Aluna Art Foundation: Rethinking Curating. An Interview with Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos

Most of the people involved in the Miami art scene know about the extraordinary work Aluna Art Foundation has done in the last two years. A nonprofit organization created by Miami-based curators and art critics Adriana Herrera and Guillermo (Willy) Castellanos, Aluna represents a creative platform that fuels and promotes the works of contemporary artists, both local and from abroad. We met the Aluna founders to talk about their curatorial philosophy and the purpose behind this initiative. They also share with our readers the challenges that independent curators face today and the projects they are working on now.

By Raisa Clavijo

Raisa Clavijo - You are currently exhibiting “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Identities in Transit” at your venue in Downtown Miami. What is the curatorial concept of this exhibition?

Guillermo Castellanos - The exposition is a journey through the realities of the American continent from the artists’ different visions of wandering. We invited Ronald Morán, Walterio Iraheta, Patricia Schnall-Gutiérrez, Cecilia Paredes, Andrés Michelena, Gustavo Gavilondo, Humberto Castro, Antuan Rodríguez, Graciela Sacco, Luis F. Roldán, Luis Fernando Peláez, Hugo Moro, Alexandra Rowley, Roberto Huarcaya, Linga Pongutá, Manuel Zapata, Debra Holt, Patricio Reig, Marina Font, Mario Bellatín, Felipe Ehrenberg and Xavier G-Solis. These artists live in cities ranging from Buenos Aires to New York, and there are also several works that were produced in Spain.

Aluna Curatorial Collective: Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos.

The exhibition is constructed from a resource that could be thought of as an artistic or communicative procedure: the metonymy. The entire show proposes the significant action of the shoe‚the leitmotif-as a metonymy of a group of living experiences that encompasses intimate and collective transits. We are interested in walking as an action that produces and generates new visions of the world, new social and aesthetic understandings that emerge from the intellectual appropriation of space. Walking as a journey through the Americas that at the same time reflects contemporary crossroads, and that can flow into new forms of social imagination.

While curating, we excluded the shoe as a fetish and we proposed two exploration paths. The first is the personal-biographical through intimate works that explore the particular way in which shoes make evident the tension between absence-presence and contain the life story of their owners. The second is the historical-collective, since shoes allow us to track the traces of the darkest chapters in the history of the continent: They are memorabilia that endure even after the disappearance of the bodies in the mass graves, in the exoduses, in the overcrowded prisons, in the migrations, in Ariadne’s labyrinths that lead to the “Minotaur of Violence.”

Installation views of “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” at Aluna Art Foundation, curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (August-October 2012).

In this sense, “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes” encompasses the field of social representation and a temporality that can be traced back to the history of art itself-they are present even in cave art-but that are also inscribed in recent chapters of contemporary history. At the same time, it is an invitation to contemplate the recurrence of works that are related to human movement in very diverse ways.

The exhibition has a strong photographic and videographic component, though it also includes installations, engravings and two performances. In this way, it is a personal and social experience through an artistic trail that evokes ‘Theory of the Dérive’ by Guy Debord. The exposition is an invitation to let yourself go, to get lost in the urban space, to rediscover-in a sensitive and intellectual way–a series of shades that we tend to overlook in the automatic and homogenized walk on our everyday walk to work. Ever since the 19th century when Baudelaire proposed the enlightened phrase ‘Go out, walk, get lost,’ the practice of this intellectual and transformative walk has been at the base of artistic and philosophical movements like Situationism, which ultimately proposed other ways of being in the world. Last but not least, “Walking” is an invitation to humility and to human warmth, as was demonstrated by Andrés Michelena’s performance REC.over, to the solidarity that supposes putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and which reclaims, in a kind of group therapy, an experience of human knowledge from the thinking and the walking of others.

R.C. - How was Aluna Art Foundation born? What is your mission? What are the purposes behind this initiative?

Adriana Herrera - Aluna Art Foundation was founded in 2011 as a way to open and amplify the possibilities and the work spaces available to us as curators. The purpose was to fill a void in the city, since curated projects that involve local artists were almost nonexistent, which cause the artists’ opportunities to communicate with the international scene to be reduced. We knew we did not want to work nor operate as a gallery and that we needed a legal and juridical structure that would allow us to function. So we opened up an alternative curatorial space in the form of a nonprofit organization, with headquarters in Miami, our city, although that does not limit us from working anywhere else. In this way we created a model different from that of a gallery since we neither represent artists nor store their work, even though we can be-as has happened-a way for the artists to insert themselves into the market. Our work is that of curators that have an independent space at their disposal in order to project the different explorations that generate the exhibition projects that we do as Aluna Curatorial Collective, which is our signature and how we identify ourselves. We decided from the beginning that we would not bend to consecrated tendencies, or to the hegemony of the established and recognized, and that we would exhibit experimental proposals, engaging the limits of thought.

