilitating his arrival in Berlin and residency for 9 months enjoying the Fellowship Program Weltoffenes Berlin. Under a specific strand of research: “Ecologies of protest”, the objective of the mediation program is to start from workshop practice and artistic research as a context of collective encounter and learning, connecting it with local professionals and other artists through the organization of panel discussions, participatory workshops, professional dinners, interviews, and studio visits.

The network is supported by a digital archive that promotes the preservation of a critical state of mind, a growing ideological reserve that provides a space to exchange new ways of trust, solidarity, knowledge, and opportunities for culture workers of Latin American origin mobilized in Berlin. Far from the traditional definition of the archive as the document’s tomb (Foucault), the practices gathered in this digital portal offer points of entry to navigate a vast but fragile landscape of displaced narratives and subjectivities that translate into a new context of reception (Berlin). Internal conversations of the network are conducted in Spanish and Portuguese, external communications and statements are channeled in English and German.

¡n[s]urgênc!as is a network organized by Agora Collective e.V., under the artistic direction of Paz Ponce Pérez-Bustamante, and supported in its two editions by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe, under the funding framework ” Cosmopolitan Berlin” (Weltoffenes Berlin). We are grateful to be able to articulate our proposal thanks to municipal public resources.

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