DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Julia Risler
Pablo Ares
Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

Julia and Pablo introduce concepts and their experiences with collaborative research devices, collective itinerant mapping, critical cartographies and pedagogical resources for community use. Iconoclasista’s practice unfolds in workshops with a critical and transformative gaze for researching issues that appear infrequently on the public agenda, using a variety of types of knowledge. These workshops gather a diverse group of voices to talk about the topics established, but above all they center those voices that are most continually marginalized. It is about finding the layers that make up the different forces at work within a territory, in addition to the common ground which we can rely on to organize the narrative. They are interested in working with analog tools over digital because they enable them to work with communities that do not have access to new technologies and also to recuperate the ways of doing things of ancestral cultures, indigenous peoples, the traditions of rural cultures and other non-rural traditions, which are rooted in other languages and other poetics. The idea is to create mestizo spaces for mutual enrichment.

An important part of Iconoclasistas’ work has to do with the recuperation of the collective memory to contend with the official, canonical narrative, in order to generate other forms more rooted in ideas of community. The workshops complement a process already in progress in the community and their role is to recuperate community networks of mutual support to create shared narratives, points of consensus in the pursuit of strategies. The workshops are also spaces of caregiving where trust is built and decisions are made in the group about what will happen with the information that is exchanged. The first territory tends to be our body and our work is done from a place of community feminisms.

Collective mapping is a tool for working with others. The map becomes more complex with each view of the territory: the problematics, but also the resistances. At first they used only the problematics, not the resistances, in order to not cause vulnerability. Then, after bringing the idea up for discussion it was decided that the latter would also be included. A map tells a story, a simultaneity of facts that leave the testimony of a story. As a product of our schooling, we think that maps tell the truth, but maps tend to be biased and share the gaze of the group that makes them.

Their pedagogies include training in open code collaborative graphic devices. On their website iconoclasistas.net you can download a bilingual manual to learn collective mapping. Each person can be their own geographer or cartographer. Following this work with the territory you can also work with time and its stratum: territorial time, circumstantial time, and the dialogue between the two. The workshops are always very much situated in the territories and the subjectivities of the participants.

We end by answering the question “How do we begin?” On the website you can find the first steps to holding a workshop. Everything on the website can be downloaded and used, including by rewriting, adapting, changing and adjusting the materials to the needs of the territory. They propose 5 basic research questions: Where would you do it? (outline the territory), Who would you do it with?, Why would you do it?, And to what end? How long would it last? Define the territory, find the iconography, define the topic with the people who will participate, etc. Another strategy can be to arrive with your own proposal leaving space for playful and artistic ways of approaching it.


Bio:

Julia Risler
(Córdoba, 1973)

Julia Risler is an independent researcher with a degree in social communication specializing in community communication, and a doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. She has been a university professor since 2009 at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Since 2003 she has participated in collective research projects.

She has presented articles about biopolitical strategies deployed by power through the utilization of propaganda and media at national and international conferences. In 2004 she developed and collectively organized free-access cultural events such as the BaFREEci free film festival, and the «Potlach» gift festival in IMPA, a factory reclaimed by its workers.

She carried out a research project on Latin American artivism between 2005 and 2006 with a grant from the American Center Foundation. In 2019 she published her doctoral thesis «La acción psicológica. Dictadura, inteligencia y gobierno de las emociones 1955-1981». With Iconoclasistas she has developed and experimented in workshops with pedagogical devices for the elaboration of territorial and collaborative research.


Pablo Ares
(Lanús, 1965)

Pablo Ares is self-taught. Having gotten his start with fanzines, he later worked for a variety of graphic publications and served as art director for several of them. He has done comics and illustrations for magazines and books (Óxido de Fierro, Cerdos y Peces, Lápiz Japonés, Crisis, Anfibia, among others).

He was the co-creator of the cultural magazine «Ciudad B» in 1993 and of the first free daily newspaper in Argentina, «La Zona», in 1994. He has designed books and book covers for the Fundación Espigas, Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo, Tinta Limón publisher, among others. He has done animation for film (Avellaneda Film School) and participated in different international festivals for short films, receiving awards.

He works with urban street art (stencil, graffiti) and between 1998 and 2005 was a member of the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), creating visual devices for urban interventions about human rights, including signage for the «Parque de la Memoria» in Buenos Aires from 1999 to 2003, cartographies for the «Bienal de Venecia» in 2003 and for «Ex-Argentina», also in 2003, among others.

He has been designing critical cartographies since 2001 and together with Iconoclasistas has created devices, visual aids and artifacts for the realization of collaborative research in museums, public space and social and activist spaces.


Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera
(Havana Cuba, 1993)

Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera is a visual artist, graphic designer, and graduate from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and later from the Instituto Superior de Diseño (ISDi) in Cuba.

Among her most important artistic and graphic experiences is the design of the visual identity of the Movimiento Cubano de Artistas e Intelectuales 27N and the redesign of the graphic image of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt. She founded the collective/underground magazine Mujercitos where she currently works as an artist, designer and the leader of said project. She has participated in several collective expositions outside and inside the country. She has been INSTAR’s graphic designer since March 2020.

VIDEO

Maps and Graphic Artifacts for Collaborative Research

PODCAST