Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Mitte

Panke.Gallery

Planetary Atoll

Connecting Latin American Dots

14. September – 6. November 2022

Planetary Atoll: Connecting Latin American Dots is an exhibition dedicated to a set of net art works that were produced by artists from the region throughout the last three decades.

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. Rather than adopting a cartography shaped by an up and down model, this exhibition examines the gap between the local and the global and how that in-betweenness emerges in certain digital artworks. This exhibition is part of the Magical Hackerism project by SAVVY Contemporary in collaboration with panke.gallery, funded by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin. The exhibition is taking place in the context of Berlin Art Week.

Artists: Brian Mackern, Giselle Beiguelman Bruno Moreschi Bernardo Fontes, Cristóbal Cea, Fabiola Larios, Gustavo Romano, Homeostasis Lab, Liliana Farber, NETescopio (MEIAC), Mari Nagem, Mariela Yeregui, Miyö Van Stenis, Molly Soda, Thiago Hersan

For the duration of Planetary Atoll: Connecting Latin American Dots, the project space /rosa will become a documentation dot extending the exhibition in panke.gallery. The presentation focuses on the archiving, preservation, and documentation of net art in Latin America. It brings together three net art archives as well as reconstructed works by Brian Mackern, Gustavo Romano, and Mariela Yeregui, accompanied by Mari Nagem’s work-in-progress installation. The documentation dot creates a network of people, places, and histories of the internet inviting the visitors to browse through the material and create new connections.

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.

Jazmin Adler, Paloma Oliveira, Sakrowski
Curators

Noemi Garay, Tereza Havlikova
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.