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Ala Plástica is an art and environmental organization based in Río de la Plata, Argentina that works on the rhizomatic linking of ecological, social, and artistic methodology, combining direct interventions and defined concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic potential of art.

 

Ala Plástica was originally comprised of Alejandro Meitin, Silvina Babich, and Rafael Santos. Meitin’s background is in law, Santos’s in horticulture and science, and Babich’s in art education. Ala Plástica now consists of Meitin and Babich. Santos is still based in La Plata and works individually. We are concerned with relating the artist’s way of thinking and working with the development of initiatives in the social and environmental realm. Since 1991 Ala Plástica has developed a range of non-conventional artworks, focused on local and regional problems, and in close contact and collaboration with other artists, scientists and environmental groups. Ala Plástica works bio-regionally, within Argentina, as well as internationally in relationship to other transformative arts practitioners.

 

For twenty-five years we have collaborated with innumerable other people. Our work would be presented as a concrete example of the methods, organizational structures, aesthetic forms and social results of a series of artistic processes that are intimately linked to a territory: the estuary of Rio de la Plata and the watershed of the Paraguay-Paraná River.

 

Ala Plástica takes an intuitive, emotional and phenomenological approach to a variety of artistic initiatives that effect communities and the environment, while promoting the potential of art to transform. Utilizing dialogue and communication as a primary means, we have created unconventional artworks that have regenerated economic networks by retraining individuals in artistic occupations, and stimulated collective experiences to empower individuals to have a wider field of influence in their own political and biological environment. Our work collaboratively with a variety of interested participants and stakeholders from all walks of life. Through these processes, our work often coalesces into self-organizing strategies that utilize art to re-imagine territories as a vital aspect of community.

 

This work has also involved in many national and international exhibitions. It has been developed concurrently with a long tradition of activist or social practice art. In our case, that tradition began in the UK in 1994 with the Littoral Art movement, an independent network of artists, critics, curators, and scholars interested in new ways of thinking about contemporary artistic practice and critical theory founded by Ian Hunter and Celia Lerner, and recently documented in the book “Littoral Art and Communicative Action” by another participant, Bruce Barber. Later we are evolved in collaboration and exhibitions with well-known and extensively published artists and critics such as Suzanne Lacy, Teddy Cruz, Helen and Newton Harrison, Grant Kester, Critical Art Ensemble, Eduardo Molinari, Fabiano Kueva, Sitezise, Transductores, members of Platform, WochenKlausur and Park Fiction, or more recently, the Myanmar’s artist and author Jay Koh. These and other figures have been partners in group exhibitions and in an ongoing public dialogue about the means and ends of socially engaged art. Beyond this, we explore the ways in which artists can collaborate with scientists and advanced technical practitioners of fields such as geography, hydrology, biology, environmental law, and ecology considered as a scientific discipline. Such transdisciplinary collaborations are reflected in the curatorial work of Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in the exhibition “Making Things Public” and in the text “Extradisciplinary Investigations” by the art critic Brian Holmes. Such references would help to understand how artists can critically engage with the realms of economic production (for example, GMO agriculture, hydroelectric dams, infrastructure projects, etc), and also how the artists can constructively engage with community-based economies involving craft work, subsistence farming, forestry and many other activities which today can benefit from specialized knowledge and innovative techniques.

 

 

CONCEPTUALIZING

 

-Emergent species, guides us as creative model. It gives sense to participation in processes of formation and transformation.

 

-The aproach to complexity representes a dynamic property in democratic or participative processes, where action tends to transformation.

 

-Creative practices are organic models which give light on decaying states of relationship nets, and they stand as a natural process positioning in front of survival.

 

-The question of what human being is capable to build or destroy, and what for.

 

-The right for communities to reach more sensitive visions of their situations.

 

-To look at how does human being function on nature.

 

-The development of an inclusive objectivity; another way for human being to focus itself into nature.

 

-Art in terms of adventure, exploration.

 

-To experience subtleness in human/nature relationship.

 

-Sensitive research, publicness, transformativeness, connectedness and confidence in emergence.

 

THE TONE

 

From a local social / political realm, through a critical points model, to a biosphere / political vision on the relationship between mankind and nature.

 

MECANISMS?

 

No, but inherent values and practices, bioregional models of action and interaction, connectedness, and selfreferenceless.

 

Organic processes models, and reflection on them (organic formation and transformation).

 

ART

 

Where is “Art”? A better question: Which are the results of art practice? A change on the way to aproach human facts and nature (an organic objectivity shift)

 

The discrete exercise as a didactic / cathalitic experiment.

 

Cathalisis, Attitude - Synapsis, Communication.

 

So called Intervention art, mostly a socially diving action than an experiment. Aproaching things cathalizes the experiment/exercise, then art interventionism emerges.

 

Art practice out of the art establishment‘s corral (market value, facility oriented practice).

 

WHY THE LONG TERM?

 

For allowing sensitive aproach, extended participation, publicness, transformativeness, and confidence in emergence.

 

 

ALA PLASTICA CV here

 

ALA PLASTICA Time Line 1991 - 2016 here

© 2016 hecho por ALA PLASTICA

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500 Terry Francois Street, San Francisco, CA 94158

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