David Miranda

David Miranda (Mexico, 1977) is a visual artist and curator with a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts by the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving “La Esmeralda”. He was project coordinator of the Aesthetic Education initiative, launched in Mexico by the Mexican Institute of Art in Service of Education (IMASE for irs acronym in Spanish) in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Institute in New York (2003-2005). He belongs to the Artist Pension Trust in New York, since 2006. He received the Young Art Creators Grant of the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) from 2011 to 2012. His artistic work has been displayed in several cultural institutions in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Spain and the United States. Currently, he combines his artistic activity with his work as a curator at the Experimental Museum “El Eco” (UNAM) in Mexico City. David Miranda is a member of the Art Education Platform (Plataforma Arte Educación).

David Miranda’s work is made up by a series of actions, happenings, and projects aiming to propel critical thinking around social and historical circumstances understanding the piece as an open message in the public space, recovering the ideas and postures of other authors with the goal of creating a poetic language of his own.

http://bajoelpavimento.com (02.06.2015)

Interview

Video interview.

Bernad Vienat – Could you tell us a little about the development of your project Dialéctica de la Soledad (in english: The Dialectics of Loneliness)?”

David Miranda – In 2010 in Mexico there was a security crisis because of something that has come to be known as the “war on drugs”, which began during Felipe Calderon’s administration. One of the many problems caused by this situation was the hindrance of free transit throughout the country’s highways. This was partially caused because the drug cartels had taken control over many important sites and main roads but also because the State was too busy campaigning and promoting the importance of their security spends and investments to actually deal with the problem. This is not new, I did not invent it. This is a way in which many economic models justify their investments in certain areas, in this case, in the security level. Back then the police budget showed a significant increase. These policies had continued through this new administration, perhaps not in the same exact way neither following the same exact schemes but they remain in force.

This project is not a work of literal complaint in which the form of the artwork mimetically represents the social problems, but I had always been interested in fulfilling a different kind of reflection that would favor the dialogue with communities outside the artistic field. I also believe that the artistic practice can be also understood as a kind of social work at the same time that it performs a critical reflection from within, assuming one is part of the situation it critics.

I had the opportunity to work in this project thanks to the Young Art Creators Grant of the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). I was interested in doing some sort of paraphrase or rumination on “The Labyrinth of Solitude” by Octavio Paz which consists of 9 essays written in 1951, which set forth a description regarding Mexican identity that has been much discussed since, but remains valid in many aspects. My work ponders about local identity. In order to do this what I did was to extract phrases that I consider are still valid regarding this and the current situation we live in.

Dialéctica de la soledad