Installation view “After Neo-Expressionism: Diaries on the Edge of Roughness,” at Barrio Workshop Art Space, curated by Willy Castellanos Simons, Aluna Art Foundation (November 2011 – January 2012).

G.C. - Even though we have done curatorial work for museums and galleries, in this provisional space in Flagler 172 we are trying out a new format that would finance itself from our common work and our own resources. This is our biggest challenge since we are professionals of culture. And we are also not decidedly attached to the space. In fact, we also work as independent curators for various institutions as we have been doing, but in the Aluna Art Fondation headquarters we can put up our curatorial visions as if we were ‘at home,’ with full liberty. In an autonomous way, without obeying the interest of a particular collection, bringing together the work of known and unknown artists, we are providing the city with a type of dialogue between the local and international scene, which conducts its mostly collective inquiries around current practices and visions of art in its relation to society.

R.C. - Today, the word ‘curator’ is a very fashionable word. What is curating for you? What does curating involve? What challenges face independent curators in current times?

A.H. - For us curating is a practice-of selection, of dialogue with and between the works, of display-that causes an experience of knowledge, capable of generating a vision and, ultimately, of engaging the intimate and social imagination. It is a job that involves a process of accompanying in the creation and the unfolding of art works, in order to trigger a way of thought production that moves around, that does not have property, that is not static, but that becomes alive with every spectator that it moves. This creation of visions generates sensibility, new relationships to the personal and collective reality, and, above all, new imaginative possibilities for everyone. For us, it is vital to cross the abysm that has been separating the general public from contemporary art. We want to generate processes of dialogue that allow us to get closer to the thought process of the artist and experience the work as a hopefully transformative, lived experience that in any case is capable of mobilizing ideas and imaginations.

Installation view “Maria Thereza Negreiros: Offerings,” at The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami. Curated by Adriana Herrera and Francine Birdbragher (January 25 – April 1, 2012).

G.C. - The curator is a producer of artistic theory, of aesthetic, sociological and cultural knowledge; and in general, of all the information that he or she researches and synthesizes, and whose resulting hypothesis is put into practice through the realization of an exhibition. In this sense the presence of the curator is essential in the qualification of this ‘everything’ that we know as the system of art. Every curatorial job should be the result of an investigation; every exposition should be the proof that this investigation resulted in certain conclusions. Particularly, and although we have also worked in monographic projects, we are interested in collective expositions that are thematic. For both of us, challenges are also opportunities: Independent curators can work without compromises and outside of the margins of the market, without circumscribing ourselves to dominant practices.

In the first exhibition in Aluna’s space, we invoked a phrase by Kandinsky about the artist that we apply to our curating work. It talks about becoming deaf and blind to the demands of a specific time, but obeying your interior needs; the artist learns to use forbidden and unforbidden media with the same ease and to come into contact with a transformative dimension. As independent curators we can choose the works that move people because of that, because they disobey tendencies. We have worked in projects with artists as famous as Damien Hirst-we presented his work in dialogue with the Bolivian artist Sonia Falcone in a private institution in Monaco-but at the same time we have included artists that have been working by themselves for decades without ever having an individual exhibition. The great curators of the 20th century were capable of seeing and naming the movements that corresponded to their time or of visualizing the emergence of artistic production in different places in the world. Maybe the curators of the 21st century need to return to Schiller’s dream, which cites Jacques Rancière in one of his essays. The theorist invokes the dream of a horizon in which aesthetics sustain the promise of ‘a new world of art, and a new life for individuals and communities.’ We are also interested in the idea of ‘radicant’ art, according to Borriaud, which tries to demolish the hegemonic structure of power. What is powerful is the idea of transforming art into a common experience, something alive, significant and transformative.

Installations view “Transformed Interceptions: José Pacheco Silva,” at Bakehouse Art Complex, curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (February 8 – March 1, 2013).

R.C. - How does Aluna manage to give consideration to the diverse artistic production that a multicultural city like Miami generates?

