Places: Tokamachi City, Kawanishi Town, Tsunan Town, Nakasato Village, Matsudai Town, Matsunoyama Town
Organized by: Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial Executive Committee
General Director: Fram Kitagawa (art director)
Art Advisors: Hou Hanru (curator/Ch), Rosa Martinez (curator/Sp), Tom Finkelpearl (curator/USA), Yusuke Nakahara (art critic/Jp)
Participating artists: about 150 artists from 23 countries.
Oficial website: http://www.echigo-tsumari.jp

The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial is a natural-setting festival for nature, art and human beings, which takes place every three years in six municipalities of Echigo-Tsumari.
The six municipalities launched the Echigo-Tsumari Art Necklace Project seven years ago, in partnership with Niigata Prefecture, to revitalize the region by taking advantage of its characteristics; they held the first festival of the Triennial in 2000. The Art Necklace Project is an enterprise designed to make use of art and plants in public projects such as the construction of roads, parks and cottages. The Triennial is a three-yearly presentation of the progress of this project that is held along with local traditional festivities. It was conceived with the firm belief that the landscape and the life of the people, both of which have been fostered with the blessing of nature since 5000 years ago, and the long relationship with the earth through agriculture are the most precious treasures of this region.
The artists discovered in Tsumari various features: namely heavy snow that covers the earth for half a year, farming during the rest of the year, people’s wisdom and warmth of heart brought about by such hardships, beautiful, ephemeral and strong nature and cooperation among the communities. The artists turned their discoveries into works of art in collaboration with local residents. Spread over an extensive rural setting, the artistic works that stood in front of the rice plants, whose colors changed everyday in fertile summer, allured many visitors. Some visitors complained about it being “too hot”,”too large” or “too far to walk”, but they said it was “interesting” and they enjoyed their experiences using their five senses. The natural canvas appeared as though illuminated by art.
The first Triennial witnessed a great number of supporters who participated from outside of the region, in particular a young volunteer group named Kohebi-tai. It showed future possibilities in that regions could be promoted through cooperation or people networking, which crosses regions, generations and disciplines.

Features of the 2nd Triennial
For the second festival, artists are creating their works in terraced rice paddies, hamlets, the city areas and parks, and beside ponds and roads. The works are scattered over more than 50 areas at the communities’ request. Many artists are using traditional materials and methods, including kimono, farming tools and yukigakoi, a device for protecting a plant from snow. A great number of workshops have been held so far. The artists have been involved with the communities more profoundly than during the first triennial.
For this festival, a short video competition was organized. It is expected to expose how international artists understand Tsumari, a depopulated, mountainous and agricultural region and how they confront the crisis in the global environment. The winning works will be shown at everyday places such as waiting rooms, meeting places and restaurants.
In addition to 150 permanent and temporary works and 40 video works, several exhibitions are scheduled: a contemporary Aboriginal art exhibition from Australia, an Inuit textile exhibition from Canada and two local exhibitions on Jomon and Akiyamago. The exhibitions on indigenous arts, which have been adopted from ancient times and are being reevaluated as contemporary, will provide us with many ideas. Along with the exhibits on Jomon, Matagi (hunting) and agrarian culture, they will tell us about the relationships between the earth, human beings and art.
The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial is supported by many countries. The Netherlands presents “Real Lear”, a play performed by Tsumari’s elderly people in collaboration with Dutch artists. We sincerely appreciate countries’ funding of the Triennial. Also, this triennial is characterized by the deep involvement of the aged and children. The 2003 summer in Tsumari is full of works of art, including the existing works created at the last Triennial, exhibitions, summer festivals and events.
Lastly, I am pleased to announce that Echigo-Tsumari Art Necklace has finally begun in full-scale with the completion of the three Stages. The Stages are planned to be the basis for the long-term vision of Art Necklace with the aim of rediscovering regional treasures with the help of artists and trying for independence through collaboration with artists. The Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center in Matsudai Town will be managed focusing on land. The Museum of Natural Science in Matsunoyama Town will show prospects for preserving the region through ecological research. The concept of the Echigo-Tsumari Exchange Center in Tokamachi City is the exchange of products and information outside a mass consumer society.

