Art@Site www.artatsite.com Silvina Babich Ala Plastica Argentina
Artist:

Silvina Babich

Title:

Ala Plastica

Year:
1991
Adress:
La Plata
Website:
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Ala Plástica is an art and environmental NGO based in Rà­o de la Plata, Argentina. The main concern is to link the art way of thinking with the development of projects in the social and environmental realm. Since 1991, Ala Plástica has developed a range of non-conventional artworks, focused on local and regional problems, and in close contact and collaboration with other artists, scientists and environmental groups. Ala Plástica works bio-regionally, within Argentina, as well as internationally in relationship to other transformative arts practitioners.
In 1995, with Junco/Especies Emergentes [The Reed/Emergent Species] Ala Plástica, begins to articulate various visions of the region by creating communication and cooperation platforms side by side with communities along the Estuary of the La Plata River. The study of the extraordinary propagation system of the reed, its ability to create new territories and its cleansing capacity, allowed us to activate the metaphor izomatic expansion and of the emergence of a series of interconnected exercises at the Plata River estuary to explore new and creative ways of developing and applying socio-environmental profiles for the La Plata River and its coastal development.
Ala Plastica is exceptional in their ability to work formally within institutions of power while simultaneously maintaining the dynamic and creative force of artists and organizers. They use the local river basin as a subject around which to start conversations about the relationship between urban and rural life, and ecology and sustainability, as well as a focus for developing strategies around finding long term solutions to environmental degradation. Ala Plastica is literally organizing and creating knowledge, community and legal recourse in order to combat environmental degradation in the region. Ala Plastica offers an exemplary example of new ways for understanding public art by putting dialogue, community and social issues in public places.
Source: Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts

www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Ala Plástica takes an intuitive, emotional and phenomenological approach to a variety of artistic initiatives that effect communities and the environment, while promoting the potential of art to transform. Utilizing dialogue and communication as a primary means, we have created unconventional artworks that have regenerated economic networks by retraining individuals in artistic occupations, and stimulated collective experiences to empower individuals to have a wider field of influence in their own political and biological environment. Our work collaboratively with a variety of interested participants and stakeholders from all walks of life. Through these processes, our work often coalesces into self-organizing strategies that utilize art to re-imagine territories as a vital aspect of community.

www.alaplastica.wixsite.com:
Silvina Babich and Alejandro Meitin: This work has also involved in many national and international exhibtions. It has been developed concurrently with a long tradition of activist or social practice art. In our case, that tradition began in the UK in 1994 with the Littoral Art movement, an independent network of artists, critics, curators, and scholars interested in new ways of thinking about contemporary artistic practice and critical theory founded by Ian Hunter and Celia Lerner, and recently documented in the book 'Littoral Art and Communicative Action' by another participant, Bruce Barber.
Later we are evolved in collaboration and exhibitions with well-known and extensively published artists and critics such as Suzanne Lacy, Teddy Cruz, Helen and Newton Harrison, Grant Kester, Critical Art Ensemble, Eduardo Molinari, Fabiano Kueva, Sitezise, Transductores, members of Platform, Wochen Klausur and Park Fiction, or more recently, the Myanmar's artist and author Jay Koh. These and other figures have been partners in group exhibitions and in an ongoing public dialogue about the means and ends of socialaged art.
Beyond this, we explore the ways in which artists can collaborate with scientists and advanced technical practitioners of fields such as geography, hydrology, biology, environmental law, and ecology considered as a scientific discipline. Such transdisciplinary collaborations are reflected in the curatorial work of Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in the exhibition 'Making Things Public' and in the text 'Extradisciplinary Investigations' by the art critic Brian Holmes.
Such references would help to understand how artists can critically engage with the realms of economic production (for example, GMO agriculture, hydroelectric dams, infrastructure projects, etc), and also how the artists can constructively engage with community-based economies involving craft work, subsistence farming, forestry and many other activities which today can benefit from specialized knowledge and innovative techniques.

www.alaplastica.wixsite.com:
Conceptualizing:
Emergent species, guides us as model. It gives sense to participation in processes of formation and transformation.
The aproach to complexity representes a dynamic property in democratic or participative processes, where action tends to transformation.
Creative practices are organic models which give light on decaying states of relationship nets, and they stand as a natural process positioning in front of survival.
The question of what human being is capable to build or destroy, and what for.
The right for communities to reach more sensitive visions of their situations.
To look at how does human being function on nature.
The development of an inclusive objectivity; another way for human being to focus itself into nature.
Art in terms of adventure, exploration.
To experience subtleness in human/nature relationship.
Sensitive research, publicness, transformativeness, connectedness and confidence in emergence.

www.scribd.com:
Ala Plástica is an art and environmental organization based in Rà­oe la Plata, Argentina that works on the rhizomatic linking of ecological, social, and artistic ethodology, combining direct interventions and precisely defined concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic potential of art. They are concerned with relating the artist’s way of thinking and working with the development of projects in the social and environmental realm. Since 1991 Ala Plástica has developed a range of non-conventional artworks, focused on local and regional problems, and in close contact and collaboration with other artists, scientists and environmental groups. Ala Plástica works bio-regionally, within Argentina, as well as internationally in relationship to other transformative arts practitioners.