Скачать или смотреть Summit Zer0 [ A talk with Humberto Vélez ]

He works and lives between Manchester (UK) and Panama.
Vélez’s performances, films, and installations actively explore the possibilities of working in collaboration with different people (artists and artisans, local communities, First Nation people, asylum and refugees, women groups, animal keepers, animal care workers or trainers, athletes, musicians, etc., and groups specifically assembled for the project) in different countries and cultures.

His artworks are conceived by what he calls “the ability to create aesthetics” for and with these groups, according to their lifestyles and circumstances, thereby managing different concepts and expressions of popular culture, power, and especially, ethics. The human relations on whom Vélez constructs his creative processes are as important as the outcome, be that a performance, a film, an installation, or a photographic memoir. For that, Vélez calls his practice “Aesthetics of Collaboration.

Humberto Vélez has a Law and Political Sciences degree from the University of Panama. He also studied Filmmaking and TV at the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba.

He has had solo performance shows at the TATE Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), among others, and participated in international art events, such as the Venice (2013 and 2015), Havana (2003, 2012,2015 and 2019), Shanghai, Montevideo (2012 and 2014), Ireland and Liverpool Biennials, among others, and in many group shows.
He works as an artist, art professor, independent filmmaker, and art producer.
In 2011 he founded VISITING MINDS (with Panamanian curator and art critic Adrienne Samos), an international forum based in Panama, devoted to art and education.

Summit Zer0
Meta-Tool: Resistance and Tacticality

“From its beginning, the artwork is handled in a way that enables it to survive culture. While one often speaks about the artwork as a commodity, it is not normal. The normal commodity is made to be consumed—in other words, to be destroyed (eaten as bread, used as a car). So, in a certain sense, art is an anti-commodity. It is put under the condition of conservation—prevented from being destroyed by time and use. And this is the essential characteristic of art: it survives its original culture, taking a long journey through all the other, later cultures. It remains at the same time foreign to these other cultures—an alien in their midst, carrying with it the knowledge of its past.”

The Museum as a Cradle of Revolution, Boris Groys

The word “Meta-tool” derives from Groy’s definition of art objects as something essentially different than commodities. Meta-tool is an ontological status that an object retains when its condition as a commodity shifts. The shift is marked by made-to-be-consumed-commodity turn into an immortal object, in the sense that it can outlive its original culture and context.
Questioning aesthetics and asking whether or not there is an essence to an art object is not a brand-new question in the realm of art. Following Groy’s ideas, an art object is an ontological status. Therefore, its being is not linked to the white cube or any authoritative figure in the art world. An art object is an art object regardless of the place of exhibition or the credit given by anybody except the artist herself.