Prospects for the Future
We have come to understand, over the six years we have been working on the Triennials, that although the 20th century was the age of cities, Japan and the rest of the world could not be developed only through urbanization; we now realized how important it is to review local properties deeply connected to nature and to encourage exchanges between the countryside and the cities, along with collaboration of people beyond areas, generations and genres. With the theme “Human Beings as Part of Nature”, we wish to further exchanges between the countryside and the cities.
Art has worked as a tie between nature and human beings since ancient times. Art connects people to people. Please come to Tsumari in the summer. Walk around there and feel this connection.

Fram Kitagawa
General Director

La entrada 2nd Echigo – Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

La entrada EL PAÍS, Madrid, 14 de junio, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

UNIVERSAL STRANGERS. 3 exhibitions curated by Rosa Martínez
Filomena Soares Gallery. Lisboa, Portugal. 16 January – 22 February, 2003

Although she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition thanks to her exquisite abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multi-talented artist. Drawing, sculpture, installations and garden design are an integral part of her work and are pervaded by the same aesthetic and ideological concerns. The quest for formal beauty, the lack of communication in love relationships, the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life and the celebration of sexual desire and female pleasure constitute the territory that forms the background against which she constructs her discourses.
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963, studied Fine Arts in France and today lives in New York. Her changes of geographical, linguistic, aesthetic and emotional location are reflected in her artistic output. Her painting is moulded by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of abstract expressionism; her drawings evince a questioning of the roles imposed on women; and her urban works unearth the connection between embroidery and gardening as specifically feminine activities. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and the models of behaviour that apply in Western culture, Ghada Amer alludes to universal problems, such as the domination of women, which are prevalent in different cultures.

Her exhibition in the Filomena Soares Gallery in Lisbon is the first one-person show she has put on in Portugal. It brings together intimate drawings and paintings such as The Little Girl, 2001 and Untitled (New Grid), 2000, along with photographs of the gardens that she has designed in various parts of the world: Cactus Painting (Unfinished), 1998, at the Roman Theatre in Sagunto, Valencia; Love Park, 1999, at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; Women qualities, 2000, at the Busan Metropolitan Museum in Korea; or Hoy el 70% de los pobres del mundo son mujeres, 2001, in the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona. The show is completed by Les Poufs, 2002, a sculpture in the form of a block puzzle, inviting the viewer to play. The surfaces of the cubes are decorated with coloured lines that, when the cubes are put together in the right combination, form images of couples. The idea of chance as a feature of amorous adventures is clearly reflected in this work, which can be seen as a metaphor of her obsessions: displacement, the bella (o impossibile) combinazione in affective relationships, surprise, the happiness of ideal love, and loss, as well as the questioning of identity conceived as something static.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada Ghada Amer, Gallery Filomena Soares, Lisboa, Portugal, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

TIME LOST AND SPACE RETRIEVED (OR VICE VERSA).
Curator: Rosa Martínez. 
Espacio 1. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid. March 11th – April 27th, 2003.

La entrada Nedko Solakov, Espacio 1 MNCARS, Madrid, Spain, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

A woman lies in a pool of blood in a street in Seville. Another appears camouflaged among some dummies in the window of a big department store in the same city. On top of a car belonging to some Moroccan immigrants there is a girl in traditional dress, roped to the rest of the bundles on the luggage rack. Dressed in traditional Andalusian costume and in the commanding presence of a bull’s head, a magnificent woman is gagged and tied to a chair. They have all been used or abused by a system that considers them chattels, consumer goods. They are all Pilar Albarracín.

Through her mises-en scène and performances, Pilar Albarracín reveals the drama of the structures used for domination and shows us the violence to which women are subjected. However, she does not do it through moralizing dogmatism, but with the irony and sarcasm of surreal visions and in her own jocular style. Although only one, she personifies many: the gypsy, the peasant, the housewife, the prostitute, the folclórica (popular singer), the immigrant, and the injured girl. In representing subordination to gender, social class and national or ethnic identity, she shows that her analysis of symbolic structures is consistent with what has been said in the most influential pronouncements of recent decades.

Levy Strauss said that identity could be a game of “floating signifiers”, but that it is above all a set of representations that tie us to tradition and the status quo. In the Romantic period, a return to specific identity came about as a reaction to the internationalization of the Industrial Revolution, the same thing is occurring again at a time when globalization dissolves local differences or reduces them to easy-to-digest ethnic clichés. Hence the proliferation of artists who dig down to the anthropological roots of their culture, especially the women who, like Shirin Neshat or Pilar Albarracín herself, question the role they have been given in this game.

