BOMB 118/Winter 2012
Roughly translated as “a place to doubt,” Lugar a Dudas serves as an artist’s space and cultural center in Cali, Colombia.
Exterior of Lugar a Dudas with Juan Pablo Echeverri’s ??Miss
Lugar a Dudas is an independent nonprofit platform initiated by artists Oscar Muñoz and Sally Mizrachi in Cali, Colombia. Since its inception in 2005, the space has quickly become a neighborhood cultural center stirring with activity: film screenings, exhibitions, talks and workshops, and an international residency program for artists, curators, and researchers. A contemporary art library and archive is available for public use and Lugar a Dudas maintains a street-level, storefront gallery called la vitrina — a window display that shows artists’ work as well as calcos, or key pieces in international contemporary art, reconstructed by residents and the space’s organizers. After just four years, Lugar a Dudas has become a major reference point for the production and research of visual arts in Colombia.
Interior of Lugar a Dudas. Photo by José Tomás Giraldo.
José Tomás Giraldo. Computer-generated floor plan of Lugar a Dudas, 2006.
Lugar a Dudas’s headquarters is a house near downtown Cali. The activities there have a distinctive tempo; events unfold in a uniquely laid-back atmosphere. A beautiful back garden is a social hub and meal space. Lugar a Dudas is fundamentally a place of interaction—cross-disciplinary discussion is perhaps the most crucial goal of its residency program. When I first visited Lugar a Dudas in 2005, I was most surprised by its transitional state. The house was practically empty, and almost all of it was available; hardly any of its rooms had fixed purposes. This radical ethos of non-definition stands in clear contrast to the trend in which cultural projects are shaped into stiff, constricting agendas and discourses. It felt like the space was sincerely available to be shaped by whoever passed through.
Two years later, in 2007, I became part of the first group of residents and stayed for five months. I proposed to become part of the working staff, to help its team develop the concepts and physical adjustments needed to advance the plans of the space. I had been working with several small-scale, independent galleries in Bogotá and was interested in exploring and researching the relationship between artists and organizations. Over the course of five months at Lugar a Dudas, we built furniture, devised signage, wrote some of the organization’s core texts, hosted visitors, answered questions for the media, and delivered talks and workshops. During my residency, I became the guardian of the house.
Interior of Lugar a Dudas. Photo by José Tomás Giraldo.
José Tomás Giraldo. Computer-generated drawing made during Lugar a Dudas residency, 2007.
Lugar a dudas is a difficult phrase to translate: the result of truncating the expression of certainty, sin lugar a dudas (without a doubt), it creates an image that can be read as “a place subject to doubts,” or more simply, “place to doubt.” This propensity to doubt is the starting point for their acceptance of new ideas. After a series of debates during my residency, it was decided that for the next three years, Lugar a Dudas would be used primarily as a platform for research, education, and professional interaction instead of as a transient exhibition space—more laboratory than gallery. This is unprecedented not only for Cali’s contemporary art culture, but also in the city’s generally rough sociopolitical environment; Lugar a Dudas beckons the public to stay. Still tended by its founders, the space is striving to become more stable without losing its improvisational, artist-run feeling in a climate where local funding is scarce. In response, Muñoz and Mizrachi are working with similar-minded Latin American art spaces to create a regional network of artists and cultural practitioners who share Lugar a Dudas’s approach to artmaking and the dissemination of culture. Lugar a Dudas feeds from the outside; it is strengthening the foundations of local culture by making available a flood of art and ideas whose unifying claim is that uncertainty is acceptable and that its own identity is contingent on its collaborators. Art shapes the organization instead of the conventional opposite, showing how there can be inclusiveness and communal creativity in doubt.
—José Tomás Giraldo is an artist from Bogotá who is currently living and working in Cali. His work has been shown in artist-run centers in Vancouver, San Francisco, Bogotá, and in major cultural institutions in Colombia. He works with drawing, text, and design.
(Installation, Artists on Artists)