13th International Festival of Performance Ex Teresa Arte Actual 2008 “Controlled Accidents” (Accidentes Controlados)
Curator: Edith Medina

Through out fifteen years, Ex-Teresa Actual Art has focused its work and functionality to the diffusion, expansion and generation of projects related to not conventional disciplines of actual art, being the performance and the action art a work field with more development. This way, Ex-Teresa sat down the experimentation bases in the Mexican contemporary art and edifies solid artistic relations with other countries which have complementing the national art panorama.

In 1993 Ex-Teresa gave continuity to the International Festival of Performance project, integrating a diversity of projects always related to the body, being this undertaken from different levels, contexts, themes, linearities and interpretations but always utilized as the main tool of the artists’ discourses.

The 13th International Festival of Performance, inquires into and propounds the new meanings of the artist‘s rapprochement with the action art and new representations and discourses that are generated about the body, in a context of scientific and technological advances, diffuse cultures, fragmented state politics, aestheticized and less integrated societies, which establishes different order relationships with corporal issue and with its manifestations and interpretations, resulting in artistic structures which need completely different tools than those used in the past.

Controlled Accidents tries to explore new investigation and creation fields related to the body and their decodings in the contemporary society, from premises of how to rethink the body in an epoch in which the techno-scientific advances and the social theories and postmodern communications have generated discourses and conceptualizations of corporal issue, which although they denote it as something material are more interested in its dematerialisation, however the body as nearby element and potentializer of our realities continues being the most important device of our experience.

Likewise, controlled accidents project makes an allusion to the artistic content of the expression with that one utilized since its origin. In 1936 David Alfaro Siqueiros within his Experimental Work Shop in New York, employed this term to
articulate the plastic innovative experimentations series that he executed in his workshop, and in which Jackson Pollock was a participating. Where Siqueiros talked about materic combinations, which although they were thought, they finalized being accidents, he utilized a two element composition method from which dynamic works were arising and with techniques which in that moment changed the art and plasticity discourse’s way. So is how expresses itself the intention of the international festival of performance, where the body relation is made evident with the technological advances and the experiences that arise from said conjunction in different societies, with distinct contexts and accesses to the culture and technology.

The body, its representations and its discourses have taken other ways, no longer only as an evolutionary element, but as economic, political, cultural and artistic expression tool. In societies influenced by the information technologies and the biotechnology the ways of seeing our bodies and thinking about ourselves have been radically modified, as well as the identity, being and individuality concepts.