Platform for (un)Solicited Research and Advice

“(…) From such formulated platforms we can relate to other spaces and spheres indicating that biennials are not predominantly to be seen as utopias, but rather as heterotopias, capable of maintaining several contradictory representations within a single space.”

Simon Sheikh
in ‘Marks of Distinction, Vectors of Possibility’

It is clear that biennials, triennials, art fairs, as art events are, undoubtedly, part of an
economic system dominated by structures of power that seek not only to brand a new
place or event but also to contribute for the legitimization of a particular art world and its
participants. Following this one can think that a biennial, whose main purpose is to
attract visitors to a city or region and to promote a restricted group of art professionals
that operate within this field, becomes only one more to add to the list. And then the
recurrent questions emerge: What was the contribution of this biennial? Why here and
not there? and so on.
Biennials in the past played an important role in what concerns to exhibiting practices
and mostly by giving visibility to artists and/or its peripheral art contexts that through this
way could reach an international art audience. Nowadays the biennial is not the only way
through which is possible to access international art. Although it is of course still
important in what concerns to exhibiting practices and mostly in terms of extending
visibility to different art contexts, but it is not exclusive.
It is for me interesting to think of the biennial free of this exclusivity and, most
importantly, as a mass medium, as a vehicle to communicate between different spheres
(that otherwise wouldn’t meet), generating new dialogues and points of view, an
heterotopic space within a host place, or even as this project’s title, a platform for
(un)solicited research. This is what I see as the main purpose of biennials and of what
could bring a sustainable meaning to its proliferation. It is clear to me that every place
can host a biennial, but would it be possible for all of them to generate new and
contradictory forms that would escape the limitations of social, economical and political
powers in order to generate this new energy?