Planetary Atoll: Connecting Latin American Dots

Brian Mackern, Giselle Beiguelman Bruno Moreschi Bernardo Fontes, Cristóbal Cea, Fabiola Larios, Gustavo Romano, Liliana Farber, Mari Nagem, Miyö Van Stenis, Molly Soda, Thiago Hersan

Wed, 14 September 2022 — Opening of Planetary Atoll
5–7 pm: Workshop Designing Futures with Leslie Garcia –
8–9.30 pm: My Dream Room a live performance on Amazon’s streaming platform, Amazon Live with Molly Soda

Sat, 17 September 2022 3–5 pm
AlgoTypes: Tarot Reading Performance by Thiago Hersan

Sun, 18 September 2022 3–5 pm
4 pm - round table talk with Gustavo Romano (NETescopio) and Brian Mackern (netart latino database) | /rosa

Mon, 19 September 2022 6 pm
Round Table Neither Center nor Periphery: Hacking the “Latin Americanness” with Diego Gómez Venegas, Molly Soda and Oscar González Díaz; Moderation: Jazmín Adler will take place at Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz Potsdamer Str. 37 D-10785 Berlin

From Mon, 19 September 2022 on
Individual instragram live interviews with the artists at @panke.gallery

More infos and overview over all events:
Events of Planetary Atolls

Net art is a diverse artistic practice based in or on internet cultures and is therefore in constant transformation. As the technology develops, devices get obsolete, servers dropped, and the artists that are maintaining their domains are no longer around, the art gets lost. You might be surprised how hard it is to find “net art” in your favorite search engine. Even though the methods of documenting, archiving, and preserving net art have been studied and researched, they remain a rare practice amongst artists and very few dedicated institutions or initiatives. Taking care of net art is a difficult and delicate task. Documentation Dot at /rosa focuses on archiving and preservation in the context of the Latin American net art scene by giving space to the actors coming from that network of artists. It shows archives and databases with their different approaches to collecting as well as a small selection of historical and contemporary art works that are included in their records. The exhibition presents reconstructed pieces that the public can experience in their complexity and full interaction, which allows them to mediate a characteristic feeling of the particular period of the internet. The practice of documenting, archiving, and restoring is always tightly linked to an act of storytelling. After all, the presentation brings together people and groups that are telling their stories of net art, internet, connection, disconnection, and sometimes reconnection.

Alcides Martínez Portillo, Brian Mackern, Gustavo Romano, Homeostasis Lab, Mari Nagem, Mariela Yeregui, NETescopio (MEIAC)

opening times /rosa : Fri: 3-7, Sat: 2-7, Sun: 2-7 pm

Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 35
10178 Berlin

Planetary Atoll: Connecting Latin American Dots is an exhibition dedicated to display a set of net art works that have been produced by artists from the region over the last three decades. From different conceptual perspectives, and through experimentation with various kinds of media, mediums, tools and formats, all the pieces are intertwined with Internet culture.

The curatorial framework reads the net art practices with historical, intergenerational and cartographic lenses to understand the relevance of regionalities for this artistic production. It does so by searching for contrasting dialogues between the Latin American and the Berlin net art scenes. Just as the Internet travels across oceans to connect the world, this initiative seeks to build a bridge between seas: to detect the hidden threads that may link both contexts, in the same way the vast underwater cables drive the invisible forces of the global Internet. In addition, the exhibition aims to explore certain particular features of net art produced in Latin America, questioning if it is possible to cartographically delimit a research about the Net without falling into essentialist perspectives that try to identify a sort of Latin Americaness.

Some of the questions the exhibition raises in this regard are: How can we think of recurring aspects in Latin American net art avoiding flattening the differences that can be found in the works produced by artists in the region? Is it possible to rewrite our understanding of particular zones respecting its complex cultural properties, without reinforcing the modern idea of Nation State and the unseen geo-political borders? What are the potential ways of defying cartographical boundaries within the so-called post-Internet era?

We are in a trap. Surrounded by bipolarities, we are trying to liberate ourselves from nationalist ideas while needing to address specific issues. Whereas Internet based projects promise to outreach a planetary public, they also reveal otherwise forgotten regional specific situations. The Internet has become a political dicomotical ground, but it is also the place where a connective tissue is formed. This huge, decentralized, intangible, and interconnected cybernetic space has embodied a fascinating mystery since the early days of the “network of networks” and the first explorations about, within and through the Internet. Rather than adopting a cartography shaped by an up and down model, through the concept of atoll -a group of several small islands that form part of a coral reef- the exhibition examines the gap between the local and the global and how that in-betweenness emerges in certain digital artworks.

Jazmín Adler, Paloma Oliveira, Sakrowski
Curators

Noemi Garay, Tereza Havlíková
Curatorial Assistance

This exhibition is part of Magical Hackerism which is a SAVVY Contemporary project in collaboration with panke.gallery, funded by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin.