Valeria Schwarz is an artist, independent curator and cultural manager who develops her activity internationally.
Official records state that she was born in Eldorado, a remote village in the North-east of Argentina. However she has been constantly dying and re-birthing each time she changed her residence. Formal education includes Art History in the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Arts in the University of Salamanca, Spain. Needless to say, that she spent more time acquiring informal education from relatives, friends and non-friends in bars, cafeterias, living rooms and kitchens. She also thanks her further development to her work with several artists such as Julian Rosefeldt, Tatsumi Orimoto or within different private and public art institutions.
Her understanding of arts has less to do with the auratic object rather than with the investigation and working out of artistic situations within different contexts, while exploring new ways of presenting arts and including the viewer in the artistic experience. She explores everyday structures of communication and tries to alter them in order to build new situations, collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions which determinate the quality of a moment. In the last years she developed participatory projects in the public space creating temporary communities that meet for a creative purpose. Most of those proposals are platforms that activate only through mutual actions. Valeria is very interested on how individual behaviors shape collective processes. In this sense, she firmly believes in collective intelligence, though she realizes that our current education system implies a great boundary to overcome in order to achieve it completely.
She participated at the Triennale du Valais (2017, Switzerland), OPEN SOURCE (2016, USA), Kunstmuseum Bern (2016, Switzerland), Spielart (2015, München), Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2013, Portugal), Parallel Events Manifesta 8 (2010, Murcia Spain) and 9 (2012, Genk, Belgium), Museu da Fotografia (2010, Curitiba, Brazil), Matadero Madrid (2012, Spain), Buenos Aires Night of Museums (2012, Argentina), School of Intermedia Arts (2013, Hang Zhou, China), Schmiede (2011 and 2012 Hallein, Austria), Argentinean Embassy in Berlin (2009 and 2010, Germany), a.o.
Public conferences include Production of culture and energy (2014, Berlin Unlimited festival); Experimentdays festival (Spreefeld, 2014); Re-imagine the cityscape. How to include citizens in the decision-making for urban design at OpenART (2013, Sweden); Participar.de (2012, Goethe Institut Madrid); Using social networks to create participatory artworks (2012, Social Media Week, Berlin) and Remapping Words (2011, General Public, Berlin).
In 2009 she co-founded i Collective, an organic platform of multidisciplinary artists, scientist and curators working glocally in the intersection of arts, urban interventions and socially engaged projects.
Apart from that she worked as a director of Invaliden1 gallery; organized a panel discussion at Goethe Institut: The Dilemma of Collectionism in Times of Dematerialization, with David Elliot, Jan Hoet, Fumio Nanjo, Berta Sichel, Mark Gisbourne and Mark Waugh and initiated numerous independent projects like 7 Days, Offensichtlich Öffentlich (in collaboration with Peer Golo Willi), Amerika, within Paralell Events Manifesta 8 or different exhibitions at Berlin Art Projects gallery.
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