What about new challenges?: Technology

When we talk about new challenges in arts areas, we can find a lot of topics.
For examples, like an Art Historian, our work is not only in a room with books. We need to go outside and to be connected with persons around the world to share investigations, information, studies, and ideas. So, we have to use internet and all their tools and social net. To know found the needed information in the unapproachable quantity of content there is in the net. Know how to be online with the new publication through the world.
In another way, we can use the internet tools to publish our own works and to make nets with other people around the same study topic.
If we are interested in the documentation area we have to know to manage a lot of computational programs a museum net, like SurDoc here in Chile. So, the internet it's our best friend nowadays.
We have to up to date our dark and old museums. And that work is not only for the technology implementation, it's also related with the audience and the education. Update the museums includes update the way the people feels inside the museums. If we can change that feeling and make more empathic and attractive the old museums, we can to bring new audience interested in the museums topics. The museum couldn't be only a place with things hanged in the walls, the museum has to be a place where to learn new things and discover worlds. A place with libraries, a place connected with the world and other similar institutions, a place that gives information, not keep information.
Here there are two different, but linked, areas: one, the technology, the other, the social. In both is necessary a change in our museums, specially the religious and colonial museum. That is the darker and boring ones, when it has wonderful collections of art and history. To refresh them it's needed an investment of money and ideas.
If we see for a minute the European examples we can find a lot of inspirations. But, we need to Chilean ideas for a Chilean audience. In technology, of course we have to use the same tool, but always is important the Chilean ingredient.

For more information go to http://www.arq.upv.es/cultura/?p=828

Weak mind, strong madness

The sects have been in the humanity history always. Since the Akhenaton schism or the biblical golden calf, the groups against the rules has wanted to break the religions foundations and to do something better.
The messiah image, one person, the chosen one, the unique, is the principal reason of the religions and the sects. The sects take that image and use it to structure their ideals. That messiah is embodying in a person who knows the true and brings the salvation.
Apocalypse is always closer for the sects. And only the chosen ones, the sect’s members, can be saved.
The strong characters of the principal religions are modified to the sects ideals, by the brains of it, and are mixed with another topics like ancient magic, racism, divine justice because injustice, etc. But there are two parts of the sects: the creator or creators, the brains, and the members, the wools. Who create a sects it's always a person very smart, with a supreme intelligence, and big psychiatric problems. The followers, instead, are very shy people, psychologically weak, who need to believe in someone or something stronger than they.
The Nazism is considered a kind of sect. And if you watch the documentary of Leni Riefenstahl you can see the mysticism of the Nazism, like a big sect. The extermination of a danger is the principal point of sects like that.
There are other smaller sects like Charles Manson's Family. With a similar speech about apocalypse and racism and murders, that sect had today hundred of followers who continued to inspiring in the Manson's words.
It's a very complicated phenomenon to understand when you have your mind well.

What about Chilean and more...

What makes us chilean? Only to born in a specific country?
Well, to discuss about our identity is a big problem and a big common place in this days because the near bicentenary celebration. A lot of books have been published, where to investigate the possible forms of chilean identity is the principal concern.
We can list a big number of common features trying to explain how the chileans are chileans, but nowadays its result a boring work. When you have had the opportunity to travel through Chile you can see chilean are very different between them, in each part of that long country.
I think that we know as chilean identity is more than everything, a construction. Could it be inspired by real and historical roots, but when it comes a plural identity is because something is force it to be a construction.
The chilean identity cans talks in ignored behaviours, through the complicated ways of to be. The chilean identity is not the identity of all chilean people, otherwise, exist diverse shared habits, ideas, histories, places, past, etc. Those things make us similar.
We have to rescue those different shared things, our ways to see and to comprehend it, to can talk about our common patrimony.
The things that we have inherited and the things that we have created and we create every day.
That idea could be applied to every countries, more than ever today when the globalization phenomenon is inside our houses. Latin America is not a big country, is a big place with different people, who are living different events. Events that every day change us.

