Mexico has attracted the attention and imagination of generations of Europeans, among them such famous artists as Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein and Antonin Artaud. At the same time, Europe has long been an important point of departure for cultural developments in art and design, inspiring great Mexicans like Diego Rivera.
The invited artists from .move forward set out to explore their host country’s culture, as well as its famous forerunners, its cities and landscape, its politics and atmosphere while working on their own projects in the labs and studios of their hosting institutions.
The varieties of formats the artists use reflect the diversity of contemporary media art: From video and interactive installations to internet based works and performances. The particular media is not the most salient feature; the themes the artists chose to deal with are as various as the formats and include city and country, religion and science, tradition and migration, globalisation and climate change, tactical and technical media, reality and the virtual, anarchism and the capitalist appropriation of revolutionary icons.
The artistic projects realised by the Mexican and European stipend awardees will be shown during the Werkleitz Festival at the exhibition .move forward – new mexican and european media art in Halle (Saale) from October 5 - 21, 2012.
At the festival, the intercultural dialogue during the residency will involve the deployment of respondents. The experts invited by Werkleitz respond directly to the work of one of the participating artists in their catalogue texts and artist talks.
The accompanying film programmes reiterate the juxtaposition of inside and outside perspectives corresponding to the opposition of the native and the outsider gaze. In addition to Sergei Eisenstein’s famous unfinished work ¡Qué viva México!with live music from the Mexican cult band Sonido Changorama, the two programmes of artistic short film México afuera(Mexico from Outside) und México adentro (Mexico from Inside) portray and anatomise the fascinating ambiguities of the country.
Mexican based media artists have been invited to a two months residency at IMPAKT, (Utrecht, Netherlands), Bandits-Mages (Bourges, France), FACT (Liverpool, United Kingdom) and at Werkleitz Centre for Media Arts in Halle (Saale), Germany. European artists have been invited to a two months residency at Centro Multimedia in Mexico City and Centro de Arte y Nuevas Technologías (CANTE) in San Luis Potosí.
The main aim of the exchange is to enable cooperation between European and Mexican artists with overseas partner organisations on projects, establishing closer bonds between European and Mexican artists, media institutions and artistic communities.
After the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE) was successfully expanded into the European Media Art Network (EMAN) in 2008 and after its grant holders’ exhibition .move – new european media artin 2009 in Halle (Saale), EMAN now moves forward to the “New World” with EMARE MEX 2012–2013.
