Discovering the Swiss Culture Scene
Participating South American curators
Clarissa Diniz, independent curator (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Nydia Gutierrez, Director of the Antioquia Museum (Medellin, Colombia)
Caroll Yasky, Head of Collections, Solidaridad Salvador Allende Museum (Santiago, Chile)
Santiago Bengolea, responsible for the Espacio Contemporáneo de la Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Enrique Rivera, Director of the Bienal de Artes Mediales (Santiago, Chile)
Launched in October 2017, the COINCIDENCIA cultural exchange programme between Switzerland and South America aims to strengthen links between Swiss and South American cultural institutions and actors and to foster partnerships. To achieve these objectives, the programme multiplies action formats and supports residencies, exhibition tours and research trips. COINCIDENCIA grants Swiss arts professionals privileged access to the contemporary South American cultural scene. In order to promote the Swiss scene, multidisciplinary curator delegations from South America are organised several times a year.
From 4 to 8 June 2018, visual arts curators were able to discover the cultural institutions of the cities of Berne, St Gallen, Biel, Basel, Aarau and Zurich, as shown in the image gallery below.
The week centered on a workshop organised by Pro Helvetia and moderated by curator Beate Engel, Programme Manager Culture at the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. The workshop took place in two stages, first at the Cabaret Voltaireand then at the Centre PasquArt. It opened up dialogue on artistic research within the framework of such an exchange programme. Participants were artists Sally Schonfeldt and George Steinmann, as well as Swiss curators Claire Hoffmann, future head of visual arts programming at the Centre culturel suisse in Paris, Nadia Veronese, curator of St. Gallen Museum and Denis Pernet, a Lausanne-based independent curator.
