Friday 21 December 2012

12/12/12 LETTER FROM OSCAR NIEMEYER'S UNFINISHED 'PERMANENT INTERNATIONAL FAIRGROUND' IN TRIPOLI, LEBANON

Oscar Niemeyer's unfinished 'Permanent International Fairground' in Tripoli, Lebanon

Heliport and Space Museum


Director's Residence



the International Pavilion



United Nations Syrian refugee centre in Tripoli, Lebanon


view of the fairground from the Quality Inn

Mural on abandoned building on Fairground, probably done when building was occupied by the Syrian army in the 1990s

unfinished section of the International Pavilion


Letter from Tripoli, Lebanon
Pablo Leon de la Barra
(a version of this text appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Spike Art Quarterly)

October 17, 2012

My dear friend,

I’m back in Tripoli.

This time I came by myself. I took the bus from the Charles Helou bus station, one of my favourite concrete buildings in Beirut (a concrete freeway with a transit station under it). The journey was quite fast, an hour and twenty minutes, and it was very beautiful, the sun was setting to the left on Lebanon’s sea horizon as we drove the coast up north. It’s amazing how people in Beirut complain about Tripoli being so far! An example of Beirut’s centralism, this in a country which you can cross from South to North, from the border to Israel to the border with Syria, in about four hours, including the stops at the military checkpoints. I thought it was important this time to come by myself, without the normal entourage, to try to be able to have a normal experience of Tripoli and the site, something which I haven’t been able to do in the last two visits. I think if we are inviting artists and thinkers to Tripoli, which is a great responsibility, they should be able to feel safe and move around as freely as possible. I also think about how art will engage with reality here, in a place where reality is so charged with meaning, and where reality sometimes surpasses any attempt of art to engage with it. People in Beirut have constantly told us that Tripoli is more dangerous, especially with the current Syrian situation and with the Syrian border being thirty minutes away. That we shouldn’t do something here. I remember when you first told me you wanted to do something in Lebanon, the country where all your grandparents and grandmothers were born before migrating to Mexico in the early XX century, escaping the rule of the Ottoman Empire. It was then that I suggested we do something at the International Fairground which had been designed by Brasilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1963, and which hadn’t been finished due to the Lebanese Civil War which started in 1975 and continued until 1990.

Once in Tripoli I took a taxi from the bus stop to the hotel. Telling the taxi driver I’m here to visit the fairground, he replies ‘Why are you visiting this buildings? They are old! They have never been used! They should be demolished!’ I’m staying at the Quality Inn Hotel. It’s the hotel that’s located inside the fairground, originally intended to be the housing building for employees of the International Fairground, a building which was supposed to be similar to a Le Corbusier’s Unite d’ Habitation, but now looks like a generic Holiday Inn. The hotel is the only chain hotel in Tripoli, a city which seldom receives foreign visitors o tourists. As it’s the only big hotel in Tripoli, it’s constantly used by locals for weddings. This night the entrance is protected by the police and the military. There is a wedding and a political rally inside. Since we started doing the research for the Tripoli project, I’ve been trying to understand Lebanese politics and religious sub-divisions, which for an outsider seem impossible to understand. The carpet in the corridors to the rooms is quite worn out, too many wine and cigarette stains from too many weddings happening at the hotel. The room’s furniture looks like from the 70s, although the hotel must have only opened after the war ended. From my room I can see the Niemeyer concrete buildings. My heart is beating. I’m so happy and excited to be here again.

I go down to the lobby and ask the female concierge what time can I visit the fairground, she says that the site is open early in the morning, and that I can enter from behind the hotel. I also ask her if it’s safe to visit the city centre of Tripoli. She responds ‘Of course it’s safe, do you believe everything you read in the media? We get the same images in television of drug violence in Mexico and I’m sure life is not violent all the time there!’ She is right, still, I ask her about the violence that happened a month ago, when a group of young angry men burned down the Kentucky Fried Chicken located two blocks away from the fairground as a response to the youtube trailer of a movie offending Allah. In the photos in internet newspapers, the ones who burn down the Kentucky and who are attacking North American imperialism, are wearing t-shirts with slogans written in English and with logos of American brands!

