LA PALABRA DE LOS MUDOS
An action by Jota castro
May 15th, 2008, 11.30 hrs (GMT -5)
Playa Redondo. Miraflores City,
Lima, Peru
Co-produced by Alta Tecnología Andina – ATA
Supported by the Prince Claus Fund, Deliveri and the Miraflores City Council
On May 15th, Jota Castro is carrying out an action envisaged to gather several thousand people on one of the beaches of the district of Miraflores, the modern commercial and leisure city-centre of Lima, for a setting that has all the characteristics of a political rally, with a stage, a speaker, and an on-stage screen projection of the speaker in close-up. The particularity of that it will be carried without utterance of a single (spoken) word. The performance will involve the use of Sign Language exclusively. The whole action or performance is a statement, a symbolic statement. This event will coincide with the V Summit of Heads of State and Government of Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union, which is set to promote a stronger and more effective partnership and closer political dialogue between both sides of the Atlantic.
Jota Castro is a Peruvian artist, living in Brussels who worked in the diplomatic service for two decades. In the late 1990s he left his career as a diplomat at the United Nations and the European Union and decided to devote himself totally to the field of art. Through his different professional activities, Castro has gained in-depth knowledge of the world of international politics; moreover, he considers his university studies in Law and Political Science as his real training in art. Conjuring up the political scene of today in European countries, often through oblique manoeuvres; the critical social issues that are (or should be) the conundrums for political leaders, with his brand of humour that gets the acid best of apparently trivial situations; his acutely developed and directed, politically incorrect sarcasm; and a wide range of social and cultural references, with or without specific historical relevance. He has participated in the Venice, Tirana, Prague and Kwangju biennales. He won the Gwandju biennale prize in 2004 in Korea.
Alta Tecnologia Andina – ATA [ www.ata.org.pe ] is a non-profit cultural organization, created with the objective of helping the development of a new critical and dynamic culture based on the use and growth of the relations between art, science and technology in Latin America. Based in Lima, Peru, it encourages and supports projects and activators in every field of human endeavour, committed to the use and exploration of technologies, media and culture as we seek to develop areas of communication and dissemination of knowledge to contribute to our societies’development through an understanding the use of technology in a critical way.
La palabra de los mudos
Info + Press contact: lapalabradelosmudos@ata.org.pe
Telephone: 00(511) 620.6090 ext. 613
00(511) 997571305
Web: www.lapalabradelosmudos.org