A.H. - It is a natural process precisely because of the nature of this creation and because of the diversity of the artists’ background. It is not something that is produced by the curatorial work but that is in the atmosphere itself. We work with Latin-American artists as well as Anglo-Saxon artists, and we accept proposals in all mediums. What we are interested in is the conceptual coherence and the continuous creation of a dialogue.

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R.C. - We have faced almost a decade of economic crisis. What is your opinion about the generation of more creative initiatives in curating these days despite the crisis-or maybe because of it?

G.C. - Downtown Miami is a reflection of the surging of alternative spaces, either managed by artists for artists or, as in our case, by curators that explore ways to unfold the production of art outside of established systems. Sales can thus avoid the usual channels or be displaced to other spaces. Without a doubt, however, the uninterested support of people that genuinely love dialogue with art or the possibilities of state financial support for non-lucrative or non-sellable projects, like many of the performances we have presented, are key. In the same way, like we have said, you have to work, not looking for profit but looking to survive, betting everything on coherence.

Installation view “Ivonne Ferrer: (R)Evolution Comics,” at Aluna Art Foundation, curated by Adriana Herrera, Willy Castellanos and Aldo Menéndez (November 3 – December 22, 2013).

One lesson is that it is possible, even during a crisis, to keep fighting against windmills. Until now we have worked in an independent way and without being blanketed by institutions. Multiple collective projects like “Regarding the Spiritual in Art,” with explorations of a dozen local artists; we have investigated in the persistence of postminimalist expressions posing a dialogue between a local artist, Patricia Schnall Gutiérrez, and another one from Louisville, Chris Radtke, whose works connect art to life and the map of the feminine body. We have also supported individual experimental projects, like the interactive performance Mad Cow that Billie Grace Lynn performed in different and moving sections around violence against animals. Our project room is called like that, Mad Cow, because of this particularly strong work that marked an instance of experimentation, where later on we had one of Carola Bravo’s video installations constructed specifically for the space, erasing the frontiers between map and territory, and object and presentation; and where we installed Cesar Rey’s hanging sculptures, very pure in form, but made with garbage and industrial material he found.

We also have the Focus Locus as a spatial and intentional zone that we dedicate to the thought of photography, as one of the most impacting and difficult to classify media of the last decades. Because of its direct participation with both artistic language and mass media, and because of its paradoxical relationship to reality, photography is a medium that reflects the reformulation of the paradigms of representation as well as the formation of new imaginaries. In this space we exhibit pieces of diverse nature such as Inercia de Bejuco by Ernesto Oroza, an artist who clarifies that he is not a photographer but that he uses photography to explore ways of massive design that have arisen because of social necessity in public and private spaces. We invited María Martínez-Cañas to expose a series of photograms created directly from the play between her body and objects projected over fabric with an amplifying light; and we later exhibited the first retrospective in the United States of Cuban Raúl Cañibano in the classic but also timeless line of documental photography.

“Seminal Art ) We All Are Co-Creators” Project, at The Siberian Center for Contemporary Art in Novosibirsk, Western Siberia. Participating artists: Sonia Falcone and Artnold Jiménez. Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (August 24 – September 30, 2013).

In the acquisition of funds to produce exhibitions we have resorted to models such as the bartering of time and services that in a way reminds us of Vidokle and Julieta Aranda’s proposal of Time/Banking. Perhaps the most important thing of artistic and curatorial imagination is that it shows the possibility of ‘doing’ by looking for loopholes in the system.

R.C. - Based on your experience, how do you balance your points of view regarding the theme selected for a show and external factors such as the artists’ interests, the cultural politics of the institutions that host the show, and the expectations of the public?

A.H. - To be honest, the institutions that have received us have been very open; we would say that they had a very clear understanding of the necessity for a curatorial vision. At the Bakehouse Art Complex we proposed for the first time in history that there be one artist selected annually, and that is the show we curated José Pacheco Silva’s individual exhibition, which undoubtedly changed his career. At the Centro Cultural Español they received the exhibition “Memories of the Oikos: The House Represented,” with works from immigrant artists in Miami. The exhibition included works from collections like that of Félix González-Torres, which invokes the dilemma of being and not being in a place, and a series of works that cover several decades and nationalities relating to the formation of the city itself. This exhibition was a mirror of a multicultural and flexible identity, which is constitutive of Miami and one of the main reasons of its potential in becoming a cultural epicenter. We have also participated in dialogue with other curators, and there is a growing hunger for knowledge in the city that facilitates the course of our proposals. We are preparing a participatory and social exhibition for the Frost Art Museum. Galleries understand more and more the importance of curatorial input, be it in individual or collective exhibitions.

