The International Contemporary Art Fair ARCOmadrid, 2010 will be held from 17th to 21st of February 2010, featuring Los Angeles as its special guest city. 

This year the project focuses on the experiences in the city, with both Africa and the Diaspora, as an inherent phenomenon in modern and contemporary Africa. 

Works on show explore strategies of re-appropriation and interpretation of the public space, issues of identity, community, and heritage, which while subverting official power, give visibility to forgotten aspects of that experience and their protagonists. 

CCAEA be participating in the event twofold.

 

1. It shall be featuring books, catalogues, texts, stories, moving images and other material in the space of documentation.

 

2. Participation & presentation within the Experts Forum. The theme of this years forum is “CITIES WE OWN, CITIES WE BELONG. CULTURAL DYNAMICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN CITIES”. The idea behind the Forum is to showcase the prevailing dynamics, challenges & successes of our institutions in the local and international fronts, and create a setting for the exchange of ideas among members of the international art community. 

This year’s edition is Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, assisted by N’Goné Fall and Elizabeth Giorgis.

One of their main objectives while organizing the event this year is to make Arte inVisible something more organic, to make it alive, to make it go beyond the time and place of ARCO fair. Its aim is to contribute to projects running by artist collectives, art spaces, and platforms.

 

 Curators Statement: ‘The city is an inherent phenomenon of African modernity and its aftermaths. Colonial legacy, post-colonial reinvention, the African city remains, as AbdouMaliq Simone points out, inscribed into a narrative of continuous development. Whether it is from the experience of transmissibility, or from the perspective of change, life within the African city urges. In the urban areas, pro-independence powers and present-day democracies continue to establish binary categories, which are used in standard interpretations of domination. As Achille Mbembe suggests, post-colonisation is still a system of simulated construction or the reform of certain stereotypes. 

 

 

 What elements, then, let a re-appropriation of the city by its citizens? How certain cultural dynamics stamp on post-colonial cities, and moreover on its social and political organizational structure, codes of identity and contemporaneity? What are the artistic expressions through which such representations are shown?  Arte inVisible persists in its layout of project of projects, and presents, here, works exploring various strategies of re-appropriation and interpretation of public space; issues on identity, community and heritage – both tangible and intangible; and ways of doing that, while subverting official powers, bring visibility to forgotten aspects of those experiences, and their protagonists. Arte inVisible explores, alongside established disciplines such as photography or video, more fragile artistic formats that are situated in liminal areas, even marginal, of contemporary art and visual culture.

 

This edition features a series of urban sound- scapes, caused by the introduction of new forms of global music, like hip hop, but also those derived from the record of daily life routine. It observes different processes of intervention in the urban space through permanent media, such as architecture or specific artistic installations, or ephemeral creations, like graffiti. It incorporates new narratives and their uses of public space, such as comics, animation, or the most radical forms of street performance. Furthermore, Arte inVisible participates once more in the International Experts Forum, offering to a broader audience a place for critical reflection and for meeting this project’s protagonists’.