I decide not to wait until the next day. It’s already dark, I go out of the hotel and through the backdoor, which happens to be open, and sneak inside the fairground. I walk slowly, seeing the silhouettes of the different buildings, recognizing each one of them and saying hello to them like if they were old friends. After having visited the Niemeyer archives in Rio de Janeiro last September, I know much more about the project than the first time I was here last March. I can also smell all the vegetation which at nights feels so much more present. It feels like being inside a labyrinth of concrete buildings and vegetation. I imagine all the romantic activities which might happen or could happen at night inside the fairground. I also imagine which artists we could invite, and what works could be in dialogue with the different buildings that were built as part of the fair programme: the Experimental Theatre, the Open Air Theatre, the Space Museum, the Housing Museum, the International Pavilion and the Lebanese Pavilion. I remember what Raafat a young architect from what seems like a wealthy Tripoli’s family told me ‘Do not do an art event for the elite, do instead a big barbeque where you invite the whole of Tripoli to come for a picnic and you have local musicians playing music’. I also remember what a Beirut curator told us ‘We don’t want people like you who come and parachute into our context and leave afterwards, we have seen many like you come and go.’ I also think of a film done a couple of years ago by french artist Adrien Missika on the fairground site. The film is very simple, and it’s the kind of approach I would like for any artistic intervention that could happen in the site. Missika enters the Experimental Theatre and starts making sounds by moving the steel cables hanging from the unfinished dome’s ceiling. It has a practical economy of working with what is there, but also has humour: afterwards he goes outside and climbs the shadow of a palm tree cast on the dome.

The next morning I wake up at sunrise, from my hotel window I can see the fairground, the window produces a magnifying effect, making the buildings appear closer than what they really are, almost as if they were almost inside the room. It’s chilly inside, I go inside the fairground which is now called Rashid Karami International Fair in honour of prime minister Karami, murdered on 1 June 1987 by a bomb exploding in his helicopter. There’s an old man in his jogging suit walking his dog around the fair, further ahead two young men in shorts jogging around, then a group of three women with their head covered doing their morning walk. It is actually those who walk and jog the only ones who really use the place, apart from the few days a year when it’s open for a concert, the marathon, the book fair, or an awards event. I think of Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo, designed in 1951 by Niemeyer with gardens by Burle Marx, where the biennal and the Museum of Modern Art are, and how alive it is, always busy and people use it all the time. On the contrary, the International Fairground, although unfinished, is almost always empty. I also think of other Niemeyer buildings, especially late Niemeyer architecture, for example the Latin American Memorial Centre, and how the architecture there is rough and badly finished, very different from early Niemeyer buildings, and try to imagine how the fairground would be and how would it function if it had been finished.

I continue thinking on the history of the fair. I’m interested on the fact that in 1962, the Lebanese government through Amado Chalhoub, a Lebanese-Brasilian immigrant, invited Oscar Niemeyer who had recently completed the construction of Brasilia, the newly built modernist capital of Brasil. It is interesting that the Lebanese government didn’t invite Le Corbusier, maybe he was too old, too expensive, or too busy building Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab in India. More probably they didn’t want Le Corbusier who was a French man, as selecting him would mean continuing the French colonial influence on the country. Selecting Niemeyer would also allow for a South-South dialogue between countries not aligned either to the USA or the USSR. I think about this South-South dialogue, about the importance to reconnect and open Lebanense culture to other connections beyond the Middle East, with the Mediterranean with whom they share so much in common, but also with the Americas, where so many Lebanese migrated during different moments in the XX century.

