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CAROLINA CAYCEDO
Born 1978, London, England; lives in New York, New York, and San Juan, Puerto Rico
Carolina Caycedo responds to the effects of global capitalism with a practice rooted in processes of communication, movement, and exchange. Her varied projects— from street actions and itinerant markets to public marches— all germinate in dialogues with communities outside of the art world, and her works invariably refer back to the culture and economy of the street.
Caycedo resists the commodification of art by turning to an economy based on bartering. In 1999, as a member of the Colombian artists’ group Colectivo Cambalache, she helped initiate the ambulatory Museo de la calle (Museum of the street), which began in a single neighborhood of Bogotá and revolved around a street cart as a site of exchange. The cart held a constantly changing inventory of objects, ranging from the functional to the illicit, that could be swapped with other objects by passersby on the street. As members of the collective transported and exhibited the cart across the globe, it continued its function as a mobile marketplace, while also existing as an ever-evolving artifact of community intervention.
Caycedo extended her use of bartering as a basis for communication during a two-month exhibition in Vienna in 2002. During this time, she traveled the city in a van subsisting only on what she could obtain from people she encountered on the street. In exchange for food or a place to shower and cook, Caycedo offered any number of goods or services that she was able to provide. The written inscription on the side of the van summarized the structuring principle of the work: “I give, I need. You give, you need.”
For Caycedo, the site of artistic experience extends beyond the studio or the exhibition space into the wider world in which the artist lives and moves. Additionally, she considers her audience to be not just the typical museum- or gallery-goer but anyone she may encounter in daily life. The result is an art that consists in the creation not of objects for passive aesthetic contemplation but of opportunities for cooperation and conversation among a broad array of individuals and communities.
GCM
...read more about this artist in the Biennial Catalogue
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Immigrants Influence Home Cultures, public march, June 20, 2004, Hackney, London
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