Alice Creischer / Andreas Siekmann

Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann will talk about their project Principio Potosí [The Potosí Principle], an exhibition based on a research project inviting contemporary artists to a dialogue with historical colonial works of art from Peru and Bolivia. The exhibition is on show at Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid until the beginning of September 2010, and subsequently in Berlin and La Paz. Their starting-point is the analysis of colonial painting in the viceroyalty of Peru from the 16th to the 18th century. The viceroyalty, founded in 1542, included for a time the occupied power centres of the Incas along the Andes, and extensive areas of the continent. The influential painting schools of Cuzco, Potosí and Collao (La Paz) emerged in the new or already established centres of Andean culture (in today's Peru and Bolivia). The pictures, shown for the first time on this scale in Spain, were both devotional images and vehicles of a message of resistance. For Creischer and Siekmann, who are curating the exhibition with Max Georg Hinderer, this ambivalence is a sign that art, then as now, is closely linked with the field of politics, which also has blind spots and black holes.

At the 2010 Summer Academy, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann are directing the class lasticine Animation as a Sculptural Experience in the Alte Saline Hallein.