SACO Contemporary Art Festival is held annually in the Antofagasta region, in the north of Chile, as an independent initiative of the Collective SE VENDE Mobile Contemporary Art Platform, under the direction of Dagmara Wyskiel and produced by Christian Núñez. Its objective is to establish a permanent nucleus of reflection, criticism and dialogue through the work, in the territory marked by the inexistence of institutions dedicated to pursuing these ends. In the world capital of copper mining, he proposes as an alternative to delve into excavations no less valuable, no less urgent and of renewable wealth – creativity and dialogue.
The first edition of SACO had as its main activity Art + Politics + Environment , an international exhibition open from July 12 to August 31, 2012 at the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta. Under the curatorship of the Argentine Marisa Caichiolo, the exhibition placed an eminently contemporary art project squarely in the local environment.
In 2013, SACO was from August 24 to September 1 in the Huanchaca Cultural Park, inaugurating an alliance with the institution located in the centuries-old ruins of a former silver foundry that today is a National Historic Monument. SACO2 proposed as a central theme a particular phenomenon of recent times in contemporary art: the emergence of autonomous efforts in regions or peripheral areas to the epicenters, arriving from Concepción, Pedro Aguirre Cerda (Santiago) and Córdova (Argentina), respectively, the managers Leslie Fernández and Óscar Concha from Móvil, Ana María Saavedra and Luis Alarcón from Galería Metropolitana, plus Jorge Sepúlveda and Ilze Petroni from Forensic Curatorship, who held talks and a general forum.
From August 21 to 31, 2014, SACO3 took a leap towards the international arena and a key issue for the area: the complex relationship between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Under the title My neighbor.
The exhibition Between the shape and the mold , showed the results of the workshops carried out by more than 80 students from the Norte Grande together with seven Latin American artists-teachers, within the framework of the 4th Week of Contemporary Art in Antofagasta, SACO4. The workshops took place between August 24 and 28, 2015, the day the assembly was inaugurated in the Huanchaca Cultural Park. The sample was visited for two weeks by about 2,500 people.
In its fifth edition, SACO Contemporary Art Festival presented One Way Ticket, with a proposal by six migrant artists and three international curators who worked on productions that had the phenomenon of emigration as a central theme. SACO5 had a high impact in the 20 days of free opening of the exhibition of six works located in the Historic Dock of Antofagasta this 2016.
The sixth edition of the Antofagasta Contemporary Art Week, SACO6, presented LOVE: decadence and resistance as its central theme. It presented the projects that were materialized at the Melbourne Clark Historic Dock in August 2017.
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