Co-operation at the base and tools for change
Tursday January 27, 2005 at 7.30 pm.

Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) was founded in 1997, made up of artists, photographers and designers. It was based on an extreme questioning of the artistic institution through wild interventions on different kinds of symbolic control over public space: the manipulation and subversion of the signs and sign-posting of the State and big business. But these first few tentative steps suddenly exploded into something much larger, through their well-known projects in Cupertino with social movements, particularly H.I.J.O.S, the organisation of sons and daughters of the victims of the last Argentinean dictatorship.
This is how the GAC (which does not respect the divisions separating what is inside and what is outside the artistic institution, in the same way that it refuses, in practice, to make any distinction between art and militancy) works: like a machine of symbolic production, inextricably linked to the constituent power of the Argentinean movements (contributing to the strengthening of their social autonomy) or to the forms of "justice from below" (creating visual tools for the escraches). Their practices ("based on working with others, promoting the re-appropriation of works and methodologies") could be interpreted, genealogically, as an outlet for the forced interruption that certain Argentinean artistic practices (such as "Tucumán Arde" 1968) underwent when they crossed institutional limits trying to embrace processes of radical social change.

In their intervention, GAC will be showing their best-known pieces along with others which are still ongoing (processes of joint-investigation with Colectivo Situaciones, collaborations with community television stations in some Buenos Aires neighbourhoods, and so on).

Presentation by:
Rafael Leona and Mariana Cecilia Corral, members of the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) collective of Buenos Aires.