ECUADORIAN ARTISTIC SCENE

The present moment, as a consequence of socio-cultural, scientific, technological, and economic processes, offers the necessary rupture of boundaries which define artistic expression. The transformations, which have generated the fragmentation between the boundaries of “high culture” and “mass culture”, involve changes in the configuration of knowledge, changes which pierce the chaos of urban living and the misalignment between identities, territories, sensibilities, beliefs and behaviors. The instability and formlessness of our society reflects the diversity of cultural sources and formats which coexist in the same geographic space, generating a great number of subjects and objects of cultural investigation.


We believe that art can be understood as an accumulation of signs which reflect the state of societies and their historical processes: an organization of organic systems which presents itself as a testimony to historic existence, as the memory of a flow in meaning, where the cultural discourse is the fulcrum of its flow and belonging. In this manner, we believe that the artistic production and the debate it provokes, can become actors capable of substantially contributing to the understanding of social phenomena, and eventually come to be an issue of public interest.

In our country, though, the absence of investigation and documentation of contemporary local art, as well as the restricted access to information and the lack of an organized body of reference material for the investigators, workers and producers, has consolidated a vision of art that designs its possibilities of social action and that practically reduce its worth to the mere object of contemplation or provider of status and prestige.


Written by CEAC Foundation
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