In his memories Niemeyer complains that when invited to develop the site, he wasn’t allowed to choose the site, but was given the plot of land which used to be an orange farm. He would have rather the fair built closer to the sea. The original Niemeyer project also had a series of housing blocks around the fair, which fortunately were not built. The fairground complex was not built from tabula rasa, destroying previous layers of city, but does not connect to the city from which it feels separated. If you see the fairground on Google Maps, it seems like an oval crater or bomb happened in the middle of the city. As the next day an intelligent women from Tripoli tells me ‘People in Tripoli don’t know the history of the fair, so for them it’s not part of their history.’ I think of the dangers the fairground faced during the 2000s when it was in danger of being destroyed. I think of the two plans which fortunately didn’t happen, one of transforming it into a Disneyland kind of Middle Eastern theme park, the other one of renting it long term to the Chinese as a Chinese import centre for the Middle East. During the time many architects and intellectuals fought for the protection of the place. Due to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, both plans were abandoned, as the foreign investors thought it was not safe to invest in these projects.

I think the Fairground urgently needs to be recognised by the Unesco as a World Heritage site, as a place which needs to be protected from destruction, and as one of the only two examples of big scale International Brasilian Modernism in the Middle East (the other one is the University of Constantine in Algeria, which is much more inaccessible than the Tripoli Fairground). I think of the fairground as being already an open air museum/park, and which only needs for people to be aware of the history of the place. I think of the unfinished fairground as being a metaphor for many unfinished histories, for personal histories that didn’t happen and lives that were ended due the Lebanese Civil War. As such I believe the concrete buildings must remain unfinished, as they are now, as a memory of that specific period of time, as a monument of survival. In the same way the site must be used, be alive, open and democratic, and exist as a way of healing scars and trauma. The fair needs to be open and accessible to everyone, a space of freedom, a concrete oasis, an open air museum, a museum of itself.

At this moment I’m stopped by a security guard because I’m taking photos. Soon I realize that a small section of the big long curved partly finished building is occupied by the United Nations Refugee Agency as a registering centre for refugees. Inside are a series of rooms built with a wood structure covered with plastic subdivisions. It’s more real than a Thomas Hirschhorn artwork and doesn’t need press photographs of murdered victims to make you understand what has been happening in the region. The guard takes me to the fairground offices where I explain I’m not a journalist but a Mexican tourist staying at the Quality Inn and interested in Niemeyer. In the street, outside the centre, I can see old Mercedes taxis arriving from the border with Syria bringing exiled Syrian refugees to register to the centre before they go to the refugee camps.

The following day, Friday I have a meeting with a local NGO with whom if we do the project in Tripoli we might collaborate. The NGO has been working with children from the Jabal Mohsen area, a neighbourhood where since the civil war Alawite Muslims and Sunni Muslims have lived in confrontation. The conflict has intensified since the Syrian civil war, with the Alawite’s supporting the Syrian Alawite dictator Bashar Assad, and shootings between the two fractions being everyday common activity. The NGO mixes children and teenagers from both fractions, in order to erase ideological differences, and has them play, learn and do activities together, supporting them through their studies all the way to higher education in order to get them out of the poverty and violence cycle. We visit the main street in Jabal Mohsen, where snipers normally shoot each other, and where facades of buildings have framed photographs of Assad. Here the NGO’s director tells to me ‘See we are in the most dangerous area in Tripoli and nothing is happening! You can do your art event in Tripoli and everything will be ok.’ Today is Friday, which she tells me, is the most dangerous day, because after prayer, people get excited with the mullah’s words and afterwards go and commit violent acts, and she insists ‘You see, nothing is happening.’

