Graciela Taquini: Art Historian (University of Buenos Aires). Studied at the University of Barcelona and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Since 1985 she has dedicated herself to the electronic arts. She has been a jury member and curator for national and international exhibitions. She has published books on the history of Argentinean video. In 2004 she curated the exhibition Vertigo in Malba of the Buenos Aires Constantini collection and the exhibition Marcas Oficiales for the Montevideo program. She is also the cultural consultant for the municipal government's cultural television station Ciudad Abierta. Since 1997 she has been organizing the Cycle of Electronic Arts at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art.

Video Program by Graciela Taquini : Horizonte

Video Program by Graciela Taquini : Desierto


"We all live under the same sky, but we do not share the same horizon." Konrad Adenauer

Argentina between the Desert and the Horizon

Argentina's geography is determined, between puna and the forest, by the horizon of the pampa, the infinite plain that, on its southern side, also opens onto a desert: Patagonia, a territory emptied of its original owners through the white man's massacre of the Indians and which is now being eyed by international and geopolitical interests. The desert, the theme of this biennial, inspired the motif of the horizon. It presence and absence is a constant in these recent videos by artists of different age groups and educational backgrounds.
The motif of the horizon is directly linked to the notion of landscape. It is the bourgeois subject of modernity who was able to take a distance and develop a rational perspective to create world with a virtual depth that was to be recuperated by cinema and video and questioned by the avant-gardes. As a symbolic form the horizon arises as an ambition of the gaze, as a metaphor of an always unfinished project, similar to an ongoing existence. Formally it appears as a limit between the sky and the earth. These works exhibit their obsessive quality, their lack and their feelings of catastrophe. They may be profound and utopian and at the same time dizzying and abysmal.
Together with the independent works the program includes works produced by the project Zoom of the Buenos Aires municipal government's cultural television channel Ciudad Abierta which commissioned videos (five minutes and under) from a hundred artists. The program concludes with works that show the desert either in its literal form or as metaphor of war, famine and violence.

Graciela Taquini