Good afternoon. Thank-you everybody for coming and my thanks to TRAMA for asking me.
I would like to share with you a few disjointed thoughts on some of the things I have seen and heard throughout these last days, and on TRAMA itself, as an event, as a community, as an institution… (Which is the word to be used in this case? All I may do in the next few minutes is to sketch a few elements for an answer to this question).
Let us start by keeping in mind the conditions. Those conditions that made our meeting possible, us (a certain number of Argentines, artists for the most part, and a few foreigners), here, in a manner that would have been unusual not long ago, to exhibit, to observe and to discuss projects somehow related to what has been called in the context of this summons "social projection " in artistic practices. Let us start by remembering two of the conditions that have been instrumental for these sessions to take place. The first one is electronic communication, that relates to TRAMA in various ways and for various reasons. It is trivial, but important: it provides the means to achieve a difficult coordination between different places and different languages through different time zones (and this is not indifferent to the processes of globalization, as it gives rise to a certain "manner of feeling", a certain way of being synchronized and not synchronized in the presence of the other one, in another place and another time). It involves the insemination of our imaginations through a net, a structure that does not only come up to date in the World Wide Web, but that this Web shapes into a powerful net beyond itself. And also part of this condition –something to which I would like to return later- is that it places more and more frequently on our screens a certain class of objects: incomplete objects that vary, more or less interactive, that unfold in a universe where things happen in a very different way from the way they do in the physical universe.
The second of these conditions –condition and motif, estimate and provocation- is the general recomposition of the relationship between states and communities that we witness in Argentina and elsewhere today (which is also inseparable from the current globalization, with its violence and appeasements, domination and hegemonies). I refer to the recomposition of a way of linking managing institutions with groups of individuals that became strong in the second half of the XX century, after a long process of development (process that was at the center of what is called "modernism"). During this period our vision of this thing called "society" took shape, this same society that has been disintegrating for the last twenty five years, to the point where it seems reasonable to some people, as it does to John Urry, the sociologist, to suggest that we should think the present as a "post-society" phase, in which, several global nets and currents weaken the endogenous social structures that the sociological discourse has considered able to reproduce themselves. This would be tantamount to dismantling the "social from society" –that was identified with national individual societies, relatively definite in their edges and rather homogenous. This – which in few places is more obvious than in Argentina – should interest us when it comes to discuss the question of the "social projection" in art. Our duty as artists and intellectuals now is to try to think this question beyond the models that we have inherited from the universe of state welfare o from the modern state, the retraction of which, fairly orderly (as would be the case in Europe, less so, in the US) or disorderly and disastrous, as in Argentina and Indonesia, if we are to believe Ade’s description – under the withdrawal of a certain managing commitment by part of the state that determined those areas within education and health, work and leisure, that assured a type of integration of inhabitants whose disappearance we have witnessed for some time now, giving rise to other things, to other coordinations of individuals, and for each one of them, other forms of pleasure and of malaise.

Neither of these developments is foreign to certain changes in the way things are taking place in the art field. We have moved a long way from the time when it was possible to write, as one can read in "Pratique du bon Francais", a revolutionary pamphlet published in 1794, quoted by Miguel Tamen in an excellent book called "Friends of objects that can be interpreted", in which he rewrites the sixth commandment as follows: "Les beaux arts tu cultiveras; / D'un état ils sont l'ornement" (You will cultivate fine arts / They are the ornament of the State). But it is also true as, Miguel Tamen himself writes, that "the relationship between the duties towards art, a doctrine of art as adornment, and the presence of the state that impregnates this not very elegant distich, seems still to stress strongly what is a dominant attitude towards art". And it stresses as well, I would add, our thoughts on "social projection", so that we may have to start thinking in a manner different to the modern way in which we frequently understood that this projection ought to consist of a symbol that represented the getting together of a community or expressed the dissension of those who inhabit it (getting together and dissensions that implied a certain spontaneity of the "social as society").
