Tropical Papers

Announcing the 2021 [ON RESIDENCE] and [TV CHANNEL] seasons

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Creating experiences, stimulating conversations, and collaborations between new and evolving technologies, ancestral knowledge, and contemporary issues, tropical papers is delighted to announce the 2021 [ON RESIDENCE] and [TV CHANNEL] seasons.

[ON RESIDENCE] 
Through this residency program, tropical papers encourages experimentation, research, visibility, and empowerment to emerging and mid-career artists with a particular focus on projects addressing climate change and global warming, building bridges between the urban and the rural, the ever-evolving new technologies, and ancestral knowledge. 

For this first season of the year guest artists are Edgar Calel and Ana María Millán. Follow their work through our digital platforms. 

Edgar Calel (b.1987, lives and works in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala): Performances, installations, paintings, and drawings by Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel evoke memories of his family and pay homage to the indigenous communities of the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. One of the strategies of the artist is to foreground the invisible, the untranslatable, the ungraspable, all of which resist prejudice and Western epistemologies centered in rationality and materiality. What are the potentialities of language, memory and presence in times of self-isolation, social distancing and physical absence? Edgar Calel’s “knowledge-wisdom-understanding” appears as an invitation to approach fluid conceptions of body, territory, ancestrality, and community as thresholds in constant movement and transformation.

Ana María Millán (b. 1975 in Cali, Colombia, lives and works in Berlin, Germany): Millán’s multidisciplinary practice references and resignifies the narratives and visualities of comics, animation, video games or popular culture, to critically question the construction of factual and official history. With an emphasis on Colombia’s recent past and its stereotyped image abroad, the artist assumes the potentialities of fiction and fantasy to formulate counter-narratives based on orality, individual and local stories. To present these alternative and necessary perspectives of silenced voices, of anonymous subcultures or the historically excluded, Millán often works in collaboration or creates dialogical contexts to develop her projects. Recently, the artist has worked on video animations with scripts resulting from experiments in live role-playing.

[TV CHANNEL]
Dedicated to short videos in which cultural practitioners, artists, curators, scholars, writers, and researchers briefly introduce their practice as well as their latest project to date, [TV CHANNEL] is posted periodically on tropical papers’ platforms and progressively constitutes an archive of cultural practices, production and transmission of knowledge in and from the tropics. 

Meet the 2021 first season's guests: Carla Zaccagnini (artist, Brazil/Argentina), Naufus Ramírez Figueroa (artist, Guatemala), Julien Creuzet (artist, Martinique/France), Ana María Millán (artist, Colombia/Germany), Gala Porras Kim (artist, Colombia/USA) and Miguel López (curator, Peru).

[LIVING ROOM]
Coming soon in May, [LIVING ROOM] is a public program that explores how the private meets the public, bringing together different but deeply interconnected realities. Artists are invited to listen, observe, share and enjoy sensitive and resilient experiences with our audiences. Introducing Amalia Pica (UK/Argentina) and Cooking Sections (UK).

About tropical papers
Created in 2005, tropical papers is a digital platform for reflection on art, architecture, design, and scientific research to visibilize the work and projects of artists and cultural practitioners focused on these disciplines from and in the tropics. 

tropical papers’ focal point is to stimulate multidisciplinary projects informed by realities, experiences, and forms of knowledge, and to amplify its multiple voices through a series of programs: [GUEST ARTIST], [TV CHANNEL], [LIVING ROOM], [TUNOG SESSIONS] and [MAILBOX]. The artists, cultural practitioners, and our audiences are the main protagonists in this constellation of digital resources functioning as an inclusive forum to discuss urgent societal issues, encourage sustainable work dynamics, increase environmental awareness, and build communities.