Joaquín Sánchez
Bio
Joaquín Sánchez (1975) was born in Paraguay, is a naturalized Bolivian citizen and has lived in Bolivia since 1998. As a child, his grandfather taught him that art is much more than the mastery of technique. Since then, his search for art has led him to study different disciplines and to work with different media: staging, scenography, art and body history, costume design, film, photography and alternative media such as installation, performance and object, thus becoming a multidisciplinary artist. He participated in the biennials of Venice, Havana, Mercosur, Sao Paulo, Valencia and the Chile Triennial, among other collective exhibitions. He has received important national and international recognition and has held several artistic residencies abroad. He has had solo exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Bolivia. He was production designer and art director of Bolivian cinema films such as “Zona Sur”, “Yvy Maraëy” (Tierra sin Mal) and “Soren”. He was artistic director and curator of the Cinenómada Foundation for the Arts, developing projects on indigenous, popular and contemporary art, as well as a series of publications on the Guaraní culture of the Bolivian Chaco. He created an alternative training space for young creators called Comunidad AVISPERO and has curated national and international exhibitions. He has curated national and international exhibitions. He was general curator of the 9th and 10th edition of the International Art Biennial “SIART” (Bolivia). He represented Bolivia at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany- and in Athens, Greece, among nine curators from Latin America. Between 2018 and 2019 he worked as National Director of Cultures of the Cultural Foundation of the Central Bank of Bolivia.
Statement
Image and cinema
I always start my work from an image, even if the image is a word. As a child, I was an assistant in my grandfather's traveling cinema that toured the rural communities of Paraguay.
Since then I have had a very deep connection with the moving image. My work process is like the creation of an unfolded film even if the final work ends up being an object or a sculpture. Objects are always charged with an almost physical memory.
Writing and re-writing
I am interested in family chronicles, personal memory and small stories that migrate towards collective narratives.
I like to erase to rewrite and unweave to reweave and thus change the end of the stories. It is to open something sealed to re-signify it, to transform a myth that disappears and turn the support into a palimpsest that retains the traces of the original writing.
Territories and communities My works arise from some kind of conflict, political-social-cultural and personal, formulated through a story.
I am interested in re-drawing the border spaces where different heritages and temporalities coexist, such as the omnipresent landscape, the ancestral world, the war event and its present implications.
My study of the human condition is nourished by popular and indigenous culture and the frictions of passing through the realities of countries with different frameworks.
My main occupation are those forgotten stories that keep me in a constant 'back to the future' and allow me to articulate a poetic vision of the facts.
