Pixelazo – La Enredadera

June 2007  – La Enredadera – The second Pixelazo event was organized in the Santa Cruz la Rosa neighborhood in Medellin. The event focused on the theme of networks and culture and featured workshops, conferences and urban events. The international guests were Regine Debatty from the We Make Money Not Art blog, the Finnish VJ duo Visual Systeemi, Juha Huskonen from Pixelache. Colombian guests included two representatives from the ACIN comunication group as well as Alejandro Tamayo and Alfredo Vargas from Bogota, the Systema Solar colective from the caribean coast, Erecyclaje and Medellin Wireless from Medellin and many more. During the festivals last event / concert in Medellin’s Park of light’s Pixelazo featured El Isleno – the first original champeta sound system from Cartagena to visit Medellin.

Programe

Workshops:

VJ & electronic music workshops

The Finnish VJ duo Visual Systeemi (Petri Ruikka & Henrik Axlund) hosted a 5-day VJ workshop for local students and professionals, who had been selected from an open call for participation. The VJ workshop was organized in connection with music workshop by Bicho Vargas from Bogotá. The workshops took place at Corporation Cultural Nuestra Gente at the Barrio Santa Cruz la Rosa and culminated into a free concert and VJing event for the local residents.
Links: visualsysteemi.com

Blogging workshop

Regine Debatty (Belgium) and Alejandro Tamayo (Colombia) hosted a blogging workshop in which each participant created their own blog. Regine is the main person behind we-make-money-not-art, one of the most well-known blogs about art and design related to new technologies. Alejandro is an artist-engineer and a teacher working in the intersections of design, art and new technologies.
Links: tallerpixelazo.blogspot.com, we-make-money-not-art.com, thepopshop.org

Streaming workshop

Tatiana Avendado and Ricardo Cubides from Bogotrax (Bogotá) gave a workshop on free, open source streaming technologies.
Links: bogotrax.free.fr

Conferences and presentations

The Pixelazo conferences delt with the theme of networks: grassroots activism and organizing, new communication technologies, the thoughts of indigenous Colombian tribes about networks. The presenters of the conferences included Tatiana Avendaño / Bogotrax, Juha Huuskonen / Pixelache, Alejandro Vélez / Medellin Wireless, Regine Debatty / we-make-money-not-art, Alejandro Tamayo / v*i*d*a lab, Jesús Ortiz Rodríguez (representing the Arhuaco indians) and Constanza Cuetia & Gustavo Adolfo Ulcué Campo from the ACIN communication group (Nasa indigenous people). Additional presentations during Pixelazo were give by Felipe Guerra (eRECICLAJE, composting and recycling), Walter Hernández (champeta music), Bicho Vargas (History of techno music) and Visual Systeemi (artist presentation).
Links: bogotrax.free.fr, http://nasaacin.org/
, medellinwireless.net, ereciclaje.com

Events

Pixelazo Bailable – free concerts and events

The workshops in Barrio Santa Cruz la Rosa ended with a public show featuring work created by the workshop participants throughout the week. A live audiovisual performance was organized out on the street, with a sound system and video projectors for the VJs and musicians. Meanwhile inside the space of Nuestra Gente, a streaming exchange between participants of the hip hop community from Medellin and Mexico City was happening along with a public presentations of the blogs created during the blogging workshop. The event was a great success, attracting hundreds of people from the community, throughout the evening. Barrio Santa Cruz la Rosa is one of the poor neighborhoods located on the outskirts of Medellin.

The grande finale of Pixelazo was held at Parque de las Luces, a public park in the centre of Medellin. The featured music acts were Systema Solar (Colombia), El Pikó El Isleño (Cartagena), DJ Corpas (Cartagena) and DJ Dani Boom (Bogotá). The El Pikó El Isleño is a sound system specialized in champeta, music style that is popular in the barrios of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. This was the first time such sound system visited Medellin. The VJ artists of the night were VJ La Bruja (Barranquilla), VJ Paula Vélez (Medellin), Iraka Jaibakus (Medellin) and Visual Systeemi (Finland). Felipe Guerra from eRECICLAJE provided a compost toilet for the event and Juan David Uribe from IDEODISENO a set of hammocks made of recycled grain bags.

Links: www.systemasolar.com , www.ideodiseno.com, www.ereciclaje.com , http://www.encuentromedellin2007.com , www.we-make-money-not-art.com
www.designboom.com


SELVATORIUM 2007

After Pixelazo, Vanessa Gocksch & Juan-Carlos Pellegrino (Intermundos), Petri Ruikka & Henrik Axlund (Visual Systeemi, Finland) and Juha Huuskonen (Pixelache, Finland) traveled to Leticia, Amazonas. Leticia is a city of approximately 100 000 thousand residents, located in the border area of three countries: Colombia, Brazil and Peru. Leticia has its own university and there are many local indigenous tribes in the area. For these reasons Leticia might be a good place to host an artist residency that would allow the artists to work with university researchers and/or indigenous tribes. The purpose of this visit was to meet local people and develop this idea further.

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