LA

ESCUELA___

The artistic and pedagogical legacy of Venezuelan-German artist Gego is reactivated in a contemporary light in Collective Reticulárea: Communal Cartographies. This participatory project conceived by artist Miguel Braceli proposes a meeting and learning space around collaboration, weaving networks, and the affective bonds between art and the territory. The work was developed in collaboration with a network of artists and Venezuelan professors and students. The resulting enmeshment of this collective learning process will be displayed as a spatial experience at Sala Mendoza, in Caracas, starting April 11, 2024. The exhibition will unfold a public program gathering reflections on the presence of collaborative and pedagogical strategies in contemporary art.

Collective Reticulárea is organized by LA ESCUELA___, an artistic platform for collective learning and making in public spaces, founded jointly by Miguel Braceli and the international foundation Siemens Stiftung. Curated by Fundación Gego and Austrian curator and professor Stefanie Reisinger, Collective Reticulárea was developed within the framework of LA ESCUELA___'s on-site CLASSROOMS program. With this, the platform seeks to stimulate new dialogues and narratives about regional bonds, while exploring the potential of collaborative artistic and learning practices, and addressing issues of mobility and diasporas from affective ties woven on art and territory. 

“The visible outcome is never the entire piece, as the process of its genesis is to be considered,” notes Reisinger. The project has been in progress since December 2023, through an open call for artists, educators, and people linked to Gego's work. Thus, Collective Reticulárea is composed of modules-pieces made up of various materials, sent from countries such as Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, the Dominican Republic, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. These fragments were added to the spatial developments built by university students from different parts of Venezuela: Taller X of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas (led by professor Diego González); the School of Visual Arts of the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida (led by professor Analy Trejo); and the School of Architecture of the University of Margarita (led jointly by professors Gustavo Izarra and Amanda Soriano).

This addition was intended to stimulate collaborative learning and inventiveness, as participants were invited to build their modules-pieces from the possibilities and limitations of their contexts. In this way, the project dialogues with Gego's most emblematic work, the Reticulárea, not from mimetic intention but "from a symbolic place, as a communal cartography of expansive forms—Braceli explains—approaching the node as a design object, but also as an exchange and meeting space."

Collective Reticulárea allows redimensioning Gego’s work “as a political communal territory through the link.” The project hopes to build a different cartography of the continent, where bridges, flows, and exchanges replace geopolitical borders, thus drawing a new network.

From a present point of view, Braceli emphasizes an aspect of the Reticulárea that, “until now, has not been fully unfolded (educational and collaborative aspects)—comments Reisinger—[creating] a social space for communal experience in a practical (working together) and conceptual manner (shared history).

The process of creating the connective points of a "communal cartography" required the active participation of a community. A network of Venezuelan artists and curators living abroad allowed collecting the pieces sent in response to the international open call. Thus, the collaborations from artists, researchers, educators, and people linked to Gego's work, were received in the workshops of Esperanza Mayobre, Lucía Pizzani, Jaime Gili, Elías Crespin, Fabiola Arroyo, María Antonia Rodríguez, Beto Gutiérrez, Valentina Alvarado Matos, Augusto Gerardi, Miguel Braceli, Andrés Michelena, Federico Ovalles, Elisa Bergel Melo, Camilo Barboza and Gabriela Quero, as well as at the Goethe-Institut Venezuela.

All these pieces, now displaced, are added to the spatial installation that will open at Sala Mendoza, along with an exhibition of selected archives from Fundación Gego, foregrounding the artist’s teaching work. It will feature pedagogical exercises developed by some of her students at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1959-1967), as well as from her famous Seminar of Spatial Relations, which she taught between 1966 and 1977.

Also, the adjoining room will present a selection of Braceli's collective performances and previous educational projects based on dialogue, participation, and the intervention of public space. These works seek to expand the dialogue and point to the links and relevance of celebrating Gego’s artistic and pedagogical legacy.

Conceived with on-site and virtual components, the exhibition will host guided tours, on-site activities, and an online seminar with prominent international artists, researchers, designers, and curators who will reflect on Gego's expanded legacy, as well as her contributions to the global history of art.

The open seminar, to be held in May 2024, will feature a panel with artists Carolina Caycedo, Vered Engelhard and Tomás Saraceno, and curators Mónica Amor and Noit Banai, as well as the on-site participation of Ruth Auerbach and Álvaro Sotillo. The program aims to foster dialogues and discussions around pedagogy, collaboration, and material experimentation in Gego's work.