Claudio Perna
(Milan, Italy, 1938 – Holguin, Cuba, 1997): Conceptual artist, photographer, and geographer. As an active teacher and researcher, he devoted much of his life to the study of geography, a discipline that allowed him to investigate the human-art-nature relations according to his ethical and aesthetic principles. It also led him to explore his awareness as a creator of patterns of thought, where the performative and the educational merged and transgressed each other. Throughout this relational process, he shared with young artists, scientists, students, and ordinary citizens many of his endeavors and creative experiences in RADAR (Centro de Arte y Ecología) (Center for Art and Ecology). This was a space of practice and archive for his approaches to "social art": A kind of work carried out by the artist with the aim of cultivating and culturing the communities where it was inserted. On the other hand, the individual practices he began doing in the mid-1960s in Venezuela, are based on explorations and experimentations with object and photographic processes and are deeply linked to strategies of appropriation and questioning of the originality of the unique work of art.
