yeny-casanueva-art-studio

Procedural. Art of intersections

Interview. October. 2014
By: Ana R. Lozano
Art criticism.
Procedural. Joint works project Yeny Casanueva & Alejandro González / 2006 - 2018 /

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Excerpts from an interview conducted by the curator and audiovisual producer Ana R. Lozano for the Libro-Catalogue-Procesual

  • Q- BEFORE CONDUCTING THE INTERVIEW, I WAS TOLD THAT THE PROJECT HAD BEEN BORN IN HAVANA AND THEN TRANSITTED THROUGH SOME EUROPEAN CITIES, THUS ATTRIBUTING IT TO A DIFFUSE PATH LINKED TO CONTINUOUS GEOGRAPHIC DISPLACEMENT AND WHAT THIS MEANS. COULD WE GO DEEPER INTO THIS TOPIC?
    A- When you constantly cross borders, you end up in a space of transit where, out of tension rather than conciliation, you begin to generate a series of works that do not allow you to talk about anything other than that transitory space, and as you mentioned, very little defined. However, these journeys linked to a more or less errant migration become productive when one tries to develop an artistic practice that involves exploring the links or ruptures generated in the interactions of art with society, especially if you are constantly going from one place to another as in our case, as we have kept traveling through various cities and interacting with different practices, levels and social frameworks temporarily.

    In this sense, we could not speak of defined relationships that nourish the aesthetic experience, and that from our point of view could be linked to certain stereotypes, in any case we speak of transience and displacements, therefore the opposite happens, these relationships become indefinite and unstable exchanges.

    We have not been naive in this regard, migrations are a complex process underlined by the differences that nourish intercultural relations that in turn have a very strong dependence on political and economic processes of the host places. Thus, Procesual houses very different works that in some cases try to rethink the intercultural without being indifferent to the reasons for inequalities in an interconnected and global world. Where, in addition, this is much more complex if we think that the cultural relativism that postmodernism promoted so much turned out to be a failure, we can feel it in our environment, in the media, it even becomes part of political party programs that promote the rejection of what is foreign. As Garcia Canclini points out, it is a very controversial panorama. On the one hand, policies were implemented that encouraged diversity and, on the other, transnational mechanisms of monopolistic concentration of property and control of the means of material and symbolic production were developed.

    yeny-casanueva-art-studioGoaltending. Spanish Cultural Center of Miami. Collective exhibition project / 2017 / Curatorship and production: Yeny Casanueva and Alejandro González.



  • Q- WHEN YOU PRESENTED THIS PROJECT TO ME AS A STARTING POINT TO HIGHLIGHT WHAT YOU CALL COMBINED PROCESSES, WERE YOU REFERRING TO THE TRANSVERSAL APPROACHES WHERE A SIGNIFICANT PART OF AESTHETICS CURRENTLY CONVERGE?

    • A- The starting point really had more to do with the idea of ​​connecting ourselves to a local heritage, to a memory or to a socio-political context to which one does not belong but to which one must necessarily connect in one way or another. It is difficult because this does not have many generous exchanges. Because you remain in an environment that constantly points out the differences reoriented by models and policies of exclusion where integrationist shows are completely false.

    Therefore you must understand how that reality and the links you establish with it, from the sense of travel and permanent displacement, become magnificent possibilities to develop proposals that also highlight uncertainty and processes with complex locations. 

    When one approaches the local from the transitory, one has another way of interacting with these spaces, the concepts change permanently, everything becomes quite combinatorial.

    As for the works that are produced from these interactions, it is possible that the most interesting thing for an aesthetic activity that is sometimes nourished by sociological experience are the processes that generate them and not the objects, let's say artistic, that are finally presented to form part of other processes of social circulation.

    Now, if you are an artist, you cannot stop wondering about the nature of the works, and in this sense we would be talking about that convergent space that reorganizes the transversality of proposals. What happens beyond this is that art and its more or less stable field of relations have lost part of their autonomy. Therefore we should recognize an aesthetic production linked to other disciplines, an interdependent production motivated by procedural exchanges that could be understood as elements of transformation within the field of aesthetic activity.

    On the other hand, we believe that we should understand this issue from different positions, because as we say, there is no total loss of autonomy in the field of art, not at all its levels, nor could we speak of absolute relocations promoted by the global where the local would be relegated... There are still artists, we believe that they are the majority, who work within the field of art and try to maintain, although in a doubtful way, their autonomy, and we say in a doubtful way because the mechanisms and regulations that legitimize their practices are strongly conditioned by extra-artistic relationships, even at higher levels, where many artists participate in media games constantly and develop marketing strategies in the style of business systems.