A few hours later we are driving back to Beirut after lunch. The NGO’s director receives a phone call telling her there has been a terrorist attack in Beirut. Afterall, it is Friday! We soon learn it’s a car bomb, a block away from the hotel where I normally stay, near the square where your mother’s cousin, Bachir Gemayel was assassinated on 14 September 1982, less than a month after being elected president. We are back in Beirut, there’s lot of traffic to enter the city. The NGO director drops me in the street because she can’t go further into the city. I move to a new hotel, as streets are blocked. The next days the city is quiet without traffic, streets are closed by the military, shops are closed, there’s been some tires burned in some streets as protest. Through the news we have learned that the bomb was aimed in killing Wissam al-Hassan, a Sunni Muslim born in Tripoli in 1965 and head of the intelligence branch of Lebanon's Security Forces, this calms people a bit, at least it’s not a random attack against normal civilians, although many civilians did die. A Lebanese friend calls me Saturday morning and tells me I should leave Lebanon straight away, that things are only going to get worse. My flight anyway is on Monday morning so I decide to stay until then.

My dear friend, when you invited me to visit Lebanon last March you had the beautiful idea of doing an event on the 12 of December of 2012. An art and culture event which would make no distinction between religions, politics and nationalities and which trough art would bring hope to the region. Due to the current situation it’s difficult to do something there today. Many of our friends and guests do not feel comfortable about coming to Tripoli or Lebanon within the current situation. Any project happening there involves a longer term involvement of our part, we should aim for something that has a more permanent effect on the area. Still, I believe we must do as the people in Lebanon have done during the last 40 years, continue working in the project until it’s not possible to work on it anymore. As architect Makram El Kadi, from LEFT architects and architect of the Beirut Exhibition Centre told me when I told him about people’s resistance to doing something in Tripoli “Don't listen to negative opinions everybody is afraid of doing anything in Lebanon, so at the end, nothing ever gets done.”

In the same way as the International Fairground which was never finished or inaugurated and to which the international guests never arrived, our project probably won’t happen on the 12/12/12. Still, I keep the hope that it might happen in a different way in the future, with a different rhythm than most biennales or art exhibitions. Maybe whatever we do there will appear and disappear, or maybe it will only exist as a rumour.

Again I thank you for your invitation to think with you a possible project to happen in Tripoli and for sharing with me the beautiful country of your foremothers and fathers.

With love, always,

Pablo 

(see images of March 2012 visit to Niemeyer's International Fairground in Tripoli here)


Thursday 20 December 2012

TETINE AT WHITE CUBICLE 'THEY WANT TO GET RID OF THE STREET VENDORS (ACTION N3)'





Tetine inside the White Cubicle Toilet Gallery!





Tetine's Black Semiotics diagrams





visitors lining up to steal Tetine's records



George and Dragon's customers taking their Tetine CD's and vynil's from the White Cubicle. When all the CDs have disappeared from the wall, the exhibition will disappear.


Tetine, bigger than life


Eliete + Bruno = Tetine behind the decks at George and Dragon



Eliete signing Tetine's take away records


Monsieur Copeland with his Tetine vinyl

and James Jeanette with her Tetine CDs


special impromptu performance by James Jeanette being Mariane Unfaithful

and Tetine inside the White Cubicle Toilet Gallery


White Cubicle Toilet Gallery is honoured to present a special exhibition as part of the celebration of George and Dragon's 10th anniversary:

TETINE
THEY WANT TO GET RID OF THE STREET VENDORS (Action N3)
Tuesday December 18, 2012
8:00 PM to Midnight
Exhibition by Tetine, and Tetine on the dj decks!
The George and Dragon Public House, 2 Hackney Road, London E2

They Want To Get Rid of The Street Vendors is part of Tetine's ongoing series of informal DIY guerilla street/video actions on the semantics of self-piracy, sound object disfunctionality, reconfiguration of goods & auto sampling tactics. An improvised ‘camelo’ (informal street selling point) with banners, selected items and manufactured CDs will be set up at the glorious White Cubicle toilette. They will be there to emanate a sexually charged anti-industry "wall of sound”. Pop and anti-pop eating themselves. The death of the record. The record of the time. Visitors are encouraged to unglue Tetine's cds from the wall and take them home!

