Clinics in the visual arts. Conference by Andrés Labaké

The clinics are courses for analysis and collective reflection on artistic production and procedures. The first clinic workshops in visual arts in Argentina date back to the early ‘nineties. Today this is an extremely widespread practice which takes place in private workshops and within a broad spectrum of private and public institutional programmes. In this conference, Andrés Labaké will set forth the diverse conceptual and methodological criteria used to work on this alternative training practice.

In their conception, these workshops function as platforms for the construction of discourse and critical thought, as spaces for reflection and production of different senses on the work and projects of each of the participating artists. Practices that make it possible to devise other focusses and approaches, which can strengthen the work, enrich the processes and procedures, diversify or concentrate them, and articulate new escape routes and possible twists.

During the talk, he will also deal with the different public training programmes for artists held in Argentina, developing the work carried out over the last decade by the National Arts Fund to promote, activate and strengthen the particular art scenes of each province and the pooling of knowledge and practices in the visual arts.

To sum up: a state policy that encourages, supports and generates conditions that enable the production of thought and experimental artistic practices, alternatives to the established ones proposed by the big international hegemonic centres of culture and art. Spaces that make other modes of construction and the circulation of connections and knowledge possible.

Andrés Labaké is a visual artist. He was born in San Juan, Argentina, in 1960. He was a lecturer of Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires from 1985 to 1991. He develops his artwork in installations, objects, paintings, drawings, texts and photographs. He has undertaken individual displays in Buenos Aires, New York, Miami, Berlin and Rome. He has participated in more than a hundred collective contemporary art exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, Toronto, Berlin, London, Zurich, Rome, Madrid, Shanghai, Mérida, Caracas, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and other Argentinian cities. He has received numerous awards in national exhibitions, such as the Gran Premio del Salón Nacional Pro Arte Córdoba (Argentina) in 2001, among many others. His artworks are part of major institutional and private collections. He has curated and coordinated the exhibition programming of the Sala Alsina and the Casa de Cultura, or cultural centre, of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Argentina, from March 2005 to the present. Since 2006 he has been directing the Fondo Nacional de las Artes de Argentina (FNA) programme of workshops of clinics, analysis and supervision of theoretical and practical productions in visual arts across the country. He writes and curates texts on the visual arts. He has been director of the FNA since February 2005 and coordinator of Visual Arts at the Centro Cultural de la Memoria H. Conti, Ex ESMA (Buenos Aires) since September 2011.
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