    In another sense, following the combined processes approach, we try to recognize contemporary artistic practice in relation to a collective production, this does not mean that we do not recognize the differences of aesthetic activity in relation to other dynamics, what we want to say is that during the aesthetic process multiple participations are required. We therefore believe that all artistic production in one way or another is collective production. Another way of understanding it is that no work is something in itself. On the one hand, from a much more complex and perhaps indirect perspective, all of them establish links with the socio-economic and cultural structure of the context in which they are produced, that is, an appropriation of the material and symbolic reality of said context, and on the other, looking at it from a space constituted and mediated by specific relationships, it also needs diverse participation to insert itself and legitimize itself as an aesthetic activity. Even artists who carry out practices of displacement and travel as a setting for their productions in search of the decontextualization of their works do not cease to interact or have something to do with a collective production sponsored by numerous participants and collaborations. Now, looking at this from another perspective that entails another type of analysis, these collaborations could be marked by a global restructuring where a few take ownership of the symbolic capital to use it for specific purposes. That is also why we say that there is no absolute loss of the field of art, since in some way it can also be the expression of a hegemonic sector capable of accessing the appropriation of its assets and pointing out distinctions. 

    yeny-casanueva-art-studioInto the Brillo Box. A contemporary art documentary / 2016 / Editing and Production: Yeny Casanueva and Alejandro González. To watch the documentary Click here!



  • Q- SO... WHAT DOES PROCESSUAL MEAN? OR BETTER SAID, TO WHAT EXTENT IS IT RELATED TO WHAT IS KNOWN AS PROCESSUAL ART?
    A- First of all, the following happens: we have become subordinated to a global hegemonic system that has achieved its objectives by developing impositions of financial and economic models, but also political and cultural ones. Art, or its field as a space that defined and valued artistic practices, is not excluded from these models. But at the same time, the global has allowed us a system of relationships based on an interconnected world that allows us to situate ourselves in interstices where other forms of participation can develop, which in turn could be generated as flows of alternatives and transformations. We understand the artistic experience as consequences of multiple negotiations on a symbolic scale. For us, art, especially its contemporary production, is a system of relationships, we could say imprecise, where diverse processes and collectives converge and interact in order to develop “artistic” practices or objects, which in turn allow and maintain these interactions. However, from another point of view, this could be controversial, since we might run the risk of reducing art to mechanisms that would make its results predictable. 

    First of all, the following happens: we have become subordinated to a global hegemonic system that has achieved its objectives by developing impositions of financial and economic models, but also political and cultural ones. Art, or its field as a space that defined and valued artistic practices, is not excluded from these models. But at the same time, the global has allowed us a system of relationships based on an interconnected world that allows us to situate ourselves in interstices where other forms of participation can develop, which in turn could be generated as flows of alternatives and transformations.
    We understand the artistic experience as consequences of multiple negotiations on a symbolic scale. For us, art, especially its contemporary production, is a system of relationships, we could say imprecise, where diverse processes and collectives converge and interact in order to develop “artistic” practices or objects, which in turn allow and maintain these interactions. However, from another point of view, this could be controversial, since we might run the risk of reducing art to mechanisms that would make its results predictable.

    yeny-casanueva-art-studio Transdisciplinary. Joint installation works / 2007 - 2017 / By: Yeny Casanueva and Alejandro González.
    To see this work Click here!



  • P- BUT THIS CONTRADICTS EVERYTHING THAT HAD BEEN TOLD ME UP TO NOW...
    It is very possible, but in the end that is not important. Look, at the beginning we have worked with elements and practices that were somehow disconnected from artistic production. It was not about abandoning the field of art to place ourselves in spaces that fostered other logics, it was perhaps about constructing new processes and ways of relating, not only highlighting certain links but also ruptures, taking into account distance and transience, working in areas of transdisciplinary intersections, which did not respond to the rules of a circuit with valuations, which should be revised, of objects and circulation dynamics such as those traditionally constructed within the field of art.

    But, returning specifically to the most recent works, nothing we have commented on is immovable, therefore what we do, we could say, is more unstable, delocalized and of course much more in need of being permanently revised.