(The Exhibition as a Site for Knowledge Production)

Centro Cultural Municipal, Guatemala City

Exhibited in February 8–22, 2020

Participating artists; Marvin Olivares, Edwin Bixcul, Julio Ajín, Iris Castillo, Elda Figueroa, Fabiola Aguirre, Samuel Escobar, Damaris Boche, Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer, Marilyn Boror, Carolina Alvarado, Fabiola Luna, Gustavo Sapón-Madrid, Gume Mejía, Jorge Carlos Pineda, Gloria Quiná, Astrid López, Lyndsie Price

This is the exhibition project conceived for the teacher-artists from the Municipal School of Visual Arts in Guatemala City. The proposal centers on a research theme focused on the everyday within the urban environment. Taking a perspective and operating from the conceptual framework of "One Kilometer in the City," the artists create the obligation to look at themselves within the proposed context where one lives and moves as point of departure for their creation.

Metropolises have always been dense and complex spaces characterized by heterogeneous populations, central economic and political functions, and abundant material and cultural resources. Based on the hypothesis that the metropolitan emerges from the diversity of transnational and transregional urban networks, our research intends to materialize through artistic forms, events, phenomena, and distinctive situations of metropolitan life.

Urban developments are based on change; therefore, besides space, issues of time should be fundamental to our thinking about the urban. By temporality, we refer not only to the past, present, and future but also to temporal rhythms, temporal regimes, the structuring of daily practices, the rationalization of work, and leisure time.

In this exhibition, each artist defined their research conception based on site specificity, choosing one kilometer of the city as a research context and place of composition. The chosen distance was not defined strictly to the millimeter but within the framework of imagination, supposing that there existed a perceptual boundary that delineates edges and delimits specific geographies.

As authors of their particularities and interests, the artists worked in different formats according to the needs of their investigative proposals and how each individual found meaning in various media—be it painting, sculpture, drawing, video, photography, performance, installation, or an eclectic combination of media and materials.

After touring the exhibition, these artists, through their representations, bring us closer to their sensitivities regarding how they see the body in space or the effect that space as context exerts on the body. They invite us to consider the possibility of relationships between the body and space. The city becomes both a point of arrival and departure, the town as a permanent station, and the city as an articulation of encounters, relationships, intensities, and dimensions.