Claudia Fontes

The project that best represents me until this moment is Collective (Colectiva). Collective was a micro-enterprise carried out in Buenos Aires in September and October of 2003, in collaboration with a community of mothers and children that was contacted in the Sarmiento neighbourhood of José C. Paz, where different acting persons of the contemporary artistic circuit of Buenos Aires participated: artists, collectors, theoreticians and gallery owners. The conceptual axis of the project turned around the idea of the donation, and was based on the Derridian concept of the impossibility of giving and receiving. In the year 2002, Luisa Pedrouzo invited me to have a solo show in her gallery, in the neighbourhood of Barrio Norte of Buenos Aires. During most of my artistic career I refused to show my work in a commercial space, simply because from the point of view of my creative and intellectual process I did not find sense in doing so. Finally, in 2003 and in response to what was happening in the country, I decided that I could produce a project specially designed for a commercial space, where the mechanisms of valuation of the artistic object in the commercial circuits of Buenos Aires where the work of art circulates would be revealed. Luisa was closing down her gallery, and she found that Collective was the perfect project for its conclusion. The project had different stages. At first, I sent the foundations and a description of the project to 25 collectors. What I proposed to them was to subsidize a workshop of visual arts and a collective and fictitious birthday party, resulting from the workshop that would take place in the N° 15 Dante Alighieri School of the Sarmiento neighbourhood in José C. Paz, among seven boys that never have had the possibility of celebrating their birthday. Five collectors responded to the request. During one month we worked intensely with the boys, creating all the necessary elements for the party, including the gifts. The party was carried out in José C. Paz. When it finished I gathered all the leftovers of the party, the wrapping papers of the gifts, the garlands, etc., and assembled a “show” in the gallery with it. The families that were involved participated by deciding the value of the “work” that was for sale. Mauro Herlitzka bought one of the pieces; with the amount of the sale we paid for the costs of the show and what was left was donated by Luisa and me to the Cooperative of the School in José C. Paz. A state library open to the community is being created with what we gathered. The doubts, problems, uncertainties and certainties that the project originated are too many to expose them in this text which should be brief. I consider that this project was one of my most successful works, in fact because of the richness of the questions it arose in all those involved in the process.

In my pieces I generally work with several reading levels. The first approach is always perceptual because, as an artist, that is the language that I decided to employ. In terms of that, I cannot avoid asking myself about the different levels of the process of construction of the work, ending even trying to embrace the mechanisms of valuation and distribution of the work of art and their consequences in the community involved, like in the project I have described above. The reader/spectator is invited to approach the work from any of those levels. When I outline my projects, a great deal of motivation arises from a will to put myself in the place of the other one so as to learn. Then, all my efforts are directed to shorten the distance that separates me from those people with whom I choose to talk and from whom I want to learn. Therefore I propose them to go through an experience together and to collaborate. The project is successful for me if I am able to shorten the distance with these people that motivate the experience.

I chose naming those that are closer. To delimit the list a bit: some of the artists and thinkers that have helped me to grow, and from whom I have learned as much as I could are Tulio de Sagastizábal, Cristian Ferrer, Reinaldo Laddaga, Pablo Ziccarello, León Ferrari, Víctor Grippo, Ana Gallardo, Pablo Suárez, Patricia Landen, Oscar Bony, Leonel Luna, Marina De Caro, Irene Banchero, Florencia Cacciabue, Diana Aisenberg, David Miles, Richard Deacon, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jan Ritsema, Peter Struycken, Avis Newman and the 188 artists, writers, art historians, sociologists and theoreticians that have passed through Trama during the last 5 years.

It is already three years since I do not live in the country. My memory will surely fail me and also the lack of knowledge about what I could not see. I choose a piece: The twin pictures of Bony, after the attack of September 2001, exposed in the Cronopios room of the Recoleta C.C., I believe it was at the show of an art competition of the National Bank Prize. For the perseverance, arrogance and intelligence that I imagine that it took him to make it.

As an artist I find it irrelevant to format and classify the artistic production in groups according to tendencies. Especially in our context, which has the virtue to be formless and unfinished, I believe that we should be more cautious in this respect.