Albarracín takes the most stereotypical aspects of “Andalusian-ness”, which the Franco régime turned into a cliché of “Spanishness”, and dives playfully and critically into them. Food, folklore, religion and the rural economy are fundamental themes in her work. In her performance Spanish Omelette (Tortilla a la española), 1999, she cuts away pieces of her dress to “cook herself” in a metaphoric ceremony of self-immolation, while the sculpture Iberian Luxury (Lujo ibérico) 2001, is made up of a beautiful string of chorizos and black puddings in silk, and black and red velvet, hanging from the ceiling on giant meat hooks. The Reliquaries (Relicarios), 1993, are sold as modern day lucky charms. They contain a photograph of the artist and a piece of the shirt she wears to paint in; in them she ridicules the protective, mystic and almost sacred role of the artist. The series Ora et labora, 2001, presents a self-satisfied peasant going about her tasks in an idyllic context. They convey the fictional nature of the happiness brought by work when one accepts one’s place on the social scale.

Basing herself on a post-modernism which facilitates transition from discipline to discipline, and aware of the power of new technologies, Pilar Albarracín uses video, sculpture, photography, installations, painting or fashion design with ductility. However, performances are her most radical statement and they mark out a territory on which she has projected her rebelliousness in a direct, primary way. Her art is a metaphor for insubordination and her appearances in public spaces make use of the surprise factor and act as social shock therapy. Untiteled. Blood in the Street (S/T. Sangre en the calle), 1992, were seven events played out in seven locations in Seville in which different types of women had experienced some type of incident. In Shop Windows (Escaparates), 1993-95, she also interacted in an urban context, this time taking the place of the dummies in shop windows. References to beauty as a prison appear in Night 1002 (La noche 1002), 2001, where she demonstrates what Virginia Woolf called the “hypnotic power of domination”: a fascinating visual fusion converts the tinkling eroticism of a belly dance into the jangling sounds of the chains of oppression.

Pilar Albarracín’s world is full of parodies and tragi-comedies that verge on cathartic paroxysm. There are flamenco dancers with spots on their dresses that are bloodstains: Dots, 2001. There is a savage dance where her partner is a wineskin which spills liquid on her with each movement: The Goat (La cabra), 2001. There is a session of cante jondo (flamenco singing) where she shouts out her laments in crescendo and ends tearing off her dress, clawing out her heart and throwing it literally on the floor amidst orgasmic groans: No Singing (Prohibido el cante), 2000. All of these are farcical scenes of dances where eroticism and death are intertwined, and are extraordinary examples of the outbursting that leads to release. They express in contemporary terms the idea of a “pathetic body”, a body that suffers all types of wounds and tensions, and connect with the theatre of the grotesque and rituals of cruelty. In contrast with religious ceremonies which seek to perpetuate systems of belief, contemporary performance has a critical potential that aims to destroy those rituals to achieve a regenerative catharsis. Shock, tears or laughter are all valid ways of doing this. Art is therefore a therapy: it allows one to become immersed in one’s own devils, but with the awareness that these are the product of ideology and social structures.

The construction of dynamic situation-provoking objects which require active audience participation has played an important part in Pilar Albarracín’s development. Duchamp said that it was the spectator who, through their interpretation, create the play. Pilar goes even further as she believes that intellectual analysis is not enough, and looks for convulsive interaction with the spectator who must, literally, suffer (or enjoy) the play, both physically and emotionally. She achieves this with pieces such as The Trip (El viaje), 2002: a car full of immigrants which is crammed with packages in which the spectators, between unavoidable bursts of laughter, experiment the sensations (the smells, the jolts, and so on) of the journeys of thousands of North Africans on Spanish roads. Seeing is Believing (Si no lo veo no lo creo), 2002, consisted of panoramic viewers which she created in the cove of San Vicente in Pollença. Scenes from other waters (boats full of illegal immigrants, pirates, the slaughter of tuna) came together virtually in the tourist-thronged sea of Mallorca. Eco-crimes, people being exploited or fantasies about freedom clash with a relaxing hedonistic context. In Divan, 2002 the spectator is invited to lie down on a replica of Freud’s couch as if he were about to begin therapy, and as he does so the weight of all his misfortunes invades him. This emotional clash is again produced in Mirror, Mirror (Espejito), 2001, a hilarious mirror that reminds us of Snow White, but in which every passer-by who looks at him or herself is insulted with “You’re ugly!”

