The Start
Taking the first steps towards something that you just have imagined is always difficult. Anxiety and expectation waits for you at the other side of the door because, in the end, a travel is not an excursion through the outdoor and outside of your self. Instead, is a curious and excentric return to your self, to your own assumptions –clearly demolished after the travel-; is a continuous inquiry about our roles, our plans, our way to get in touch with everything and everyone.
This kind of auspicious exultation is the common ground of any experience that breaks our everyday rituals and, in consecquence, is the authentic dominion of any artistic or ethnographical enterprise.
In the particular case of the project Highway II Made not in Chin
a, art and ethnography, plastic languages and societal incursion converges and produces a hybrid mode of research in the particular material forms of expression that find local inquiries on collective identity.
Thanks to the support of Calgary Arts Development, the project will itinerate through the Highway II in order to visit ten of the towns that rests by its course to find, assess and dialogate with the material/narrative culture produced there. Buildings, streets, everyday tools, material remains of the daily interactions of its inhabitants and, last but not least, histories and stories, collective portraits and particular faces, will trace a poetical, empathetical description, of the very contours of Highway II peoples identities. The gas tank is full. Our eyes, ears and tongue are ready. Our faces will meet with others.
Let´s start the engine.
July 2019
Fredy Rivas with
Juan Carlos Montero Vallejo