FILE UNDER:
SALE / DAMAGED GOODS / FOR FREE / FOR LIFE / MADE IN BRAZIL / MADE-MADE-MADE / DO IT YOURSELF BEFORE ITS DONE TO YOU /

MADE IN CHINA / PRINTED IN THE UK / THE ANTI-BARCODE THEORY

CASH CONVERTERS / ILLEGALITY / TROPICAL PUNK / LICK MY FAVELA

FROM A FOREST NEAR YOU / FUNK CARIOCA / TWISTED SONICS

THE SEXUAL LIFE OF THE SAVAGES / DISPLEACEMENT OF SEXUAL IMPULSES / FOURTH WORLD

BANNER _ TESCO BONDE DO TETAO (not for sale)

BANNER _ TATI (not for sale)

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TETINE:
Tetine are artists/musicians Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado. The pair met in 1995 in Brazil while taking part in the local underground art punk scene of São Paulo. Since then they have created a multitude of works from baile funk performances to electronica, spoken word & atonal orchestral music incursions for plays, from experimental radio shows to ritualistic street actions, artist films, installations and independent curatorial projects. Bruno and Eliete have carved an unusual artistic path constantly exploring the boundaries between music, art, video and performance. They have made a series of ritualistic performances and have extensively exhibited art films and video throughout Europe and South America. The duo’s live events range from rock gigs to gallery installations; from opening ‘Tropicalia – A Revolution in Brazilian Culture’ exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London to numerous art performances for galleries, museums, art spaces, cinemas and festivals around the world. Actions were shown from Paris (Palais de Tokyo), to Chicago (The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music Festival) and Sonar including live performances at Museu Serralves in Porto, A Foundation, Liverpool Biennal, Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, Whitechapel Gallery, Frankfurter Kunstverein, National Museum of Contemporary Art of Norway, Sternessen Museum amongst many others.

A wild mix-up of Punk-Funk/NewWave/Post-Punk/Baile-Bass, Tetine’s music is frequently described as an unconventional mixture of raw punky energy and attitude with musical influences that range from artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Tuxedomoon to Kraftwerk & Can, but also incorporating heavily the more experimental side of Brazilian pop experimentalists such as Rogerio Sganzerla, Helena Ignes, Os Mutantes, Novos Baianos and the Rio Baile Funk scene. Tetine have also been instrumental in bringing the Brazilian underground music scene to the attention of the UK for a number of years. They compiled, presented and mixed the first ever album of Baile Funk outside of Brazil (Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca Mixed by Tetine, 2004 released on Mr Bongo Records) as well as an essential primer to early-80s Post-Punk from Sao Paulo, the acclaimed album The Sexual Life of The Savages, released on Soul Jazz Records in 2006). Both these albums have influenced an entire new generation of DJs, beat-makers and music writers around the world. Tetine have also run the Slum Dunk radio show on Resonance Fm 104.4 - pretty much since the station's inception in 2003. On Slum Dunk they broadcast a multitude of obscure and unexpected music from Brazil and beyond – including live interviews with hundreds of special guests, live and improvised sets of other artists and experimental broadcasting.

For complete biography, selected performances, projects and discography please go to: www.tetine.net

**********************************************************
The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery measures 1.40 by 1.40 metres, is located within the Ladies Toilet of the George and Dragon, and works with no budget, staff or boundaries. Since 2005 White Cubicle has been presenting a discerning programme of local and international manifestations as an antidote to London’s sometimes extremely commodified art scene. Past exhibitions have included Deborah Castillo, Gregorio Magnani, Butt Magazine, Federico Herrero, Terence Koh, i-Cabin, Steven Gontarski, Pixis Fanzine/Princess Julia and Hanah, General Idea and avaf, Basso Magazin, Carl Hopgood, Giles Round, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Superm, (Brian Kenny and Slava Mogutin), Elkin Calderon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Calvin Holbrook/Hate Magazine, Husam el Odeh, Simon Popper, Fur, Dik Fagazine, Rick Castro/Abravanation, Jean Michel Wicker, Noki, Ellen Cantor, Karl Holmqvist, Julie Verhoeven, Aldo Chaparro, Esther Planas, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Luis Venegas, Twinklife, Rocky Alvarez, Benedetto Chirco, STH Magazine, Elmgreen & Dragset, Francesc Ruiz, Sico Carlier, Stefan Benchoam, Thomas Dozol, Marco Rountree, Aleksandra Mir, Cameron Irving, the Hundley twins…