We ourselves stand with determination -if I do not misinterpret the things I have been listening to these last days – as the descendants of those movements, that for more than half a century have reacted to an "art institution". These movements took their final shape at the same time as the state welfare and modernization institutions, a shape that would undergo its crisis (this is a little what we associate with the 1960s), after which they were fatally wounded, to experiment subsequently the progressive undermining of its contents whose final stages we witness today (which is one of the reasons for TRAMA to exist). In its mature form, this art institution coordinated the interactions of a series of terms: individual artists, who worked from different levels of creativity, proposed work (biface identities: objects on the one hand, but more objects on the other) destined to an essentially individual and fundamentally silent appreciation from other individuals that came across them in galleries (places that relate to commerce and to rebellion) or museums (historical places), that used to be oriented by the discourse of certain critical authorities. There were other things as well in this universe: groups of artists that worked within different organization consensus, gallery director associations, academic critics, not to mention the thousand different publications, and there was, of course, a large variety of transgressions of this structure, that, nevertheless, offered strong resistance, which is due, no doubt, to the weight of history. Once more it has become clear that, in spite of its wounds, it still defines a certain presence in the public field.
It is within the context of these networking practices, of manners of socialization and ways that relate to different organizations, where social projection found a series of active resistance, from which stem the outlines, that can be more or less explicit, that we have been using to discuss the "social projection" of art, and, specifically, the introduction of art in public spaces. I refer to the projects construed by the avant-garde, the neoavant-garde, ultra and meta-avant-gardes. I am not saying, of course, that these instruments are not useful, but is necessary to support them with others, with those that we are working at currently, moved by, among other things, the feeling that the net in question is being profoundly redefined to a point in which we do not recognize it. TRAMA in Buenos Aires and Ruang Rupa in Jakarta (or, Araï.net in Bombay, or Knowbotics Research in Berlin and other places) are, no doubt, indicative of these redefinitions.
It is not that all these collective efforts are the same or are structured in the same way. The differences between them are, in some cases, as large as those between a (private) studio and a militant group. But all of them have in common the fact that they do not hold a given place or that they cannot be clearly defined within a universe of practices, ways of socialization and organizations that represent art as an institution. In what sense? In the sense that they intervene as mediators of objects, forms of relationships, spaces and discussions that do not answer to the parameters that this institution had been allotted under the conditions established by modernism. Let us suppose that TRAMA is less an instance of preparation, a preliminary exercise so that a few artists make work destined to be exhibited in galleries or museums, for the delight of viewers and for critics to work on, and that this, this week and its developments, in the past and in the future, these shows and discussions, but also these conversations in show rooms, and the publications they are destined to are the very aims of the efforts of those to whom we owe the establishment of this place. Let us suppose that the typical art production and reception led irrevocably in the immediate future to something like the situation we are in here, and that we have to think this experience as something akin to "art" (and its ways of projecting itself) rather than in what happens to the artist in the isolation of his studio, to the spectator in the show room, and to the critic in his office. What form then would the modified "art institution" take?
But before that, we have to ask ourselves another question. How can one describe the situation in which we have been –and still are- involved in this place? Allow me to stress a few attributes, stylise others, and describe it in something like its exterior extreme form (form that I would say it achieves at times). If we are here in this room and in the spaces that surround it, it is because there are objects (surfaces, volumes, images, texts) that offer themselves as focal points in a conversation, points that we observe and those we can debate. But it is not only that. I am under the impression that these objects tend to appear here, among us, as instances of observation and problematical instances, but even more so as instruments to sustain the density of connections in an extensible gathering. An extensible gathering to which we have to give credit not only for an interest in questions of art in general, but for a particular interest as well, in which the surfaces, volumes, images and discourses that are generated change and increase, so that each one of them when brought up to date unfolds other perspectives. Objects that respond to these characteristics that appear like this are what I prefer to call "epistemological objects". We owe this expression to Karin Knorr Cetina, who has used it to refer to objects of research, as you can find in a laboratory, but also, for example, to currency markets or computer programs. Epistemic objects, says Knorr Cetina, "are characteristically open, generated by questions and complexes. They are processes and projections rather than definite things. Observation and research bring them out as increasing rather than reducing their complexity". I would add here that they coordinate: things that acquire their best value when they are incorporated into practices geared to reach a certain manner of coordination that is unstable on its own. These objects induce community, and as such they reach out to us, incitement, occasions, conditions, means to invent forms of socializing.
