Con el mismo sabor a boca| René Francisco Rodríguez| Cuba| Westin Hotels & Resorts| INSIGHT Fou
- www.nelsongonzalez.org
- 25 sept 2012
- 3 Min. de lectura
Rene Francisco´s presence in Aruba was an adequate moment to exhibit some of his videos under the same title of his workshop. The trilogy of videos Agua Benita, El patio de Nin and A la ca(sz)a de Rosa is part of the project developed by René Francisco Rodríguez within the so-called art of social insertion, a modality that takes social space as object of intervention.
The core of these interventions consists in the capacity of art to respond to the needs of persons who live in precarious and marginal conditions. The work process includes surveys of opinion to help some persons improve their living conditions, the artist’s natural sympathy and coexistence with the chosen family, being able to learn about their dreams and aspirations in order to improve their domestic environment afterwards.
The work is carried out in groups. In a clear act of altruism in art, they are usually produced with some financing or with the efforts and honoraries earned by the artist with his teaching activity.
With them René Francisco dismounts those concepts that have understood the artist historically as demiurge, in order to put the art praxis at the disposal of a specific context and of the groups of problems of social subjects in a state of helplessness. In this regard, he is a neutral mediator between the demands and their final achievement, without his creative subjectivity prevailing in it. As stated by Antonio Eligio Tonel, «René Francisco exerts the functions of the artist-anthropologist who re-reads history and tours the urban landscape to revive forgotten or somewhat disregarded plots where vulnerable characters, dilapidated buildings and decayed neighborhoods come together...».
Text wrote by José Manuel Noceda Fernández.
At the very beginning of the nineties René Francisco put into practice his artistic-teaching project Desde una pragmática pedagógica (DUPP) at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) of Havana, aimed at awakening new motivations and attitudes/aptitudes in the students of that center with a view to re-channel the creative potential gathered there and generate new models of action, representation and social reinsertion of art, in the midst of new and complex socio-historical circumstances whose effects were having considerable repercussions on the art institution and on the production and teaching of art…
The experience obtained and so many other initiatives accomplished between the First and Fourth Pragmáticas —the latter presently in progress— in addition to the peculiar circumstances of art education in Aruba, moved the curator of the Prome Encuentro Bienal Arte Contemporáneo di Caribe to include in the structural design of the event an element of pedagogic nature in form of a workshop to be conducted precisely by René Francisco, without pretending to attain the importance of similar projects conceived by some biennials in recent times.
The workshop designed by the Cuban professor was to offer then a new opportunity, and with it, the option of comparing another alternative of a more experimental pedagogic practice, emancipated from the vertical subordination to the former metropolis that has marked the teaching of art in that territory a workshop that was to articulate, at the same time, with one of the essential postulates of the event: to reposition the Island in the geo-cultural context of the Caribbean, now from an educational perspective.
The first stage of the workshop in its initial segment focused on theoretical aspects, with the purpose of providing the participants with the instruments required for the setting in motion and best development of social insertion proposals. Among these initial actions were the group tours of different urban enclaves and spaces of the Island, as well as the contribution of ideas and group discussion with a view to the subsequent construction of a piece. The work lines were gradually defined according to the interests and expectations of the group; the professor’s labor consisted in inducing the search of efficient strategies to make viable the group’s interests and demands. At this stage of reflection and exchange there predominated the idea concerning the possibility of building a Museum of Contemporary Art of Aruba, a proposal that was materialized in an exhibition and in a virtual form.
Text fragment wrote by Ibis Hernández Abascal
PARTICIPANTS
CIRO ABATH
MARISOL CAÑIZARES
TIMOTHY CHARLES
SHERRY DOUGLAS
ELGIN FLANEGEN
GUILLIAN GOELOE
GLENDA HEYLIGER
STAN KUIPERI
MARYLAINE KOCK
JULIA SOLANIEL MARTÍNE
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