Following ICI's recent collaborations with Nitin Sawhney (Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School) and his curatorial project, Guatemala Después, ICI hosted a closed-door think tank to discuss online archives and digital collections. Sawhney screened his documentary, Zona Intervenida, at the ICI Curatorial Hub (October 2014) and also organized Contemporary Guatemalan Art at The New School (March 2015); both of which events correlate to his research interest in Guatemalan artists.
Guatemala Después is a curatorial research project developed between The New School and Ciudad de la Imaginación, a contemporary arts organization based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. From an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, the project explores the ways in which political and social realities in contemporary Guatemala have affected its artistic and cultural production in the aftermath of the “inner armed conflict” (1970-1996). http://guatemaladespues.org
Guatemala Después Digital Collection is an effort to document multiple aspects of the project, to preserve the exhibited artworks in the digital form, and to engage new audiences online. This think tank explored how to archive a particular moment in time, how to privilege the artist’s voice, and the possibilities and challenges of an online archive.
Participants included: Nitin Sawhney (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School), María del Carmen Carrión (Director of Public Programs & Research, ICI), Alex Fialho (Programs Manager, Visual AIDS), Marlène Ramírez-Cancio (Associate Director, arts + media, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU), Gabriela Rangel (Director, Visual Arts and Chief Curator, Americas Society), Nelesi Rodriguez (MA Candidate in Media Studies, The New School), and Stephanie Weissberg (Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum).