In words of artist Aleksandra Mir "White Cubicle has become the stamp of approval for any self respecting artist of our generation."
Like White Cubicle at White Cubicle's Facebook page: 

Monday 17 December 2012

'LIMA ROOFTOP ECOLOGY' CURATED BY CARLOS LEON XJIMENEZ, AN APEXART FRANCHISE IN LIMA, PERU


Taller de Artesanía Salvaje (TAS) Blueprint, rooftop painted blue


Colectivo C.H.O.L.O.'s photomural, images of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, including local transvestites



neighbouring rooftop

CITIO, 3 Funciones 3, occupation of rooftop with new uses including poetry club

Lima Rooftop Ecology curator Carlos Leon-Xjimenez inviting guests to climb the viewing platform



Rooftop viewing platform


Lima Urban Laboratory microgarden installation


Karen Bernedo's documentary video of the inhabitants of the area

Lima Rooftop Ecology office

anonymous mural on rooftop


press release:
LIMA ROOFTOP ECOLOGY
Organized by Carlos Leon-Xjimenez
An apexart franchise in Lima,
Featuring work by:
Karen Bernedo, Christians Luna, CITIO (Ciudad Transdiciplinar), Colectivo C.H.O.L.O. and Taller de Artesania Salvaje
On View November 3-December 1
In Zona30: Jr. Carabaya 953, San Martin Square. Cercado de Lima, Lima, Peru
http://apexart.org/exhibitions/leonxjimenez.php

In Lima, a place where it never rains, rooftops provide a unique perspective from which to reimagine and reinterpret the city. A kind of parallel city, Lima’s rooftops are a fragile, hidden landscape, full of unregulated possibilities within an already existing architectural infrastructure. Lima Rooftop Ecology explores the potential of art interventions in the urban landscape, inviting the audience to rethink protected cultural heritage in a reality where stagnation frames urban decay.

The exhibition will take place on different rooftops in Lima’s historical city center that surround Zona30, an art residency program. For the exhibition, artists, activists, and architects will create site-specific artworks and participate in a series of round-table discussions, addressing art and its potential for activism and interpretations of the local urban landscape.

Carlos León-Xjimenez is an artist and independent curator based in Lima, Peru, and Berlin, Germany. His projects are focused on the topics of memory, gender, public space, cultural heritage, and the city. He studied anthropology at Catholic University of Peru in Lima and has a Master in Fine Arts in Public Art from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, where he is currently a PhD Candidate in Architecture in Urban Heritage.

exhibition text:
Like small deserts, isolated plots, and terrain-vagues, Lima's rooftops are suspended spaces with particular ecologies. In a city that never sees rain, the flat rooftops accumulate dust brought by the wind from surrounding mountains and sandy coastal areas.

Looking over the rooftops of Lima's historical center, which includes buildings from the 16th to the 20th Century, a process of stagnation and decay is evident. This city center embodies the challenges and problems of development in an unorganized megacity. In 1991 UNESCO incorporated it into the World Heritage List and, while the ensuing tourism-oriented recovery included architectural cosmetic surgery the poverty and social problems were left untouched behind the area's walls. Since 2004 a slow gentrification process led by private investors has focused on the purchase and renovation of office buildings from the 20th Century.

It is from this rooftop perspective that one gets a different insight into Lima's historical city center: approaching socio-cultural complexities, which are impossible to perceive from the street level. These rooftops are a kind of parallel city, but also a fragile, hidden landscape; a territory full of unregulated possibilities within an existing architectural infrastructure. It is also a space of struggle, survival, and a "right to the city." In opposite and yet complementary ways the streets and rooftops of Lima tell the story of the city. From this perspective the city is approached as a complex palimpsest of agendas, policies, and citizens in conflict and tension.