Walking around Santiago city

If you are a tourist and you are here, in Santiago, I'm going to tell you where you can go to know the past and the present of this city, walking quietly through the downtown, knowing the most typical and historical areas.
Founded in 1541, Santiago has a hill that was very important in that period. The Santa Lucía hill, named by the mapuche people as Huelén hill, was a strategic point in the Conquest War. In the end of XIX century, the superintendent Benjamín Vicuña, designed a beautiful public walking that you can tour through it stairs.
If you want to know the old splendour of the upper classes in the end of XIX century and begin of XX, you can visit the Republica neirborhood, starting by the Dieciocho street. There, you will see a lot of big houses of neoclassical style that shows the European taste of the epoch.
Now, if you want to know the cultural current movement, and you want to drink quietly a cup of coffee in the free air, you can go to walk through the Bellas Artes neirborhood and the Lastarria neirborhood. There, you'll find a lot of coffee houses and small and vanguard stores where buy design stuffs. Obviously, you have to visit the Fine Arts Museum to watch Chilean and foreign arts.
Then, you can go to the main square and know how the Chilean people really are. Like the rest of Hispanic colonial cities, Santiago has a main square surrounded by the Cathedral and administrative buildings, all of them from colonial period. There you can visit the National Historical Museum, the singular shop galleries Portal Fernández Concha and Bulnes.
Finally, you don't have to forget to visit the most important museums and galleries of colonial and modern art. Colonial and religious arts: San Francisco museum, La Merced museum and, a couple of minutes out of the centre by the subway, the Recoleta Dominica. Chilean art: the MAPA, Centro Cultural La Moneda, for examples.
Well, here you have a lot of good ideas to spend your time in Santiago. I hope you enjoy it!

Express yourself, whatever you are...

When I watched the film "The cabinet of Dr Caligari" I felt in love with the Expressionism. I think, more than the paintings, the films was the most accurated piece of art in the expressionism movement. Beautiful and terrible.

From Germany, in the begins of XX century, the picture expressionism was carry out by to groups: Blaue Reiter (Blue rider/horseman) and Die Brücke (The bridge). Artists like Franz Marc or Edvard Munch worked with strong and impulsive colors, exaggerated and broken lines, trying to express, very literal, the anguish and desperation, against the french Impressionism, that only shows the appearence of the things.

The films presents that visual ideas, without color, but with movement and sound (piano music, of course, because was muted films). The most important film directors was Robert Weine and F. W Murnau. Weine directed "The cabinet of Dr Caligari", a strange and beautiful film about a sonambulist and muderer man. Filmed only in studios, was the oportunity to show all the visual aesthetics of expressionism in the sets.

One of the other famous expressionism films is Murnau's "Nosferatu". Boarding the vampire's myth, the film is a big piece of expressionism art. The dark and depressed feeling is reflected in the sets, in the make up, in the clothing, like a long scream of anguish and blood.

I can see hundred of times that films and every time I can feel it power again.

Transantiago and me... a story of love and hate

Before the Transantiago, our new transpot system, my life was hard. I live on the outskirts of town, in a place named Nos (San Bernardo), near of Buin. So, I have to travel a couple of hours, or and hour and half, to get everywhere. Since I have memory I have to do it, and with the yellow busses it wasn't different.

Wherever, at first time of Transtgo. I had to take a feeder to San Bdo. center and then, take another main bus. It was an oddity to try to get home late in the evenings, because doesn't exist feeder busses! A lot of times, I almost cry in the stop, waiting for more than an hour.

Fortunately, exist another kind of busses to get to my home, buses that get out of the Gran Santiago and pass near of my home, like El Rulo bus, Santa Inés bus, or my favourite, the Buin Maipo, the bus that I take in the mornings.

However, I miss the big yellow bus Nos Independencia where I learned to go in busses when I was a little girl...

Well, now, I have to recognize the things have improved. I can take a bus from Macul subway directly to my home! Of course still being very slow and tiring.

This story couldn’t be very important, but when you multiply it for thousand and thousand, you can understand the mess that the city was when someone thinks to change the transport system from a day to another.

Higher level: for everyone!

The requirements level of the chilean education -elementary and high school- are very unequal between municipal schools and private or private subsidized school. The children don't have the same oportunities to get knowledge and that keep the social gap.

There is a lot of faults in the programs, a lot of wrong topics, a lot of laziness from the teachers to do better classes.

But, in the private schools, that doesn't happens. There, the children lear to speak english since kindergarden and have teachers who do better classes. That happens because they have more money.

But it couldn't be! The money couldn't make better schools and better students! The chilean education have to have WILL: I mean, will and open minds to find a way to make a better education from the core of the problem.

A higher education level in the municipals schools start from to fix the educational programs and demands better teachers.

Of course is needed a big investment from the goverment, but the news ideas are needed to, to refresh the old ideas about educations. Now, there's a lot of people who are thinking about it and doing greats plans through their organizations, but the politicians have to listen them.

Finally, it's all about will.