TAGS

artist, carlos-navarrete, plan-of-readings.

BIOGRAPHY

Carlos Navarrete was born in Santiago, Chile, 1968. Lives in Santiago 2008 Momento, Florencia Loewenthal Gallery, Santiago 2007 The Ineffable Object, Cleveland State University Art Gallery, USA 2006 Travels, mobility & gardens, (City-Scan), Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst – SMAK, Gent, Belgium 2005 Transformer, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago 2004 Produciendo Realidad, Arte e resistenza latinoamericana, Prometeo Associazione per l’Arte Contemporanea, Lucca, Italy 2003 Farenheit around the Garden, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten NICC, Free Space, Antwerpen, Belgium Selected Bibliography FONSECA, Mario, “La ubicuidad de la memoria”, El Mercurio, Revista El Sábado, # 494, March 8, 2008, pp. 6; LITZ, Christian, “Der Große treck”, Monopol Magazine, v.8, August, 2007, pp. 76-85; NAVARRETE, Carlos, Winter Garden/ Jardín de Invierno (cat.), Stuttgart, Akademie Schloß Solitude, 2006.

INTERVIEW

Santiago García Navarro: What is Arquivo Pessoal [Personal Archive] about?

Carlos Navarrete: It is a set of drawings, pictures, diagrams, letters and objects that portray some thoughts about the city of São Paulo based on my personal experience as an artist and at the same time as a person who visits the Bienal de São Paulo. This way of working, by collecting experiences, lets me see the different relations I have been building up in my visits to this metropolis since 1985. This piece of work intends to interlink personal aspects with universal issues related to travel, and the effects of this on contemporary artists and people in general. It all started because my father’s brother decided, in 1975, to move to São Paulo with his family in search of better economic conditions. Since then, I have been able to closely follow the life led by my cousins and aunt and uncle here, and how they have developed. Therefore, Archivo Personal has an active dimension, which – although it is not a performance – will have something very personal to my aunt and uncle and me. During the exhibition I am going to conduct several public guided visits to the 28th Bienal in Spanish, because this has been a private activity that I have been doing without interruption for my aunt and uncle and cousins since 1991. They are going to be invited to the first one and also be present in the artwork itself through the correspondence exhibited that is part of the exchange between the members of the family in these two cities.

Santiago García Navarro: Do you plan to include your ephemeral actions with Malevich’s glazed tiles or domino in this artwork?

Carlos Navarrete: This was one of the big dilemmas, but I decided not to include them because the series of drawings of São Paulo related to my bus trips around the metropolis involves the implicit idea of highlighting or recognizing the fact of being in the metropolis, by means of local landmarks. In fact, each of the drawings is named after the different bus trips I have taken between my aunt and uncle’s house in São Bernardo do Campo and several parts of the metropolis. The marks of these emblematic objects present in the pictures are based on the idea of constructing a drawing to portray São Paulo and my bus trips in the metropolis. However, while I was preparing the material for the piece, I came across several huge garbage containers where I found pieces of broken glazed tiles and ceramics with which I decided to build a piece called 11 noches en SP [11 Nights in SP], displayed as duly ordered fragments that recall the time invested in doing the project in sp. This collection is the heart of Archivo Personal, because it is where everything starts, and where it all converges.

Santiago García Navarro: How would you define your way of making a work while travelling?

Carlos Navarrete: My work is entirely nomad. I always think about the word “mobility” to convey my ideas. Mobility is the reflection and the effect of always developing the artwork while the trip lasts. The piece develops as I feel the effects of the trip on myself and on my way of observing the place where I am while I am working on the piece. The basic question is: How do the trips impact my work, and how can I transform this impact into a creative look that evinces the world I observe? I work with the idea of being a territorial extension of my country, Chile. That is to say, this image of a long and narrow strip of land serves as a metaphor for my long and intense journeys that do not need to have a determined end or arrival; in a sense, they are a permanent way of going back and forth. That is why more than places visited I keep moments; fragments of experiences lived in faraway cities such as Tokyo, New York, Dublin, Venice, Valdivia, Buenos Aires, etc. There is a need to show the world from an artistic perspective through these short expeditions.


Santiago García Navarro is a writer, translator and art critic. He lives in Buenos Aires.

PROJECTS - 28TH SAO PAULO BIENAL

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