Lima Rooftop Ecology addresses the pre-conceived notions of urban landscape and habitat, generating specific interventions using the rooftops and their different ecologic complexities as a point of departure. The project reflects on the potential of the downtown rooftops, and promotes alternative perceptions and scenarios in the local urban landscape, serving as a case study in the potential of a neighborhood under protected heritage status.

A viewing platform, which serves as a central viewpoint for the project, has been installed on the rooftop of ZONA30 an art residency in the city center. This platform turns its back to the Plaza San Martin in the heart of Lima's historic center, focusing instead on the urban landscape visible towards the neighborhood of Contumaza and Lino Cornejo streets. It is on the rooftops of the nearby houses of this neighborhood that the works of participating artists, architects, and collectives have been installed to be seen and experienced from the platform at ZONA30.

For Lima Rooftop Ecology the participating artists have created site specific works that give form to different aspects, dimensions, and tensions around the "urban topography" of roofs, façades, and streets that serve as a porous skin between the private and the public.

Two of the works in the exhibition use traditional media—in a nontraditional setting—to engage with the area's residents. Karen Bernedo is a documentary and art filmmaker whose work is focused on the topics of memory, gender, and human rights issues connected to the armed conflict and political violence in Peru. For Lima Rooftop Ecology she has created a documentary video that serves as an activator for dialogue between neighbors. The collective C.H.O.L.O. is comprised of Nancy Viza, Wilder Ramos, and Marcelo Zevallos; since 2007 they have encouraged local cultural identity and environmental awareness with their work in low income districts of Lima and Callao. For Lima Rooftop Ecology, C.H.O.L.O. has developed a rooftop installation composed of photographs of local residents.

Other projects for Lima Rooftop Ecology include interventions in the urban environment that invite visitors to interact with the physical space of the rooftops. Taller de Artesanía Salvaje (TAS) (Wild Crafts Workshop) is a multidisciplinary group comprised of Teresa Cabrera, Cristián Alarcón, and Daniel Ramirez Corzo, that focus on activism and research in the social sciences, communications, and visual arts. Since 2007 their work has included video art, documentary film, and site-specific interventions, along with academic seminars and political activism. For the exhibition, TAS has used the roof of a local house as a place for architectural extension.

Christians Luna and his colleagues from the Lima Urban Laboratory (Pablo Díaz Mora and Diego Rodríguez), together with Michelle Álvarez and Fiorella Pugliesi, have created a micro-gardening installation. Luna is a visual artist, focused mainly on social behavior and also an activist, poet, and member of the ZONA30 team; Alvarez and Pugliesi are architects and landscape designers. Luna's work generates situations of interaction with different publics, addressing issues of pollution, social gaps, and communication absence. His colleagues for his project for Lima Rooftop Ecology are architects and landscape designers.

Lastly, the collective CITIO (trans-disciplinary city), comprised of Lisset Escudero, Carlos Tapia, and Javier Vera, have installed furniture and domestic objects to foster an unsolicited rooftop meeting and dialogue space with which to view the surrounding neighborhood. Through their ideas and actions, CITIO develops a process of exploration and experimentation with the concepts of city and citizenship, building bridges for trans-disciplinary work from architecture and urbanism.

It is intended that the role of art in this project is to create opportunities for unconventional thinking and looking at the city in other ways, from the margins, and to return to it and recalculate the urgent challenges ahead by reflecting on this urban landscape. What the project poses as subject is related to the agendas of urban planners, neighborhood organizations, politicians, and real estate investors. To citizens who want to participate in the making of the city and the creation of active public spaces, it presents political actors working in the here and now, thinking of a direct practice for today.

ONLINE PDF CATALOGUE (English/Spanish) TO DOWNLOAD:
http://apexart.org/images/leonxjimenez/leonxjimenez.pdf