Installation views of “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Identities in Transit,” at Aluna Art Foundation, curated by Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos (December 8 – February 25, 2014).

R.C. - Do you think that both public and private cultural institutions in South Florida provide enough support to independent projects such as Aluna? In your opinion, what is needed?

G.C. - There is always a need for more support. The contribution of institutions such as the Knight Foundation is extraordinary, but it is important that its directors have a more direct relationship with new alternative spaces, that they visit them in person. Either way, we have to recognize the role of increasing support, not only in terms of grant opportunities, but in the type of support that is given by, for example, Downtown Development, by offering exhibition guides, and even, at certain times of the year, transportation services. We have to organize the city’s events better. For instance, the Coral Gables Gallery Night coincides right now with the Downtown Art Walk, and that’s not convenient. But more than anything, it is important that concentration of aid that is reserved for the Art Basel Miami Beach period be extended throughout the year so that, for example, there is transportation and guided tours at least once a month to each of the spaces. The public art projects that are given almost exclusively to the big museums have to be more open to initiatives from alternative organizations. Another field that requires more aid is the pedagogic. The city can and should have spaces of support for lectures and talk programs. Aluna Art Foundation has received support of different private collectors or art lovers and groups such as Jack Thomas Realtors and Barlington Group.

R.C. - Do you plan to work with other independent curators and institutions from outside Florida or abroad?

A.H. - Of course. We have plans to work with various curators in the city and with a young artist for an interdisciplinary project. Later on we plan to realize exchanges with curators from other regions like Central and South America. In the same way that, invited by Fugalternativa, a collective of Salvadorian artists, we curated an exhibition in Miami with three of its artists, we expect to work with a network of alternative spaces in other countries in order to allow for cultural exchange.

R.C. - Which of the exhibitions that you have curated do you especially remember?

G.C. - “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes” is of particular value because there is a dialogue between the local and the international scene, for the amount of artists that it reunites, 23, and for the profound capacity to dialogue, not only with a specialized public, but any visitor. We hope that every new exhibition will be memorable for us.

R.C. - Can you share with our readers your upcoming curatorial projects?

A.H. - In Aluna’s headquarters there will be several projects with invited curators. One of these will present new languages of emerging photography in Miami, and the selection process will be done with teachers from the city. We are looking for support to turn this exhibition into a parallel public art project. Commemorating the 20 years of the Crisis of the Balseros (rafters), we will have at Centro Cultural Español, Miami, an exhibition that will transform documental photography in a way that extends-and questions-the mid frontier. At the same time there will be work on the recovery of historical memory carried out with the participation of the witnesses and participants of that exodus, and a series of talks on the nature of the archive and the frontiers of narrative tales. Two other projects for the end of the year will be based around the relationship between architecture and the utopia, and the notion of the invisible, deconstructing the children’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Robe’ in a paradoxical way.

Installation views of “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Identities in Transit,” at Aluna Art Foundation, curated by Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos (December 8 – February 25, 2014).

For 2015, we have three approved projects with diverse institutions that present individual works by artists, each one with a strong and different potential. In the Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design, we will present a retrospective exhibition of Gladys Triana, a Cuban artist almost 80 years old, presenting her processes of artistic rupture with works in diverse mediums -paintings, drawings and installations-and the gradual discovery of a language for the transcendence that led her to a powerful oeuvre of abstract photography and video.

At the Frost Art Museum we will curate a participative project developed by an emerging Puerto Rican artist Lorna Otero, who is in the second stage of the construction of a type of album in the form of a roaming tree, with family portraits that reflect the transformation of this imaginary in South Florida. The exhibition includes multiple participatory and interdisciplinary dynamics and the proposal of an oeuvre that is ultimately made by a community. The first stage of Otero’s proposal was curated in Puerto Rico by Laura Bravo. For the Durban Segnini Gallery we are working on an exhibition on the Colombian artist Germán Botero, which will be his first exposition in Miami. The proposal is a surprising transformation of the Durban Segnini Gallery space that up until now has incarnated the ‘white cube.’ Also, we will have an interesting program of art talks, creating an interactive dialogue with the community.

Raisa Clavijo is an art historian and art critic based in Miami. She is the founder and editor of ARTPULSE and ARTDISTRICTS magazines.