So this is about the shaping of a community of individuals who gravitate around certain epistemological objects that are at the same time media for the display of sociality whose form one ought to be able to describe. Yesterday, Christian Ferrer talked on the growing emergence in Buenos Aires of forms of sociality, linked to friendship and suggested, if I am not wrong, that TRAMA was part of this dynamic. If this were the case, it would be a good starting point, though one ought to explain a couple of things. One of them is that there is here a certain institutionalisation that does not make sense, strictly speaking, to a group of friends. I would not like "institution" to be read in the sense of a rigid order of positions and rules (which is, no doubt, the way this word sounds to us), if not – to employ a definition by Masahiko Aoku, the economist-, an emergent system able to support itself on shared beliefs on how a certain game is played, and "a compressed representation of the invariable and salient traits of a balanced course", if I am allowed to refer to this question in a particularly abstruse way. This is the condition so that something like TRAMA may resist the personal variations lacking, to start with, in a group of friends. The second thing is the role played by foreigners in all this. I would say they participate and witness: they are participants who, at the same time, stand as witnesses and witnesses, who at the same time, participate. This situation may be misunderstood on several grounds. But these misunderstandings are necessary to verify the type of interopening that a situation like this one needs, so that –among other things- the space in which we are now may be considered a public space. An interopening is a condition to the introduction of an act testifying that there is always the possibility of moving away from the community: the possibility to run away.
It also introduces indetermination. This is important. The communities we are dealing with enlist in the inheritance of modern art, in its restlessness and dissatisfaction. That is to say, in its most critical aspects. Some of the conditions of criticism, characteristic of the modern universe (and postmodern), are not found among us, so that criticism must be reinvented. I feel indetermination is a figure that ought to survive, a quality pertaining to the objects of art as it was in the modern tradition. Indetermination that was thought, of course, together with the principles of estrangement or strangeness, displacement or disquietude, from Brecht to Borges, from Adorno to Barthes. I do not think that the forms of estrangement have the same power in our universe. But a certain indetermination would seem valuable, even when now it is identified as a quality of the space of a community that gravitates around and incorporates in its process objects that are binding rather than strange.
And this is something that we should look forward to it happening with growing frequency, I suppose, in the regions of art: creative acts of experimental communities (whatever their stability and duration –a day, a week, a year-, it does not matter either how involved their members are). One can say that this has always been the case: from the smaller circles of cooperation to the surrealist mouvement, Fluxus or situationism in its diverse incarnations. And this is perfectly true: the century that we have just left has been particularly rich in this. But it is also true that very often these circles have grown round the ideology of a movement or a party. Which is not the case in these communities that are beginning to turn into molecules through which the art system regenerates.
In other words: I prefer to understand initiatives such as TRAMA (or Ruang Rupa, or so many others) as signs of a general reorganization of the art system. I am under the impression that not very long from now work, artists, galleries and critics will belong somehow to the periphery of the inheritance of art. In the regions were new things take place, there will be groups, rather than individuals (no matter how small) immediately interested in generating a certain class of objects, but they will also be interested in keeping a coordination with their own generation. The objects in question, if they are to be efficient coordinators and, at the same time, retain in their texture certain traces of the process of their generation, will become what have been called "epistemological objects". As to the laying out together of these objects, it will not stem from the instance of their creation, that will have always been, besides a material construction, a conversation. Therefore the discourse will not relate to the objects in relation to their previousness (theory or plan) or their posteriority (evaluation and remarks). And as far as the relation of these objects with whatever is beyond the limits of the group, it will take the shape of a double gesture: of insertion and of invitation.
The destiny of processes such as this one is particularly uncertain. But it may be anticipated that the field of practices, ways of life, organizations in which art will unfold will have a different form from the one in which, from certain modern art, the need for a dissolution and a reabsortion into what is called "life" was proclaimed. The present, considered in perspective of high modernism, is a phase of differentiation of spheres: not only the sphere of art, if not also politics, economy and science. This point is particularly difficult to develop in this context, so that I prefer to stop here, and allow the conversation to resume, as it has done all along.