The Door of Return at exhibition Shared Heritage

June 20th – August 31st – Visual Arts Center Amsterdam South East.

Some of the participating artists are Iris Kensmil, Sara Blokland, Brian Coutinho, Ken Doorson, Jeannette Ehlers, Antonio Jose Guzman, Remy Jungerman, Patricia Kaersenhout, Charl Landvreugd, Tirzo Martha, Helen Martina, Henny Overbeek, Hector Raphaela and Brett Russell.
The exhibition Shared Heritage move from September 12th t / m October 20 to Kunstenlab Deventer.
The opening of this exhibition is a part of the program Cultuurlijn 110.

Guzman talks to Darkfix Blog

Amsterdam based visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and all around creative designer, Antonio Jose Guzman talks to Darkfix about the influence of traveling, the importance of Subcultures, his film Regressions & much more.

 Guzman’s body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. Guzman’s video works and installations have taken place in sites as Senegal, India, The Grand Canyon, the Norwegian Polar Circle and Panama.

Darkfix: Have you always lived in Amsterdam? If not where are you originally from?

Guzman: I grew up in Panama, and then moved to Costa Rica when I was about 23, then to London and Barcelona. I’ve been in Amsterdam for more than 15 years now. Amsterdam is after Panama the longest place I have ever lived. It’s definitely home for me. For many Dutch people, specially the young generation is difficult to understand why people move to this rainy small country with such complicated cultural climate, but if you arrive here in the 90’s was a different story, this was paradise in the arts, culture, music, specially in the rave and electronic scene were I was active as music programmer and a photographer.

Darkfix: What influence did living in so many different places?

Guzman: Traveling had a really big influence on me. It influenced the way I intervene in spaces with my art and the way my aesthetics are projected in research projects. I learned to be really observant and have patience with time, which is the way I make art, films and take photographs.

Darkfix: What did you do when you were a teenager that pushed you towards being a creative person?

Los Angeles Mapping Project Kick Off!

Opening at Void was a blast, thank you to everyone who showed up last friday! “Mapping various cities through DNA research, data analysis, and alternative mapping strategies, multidisciplinary artist Antonio Jose Guzman, attempts to reimagine ethnic and cultural identities, to envision an ideal global society. Guzman will present his latest work the Los Angeles Mapping Project at Wearevoid Gallery in Amsterdam”.

ARC MAGAZINE

An Article by Rob Perrée

MAPPING LOS ANGELES
A project by Antonio Jose Guzman

In 1960 the Suriname-born artist Stanley Brouwn asked people on the street to show on a piece of paper how they would walk from point A to point B. ‘This Way Brouwn’ was the result. A key work. In 1963 American Edward Ruscha photographed all the gas stations he came across driving from his home in L.A. to Oklahoma City, the city he grew up in. These he collected in the book ‘Twenty Six Gasoline Stations’. An ionic example of conceptual art.
I was reminded of these artists when I heard of the ‘Los Angeles Mapping Project’ (2013) by Antonio Guzman (1971). For a number of months he was artist-in-residence at the Windward School in Los Angeles, a college primarily for the children of the city’s wealthy residents. Privileged students who are frequently quite unaware of the (cultural) diversity of their surrounding area. Working together with more than a hundred of them, Guzman has illustrated the geography of their daily life. He had them record their route from home to school and also make maps of those parts of the city they never went to. He thus implicitly gave them insight into their own identity.

 

The result is a large installation composed of photos, drawings, light boxes, objects and sculptures that document basic geographic elements. Maps, cracks in the road, paving stone patterns, curbstones, etc. Sometimes aesthetic and consciously sculptural, sometimes dry and factual. The students’ contributions are included and incorporated into the work. In this way Antonio Guzman, following artists such as Stanley Brouwn, also brings up the issue of the authorship of the artist.
This work by Guzman fits in with his oeuvre in which he researches his own DNA in various ways (he comes from Panama, has African roots and lives in the Netherlands), in which he looks for transatlantic connections between cultures and in which he tries to expose the underlying power structures. He digs into his own past to feed the collective memory. In addition, every now and again he attempts to visualize the geography of the future. The presentations of these research activities are always realized using a wide variety of media: drawing, photography, sculpture, film, performance, workshop and lecture. Here, the concept behind and the intensity of the research is usually more important than the aesthetics of the result. He wants to open eyes, not please them.
Stanley Brouwn no longer shows as an artist, Edward Ruscha has developed along a different route. Antonio Guzman is already busy mapping out his next research project. It will no doubt soon be on show in a number of (distant) countries.
Rob Perrée
Amsterdam, May 2013.
Photos © S. Langedijk

From May 31 till June 12 in ‘We Are Void Gallery’, Ferdinand Bolstraat 1, Amsterdam.

Musee du Quai Branly Paris

“Regressions” the documentary at the Musee du Quai Branly Paris – Saturday 1st of June – 18 hrs

Antonio Jose Guzman's Los Angeles Mapping Project

May 31 Antonio Jose Guzman's  We Are Void Amsterdam

LOS ANGELES MAPPING PROJECT
31 MAY | 12 JUNE 2013

OPENING FRIDAY 31 MAY
H 6 - 10 PM

WE ARE VOID GALLERY
FERDINAND BOLSTRAAT 1
1072 LA AMSTERDAM
T +31204894869
INFO@WEAREVOID.COM

Earlier this year the multidisciplinary artist Antonio Jose Guzman was part of the Windward School Art Residency in Los Angeles, California. During the residency the artist created a collaborative site-specific installation with a grant from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. The project was one of the most intricate undertakings in the history of the program, created with contributions from more than a hundred participating students.

Over the course of the residency, the artist works with Windward students to create a site-specific installation at the Held & Bordy Family Gallery. The artist also share his working processes and ideas with teachers, artists, and community members from the greater Los Angeles area. Guzman’s creation incorporates work from Windward students in different classes and grade levels. Through a variety of assignments, Guzman challenged students to create a mapping of their identities, encouraging them to explore and aesthetically reimagine what it means to be a global citizen by documenting the physical and mental geographies they traverse in their everyday lives. The completed installation deploys a variety of media to represent an analysis of psychogeographic social interaction and spatial mobility.

The workshops and lectures that Guzman give during the residency were thematically developed for the students of the Windward School, the project maps with photography and drawings the critical topographies of Los Angeles from the 70′s to now, by focusing on the cultural politics of space, time, and segregated neighborhoods. Inspired by Guy Debord “unitary urbanism” the research is a study of the population demographics, unified environment and transit of Los Angeles. The research is a data visualization that generates an idea of the way the city is forming itself towards the future, the maps demonstrate areas of transculturalism or homogeneous cultures, incomes and preference.

http://www.aguzman.com/

Source: The Windward School, Los Angeles California

Los Angeles Mapping Project

May 31 Antonio Jose Guzman's Los Angeles Mapping Project - WeAreVoid Amsterdam 

 

Piertopolis Project

From this coming Saturday 9/11, after 10 years of the fatal incidents that changed the world and made me take the decision to focus 100 percent on the audiovisual arts fields; I will be uploading two photos per day periodically to my ongoing project website Piertopolis.

Check out:
http://www.piertopolis.com