235 Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy e Michelle Sommer: 9th Mercosul Biennial | Porto Alegre: curatorial and spatial practices, a dialogue with Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy Michelle Sommer 9th Mercosul Biennial | Porto Alegre: curatorial and spatial practices, a dialogue with Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy Translated by Ana Carolina Azevedo WEATHER PERMITTING PORTO ALEGRE | 10-07-2013 | 14:38H | TEMPERATURE 17C | HUMIDITY 81% | WIND 20,9KM/H What sets the curatorial practice in a biennial exhibition model today? A question, among many others, raised during the project structuring of the 9th Mercosul Biennial | Porto Alegre, from September 13th to Novem- ber 10th 2013, under the title, in Portuguese, Se o Clima for Favorável (in Spanish, Si el tiempo lo permite; in English, Weather Permitting), is contained in this interview with art director and general curator of this issue, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. The meeting, which took place during the unfolding of the event, shares with the reader the questions generated during the process of construction of a large-scale exhibition event. On one side, curating,1 and on the other, museography,2 consid- ered from the professional activities performed by the ones involved in this conversation during the biennial edition, meet to, through open dialogue, establish an attempt to think critically about the experience of exhibition practices nowadays – amid design and materialization, debate and provocation, curatorial and artistic intentionality, interpretation and public presentation of contemporary art. MICHELLE SOMMER: In the context of practice on the 21st century, what is the concept of curatorship in a “biennial” model of exhibition, specifically in a biennial as Mercosul’s, now designated Mercosul | Porto Alegre? What are the limitations and potential of this model of exhibition? SOFÍA HERNÁNDEZ CHONG CUY: The biennial history is very interesting to a certain extent, but I don’t know if it’s something that curatorially interests me, historically speaking. The 1. The curatorial team included Raimundas Malašauskas, Monica Hoff, Bernardo de Souza, Sarah Demeuse, Daniela Pérez, Júlia Rebouças and Dominic Willsdon. 2. The museography team was formed by Eduardo Saorin and Michelle Sommer (main coordination, museographic project and planning), Alberto Gomez (museographic project), Bruna Bailume de Vasconcelos (executive producer) and Ricardo Curti (museography assistance). biennial history has been linked with the history of national representa- tions and, from certain years and some instances, there was a break because there is no longer a concern on thinking art from national repre- sentations: an artist or a work can be representative of a culture, at a given moment in time. Also, the selections of works involve not only cura- torial or artistic criteria, but also a series of political negotiations. In my experience, in the history of exhibitions, the history of biennials doesn’t have that kind of role, because I believe that, in reality, most interna- tional contemporary art biennials in which I’ve been thinking, visiting or analyzing arose in a very particular moment of the 90’s. In this context, the socio-economic changes, the opening that was given to the arts and the desire of a place for the arts to be accessible to a larger audience, as well as imagining that the arts can improve a city and provide reverse gentrification issues, through the architecture and urbanism, are import- ant points. But I think that each one is a special case. There are opening biennials: the Berlin Biennial,3 for example, is born from the need of inter- nationalization and visibility in a post Wall of Berlin political movement and the end of the soviet block. Something similar takes place in the Biennial of Johannesburg as well,4 with the end of apartheid and the need to give visibility to certain thoughts and not only art projects, but also to create models of coexistence on how an exhibition can present different ideas that were being managed through the years and from political changes. I believe every biennial has a political context in which it presents itself – at least the best ones do. In the specific case of the Mercosul biennial5 it seems very clear to me that there was an interest that Porto Alegre was converted into a cultural capital of a free trade zone, Mercosul. Now, if this actually happened, I don’t know. However, it seems to me that if you really wanted that to happen, I believe that the administrative and financial participation would have to have been diversified in Mercosul. In fact, this is a local project in the administrative sense: the administration is local, the management is local, project financing models are also local (national and state). The desire to be a cultural capital is expressed in its name, but I don’t think the act of positioning Porto Alegre as central within the Mercosul context happened, precisely because there has not been an administrative diversification and, maybe, for their own benefit. It seems to me that, somehow, the benefits of the project were kept locally and that’s fine, because it is not a closed “locally” 3. The Berlin Biennial was founded in 1996 by Klaus Biesenbach, founder-director of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The first Berlin Biennial was held two years after its founding in 1998. 4. The first Johannesburg Biennial was in 1995, a year after the first elections free of the regime of apartheid. 5. The 1st Biennial of Mercosul was held in 1997.