Andrea Ancira / Pernod Ricard Fellow 2016
In residence from February 13 to May 16, 2016
Andrea Ancira (Mexico, 1984) is an independent researcher and curator based in Mexico City. She is interested in contemporary experimental artistic practices and their role in shaping social identities, discourses and sensibilities. When examining these practices— either in the field of sound or image— she has approached them from their possible implications in the conformation of ideas of utopia, revolution and the commons. The perspective from where she explores these phenomena is informed by multiple theoretical frameworks such as marxism, history of contemporary culture and politics, feminism, decolonial studies, among others. Her work has been published in academic and non-academic platforms. Since August 2014, she is part of the curatorial research platform «Technology, Audiovisual Media and Artistic Experimentation» at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico DF.
RESEARCH PROJECT
Teo Hernández: estallar las apariencias (Teo Hernández: shatter appearances) is a curatorial project conducted by Andrea Ancira and Regina Tattersfield. At its research stage, the project aims to examine and exhibit the remarkable archive of Teo Hernández (1939-1992), a Neo Avant Garde Mexican artist whose work has so far been been overlooked in historical artistic and film narratives. The relevance of his work relies in its experimental and interdisciplinary nature, which is thoroughly documented in his journals and notes on cinema. Between prose, philosophy and poetry, these writings reveal a rigorous artistic research around movement, space, the body and image.
Teo Hernández was devoted to a stubborn and rigorous avant-garde practice inextricably linked to his life. He was born in Mexico where he created the Center of Experimental Cinematography (CEC) among other artistic initiatives. From 1966, he lived and worked in Paris where he founded MétroBarbèsRochechou Art (1980) an experimental art collective. Alongside Stéphane Marti, Maria Klonaris, Katerina Thomadaki, Michel Nedjar, and Lionel Soukaz, he became one of the greatest representatives of L’École du Corps, a profound investigative practice into gender and body identity.
This project intends to bring awareness and make visible this artists experimental work from an integral and transversal perspective that appraises his archive (films, photographs, slides, letters and writings) as a whole corpus of practice and thought. Amid other material, his archive comprises 200 films of diverse lengths (from 7 seconds to 300 minutes) and formats (8, Super8, 16 mm, video), slides, photographs, as well as 23 logbooks and notes where he developed his thought derived from his own artistic practice. Currently his archive is located at the MNAM-CCI and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Paris). This research will be a key element for the materialization of the aforementioned curatorial project planned to be developed on March 2017 at Centro de la Imagen (Mexico DF). Among several activities with specialists on the topic, a public program and an editorial project, it contemplates a contemporary reading of Hernández’s archive by four mexican artists.
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