ALEXIA TALA

Alexia Tala is an independent curator based in Santiago, Chile. She is currently co-curator of the 20th Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala, curator of the Printmaking Collectors Club of Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and artistic director of Plataforma Atacama, an organization that addresses the relationship between art and place in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Tala has curated solo exhibitions by a variety of artists, including Cadu, Marcelo Moscheta and Hamish Fulton, and was co-curator of Deformes, the 1st Performance Biennial in Chile, as well as the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Brazil and the 4th San Juan Poly/graphic Triennial, in Puerto Rico, among other projects.

Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy. Seattle: Baypress, 1995.

I consider this book about social practices, essential reading to understand not only the transformation of public art in the 1990s, but contemporary art in general in these last decades. Furthermore, it was born in a specific context of dissemination of art in public space, which was beginning to critically consider its very nature. The new demands on the field of art and contemporary life itself had begun to ask for more from artists, curators and institutions. Contemporary to related events and other publications, this book was very important to me as it allowed me to reflect on Travel Notebooks, a project I developed for the 8th Mercosur Biennial in Brazil while working as co-curator. Articulating the contribution of different authors, this book gives a complete picture of the process of germination of a debate, which is now installed in the art that is in dialogue with specific contexts.

Textos do Trópico de Capricornio. Artigos e ensaios. Aracy A. Amaral. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2006.

This compilation by Aracy Amaral influenced me deeply when I returned from London to live in Chile and was instrumental when I started to become more interested in different themes of art in Latin America. This book contains a series of texts that help install contemporary art in the Southern Cone, in relation to their contexts of production and exhibition, a deeply critical and informed view of an author who has written extensively and is a must-read for anyone in the art field. Although the emphasis is on the Brazilian artistic scene, this book also covers other Latin American countries. It analyzes specific proposals, for example, the relationship between the city and architecture, raising interesting questions that go beyond strictly artistic fields.

Lucy Lippard. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997.

This was one of the first books that triggered my curiosity about contemporary process art, probably because of the clarity with which Lucy Lippard exposes the openings of the artistic proposals compiled. I was immediately puzzled and started to think about how process art is and has been developed in Latin America, focused on procedures such as participation, territory and community. Not coincidentally, as a result of this book, the first solo show I curated was entitled Processes and Procedures. On the other hand, the publication stands out from its editorial proposal, which includes documents, interviews and text fragments that organically coexist. This encourages us to have a non-linear-not hierarchical-reading experience that makes the information more playful and engaging.