In the urgent need to communicate and the challenge to established modes of expression present in Pilar Albarracín’s early work, we could sense a rebellious taste for the coarseness of language. In her latest production we observe a greater sobriety of style, but the communicative intensity is not diminished. The photographs that portray Christian myths, such as the expulsion from paradise or the conversion of Mary Magdalene, allude to the transformations associated with punishment or forgiveness. Judaeo-Christian tradition has given form to this specific perversion that connects blame with the disobedience of the laws of the Father. Pilar Albarracín looks for a way out of this dialectic, a cure that will ease the constant tension between these two poles. She achieves it primarily through heterodox laughter, though she is also capable of transmitting the most devastating repugnance in works like Passion Depending on How you Look at it (La pasión según se mire), 2001, or Pity (La piedad), 2001, which deal with rape. In this way, her visions connect with a tradition of Spanish criticism and its echos of Valle Inclán’s esperpento (theatre of the grotesque or macabre) or in the positions illustrated by a Goya who would have looked favourably on women’s liberation. Her taste for excesses and contrasts borders on the baroque, and her passion for what is kitsch connects with Pop. She is thus part of a creative movement that questions the puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon mainstream and is in favour of the validation of the extravagant poets, of erotic “coming out” as Bataille once said.

Analysing the images created in art or popular culture dissolves the patriarchal design that imprisons women in castrating moulds. Her art is a full testimony that women
exist as subjects of enunciation (whether Lacan likes it or not). However, what makes Pilar Albarracín a phenomenon (not to say a miracle) is her excess of generosity and courage, as well as her tenacity and the fact that she is extremely demanding with herself. That and her courage to go out and grab the bull by the horns, or the tail, as the situation requires.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada Pilar Albarracín, Altadís. París, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Cutaror: Rosa Martínez

Venice June 15 – November 2 , 2003

Santiago Sierra’s work belongs to a set of critical operations which call into question the belief that art is an autonomous, sublime and unselfish activity. Reviewing his works over the last twelve years, what stands out is the persistence of certain subjects – recurring lines of action which end up pointing to a basic obsession: that of deconstructing minimalism as the hegemonic language, associating it with the dictatorship of production and profit.
In his actions, people become ‘performative ready-mades’ that shape ‘situated stories’, extending the classical idea of site specificity. Connecting the semantic charges personified by his actors to socio-economic and geopolitical conditions is an effective way of linking the personal to the political, the local to the global. Some fundamental lines of his poetics converge in his projects at the Spanish Pavilion in Venice – obstruction, linguistic provocation and the reflection on work as punishment.

Wall enclosing a space points to the technologies of mediation and restricted access posed by borders and by limits, whether visible or invisible, which place people in different geographical, social or ideological territories. The wall polarises the Biennial spectators on either side of a hypothetical stage and formalises physical and political tensions evocative of that strange territory of sealed cities and countries defined by contemporary exclusions. Unlike Beckett’s absurd existentialist ‘wall of nothing’, Sierra builds walls that show how frontiers have not been abolished but reinforced. Inside the Pavilion, by staging the remains of construction work on the wall, disorder and abandonment, he proposes an exercise in denuding reality and refers to other remains and other twilight zones.

Covered word is a simple sculpture made of poor materials. Here, Sierra acts by omission. By covering the word ‘España’, he momentarily truncates its multiple historical and symbolic connotations, thus prefiguring a controversial emergence of sentimental reactions, ideological interpretations and aesthetic assessments.

The action, Hooded woman seated facing the wall took place in the physical location of the Spanish Pavilion interior, with no audience, on 1 May 2003. For an hour, a woman wearing a black hood remained seated, still and in silence. This work, which the artist documented in photographs and on video, dwelt on the idea of labour as a technology of domination and punishment, bearing witness to the violence of disciplinary processes and the objectualising power of money. The iconographic connections with Goya’s works, and with torture by the Inquisition, link up with many other contemporary iconological references.

Rosa Martínez Curator of The Spanish Pavilion / Venice Biennale 2003

Excerpts from the essay Merchandise and Death, in Santiago Sierra catalogue. Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2003. Publishers: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas / Turner. 2003.

La entrada 50th Venice Biennial – Spanish Pavillion – Italy, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.