ISEA 2011, Estambul

Foro Latinoamericano

 

Introducción y registros de video




What the United States does best is to understand itself.

What it does worst is understand others.

Carlos Fuentes, Mexican writer

Introduction to a Latin American Forum: why.

For thirty years, I have been working professionally as a troubleshooter, solving problems for companies and governments. Always very different type of problems ranging from conceptualizing federal elections to the introduction of new technologies. It is my experience that any problem most of the time is simpler than it seems. All you have to do is having the right diagnostic in your hand, it has to do with the possibility to "see". In many ocassions professionals choose the most complicated process in order to justify the hiring of a big team to ensure a probable solution based on quantity and no quality. I am very sorry to say that most of the people have a solution before they know what the problem is about.

The issue that I try to explain today as a metaphore has to do with a name. It does not matter how much power or money you have, if you are a teacher or the president of a country, when you are calling someone by the wrong name, that person is never going to show up, you are never going to meet him or her, never going to get to know him or her. It is quite a problem that in the year 2011, we are still struggling with basic principles. 

It is my experience that when you apply the equation of technology to a missunderstanding or the wrong message it only multiplies the confussion.

That is what I would like to speak today in the Latin American Forum ISEA 2011. Going back to the basics, to get you attention to the term "Latin America". It is important that as time changes so do concepts.

I want to focus on the understanding of the dificult reality that this region lives. It is a paradox, between the complexity of thought that you can find there and the struggle to solve every day reality. Nanotechnologists with international science awards, Nobel Prize candidates that instead of struggling with the misteries of a micro universe, they struggle to be able to walk in into their classroom in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. In this particular case two brilliant scientists, Mauricio and Humberto Terrones were asked to leave their jobs because they were invited to too many international conferences and the administrator in retaliation would not give them budget to put together their their microscope for several years.They spent more energy convinzing a very bad administrator than doing their research.

On the other hand, the outside view, it was historic when George Bush spoke one time to the people of Texas warning them how the Nicaraguans could invade the United States by foot. It is not bad enough that Bush believed that. It is incredible that the audience actually believed such statement. It is incredible that they elected him president and by default a World leader”.

In my travels around the World, it is very common for people to ask me questions like where is Mexico or to state things like you are not Mexican, in most cases I gave no importance to statements like that, since I always would take them as an isolated accident. Nonetheless, lately, upon reflection, in the added experience of thirty years traveling through the World, I have come to realize that if we do not define basic terms we can not define complex terms. If the first step in a plan made of many steps is not clear the second step is a disaster and so on. Dialogue and communication can not take place if the very beginning is a false premise. Basic logic.

The Forum we are today is meant to have a clear strategy  and a clear message on my behalf. I am trying to redefine a vacant term called  Latinoamerica, which is a term that defines a series of countries, but strange enough in each of the chosen criteria they never land the same countries. When you define Latin America as per its Latino language, you include places like Montreal or Quebec, but you leave out all the indigenous population and the original tribes in all the countries.  If you define it as per historical parallel, places like Haiti or Montreal are out of the conversation.

This type of confused definition generates a problem of identity, in which the people within the parameters of the term do not believe or want to be part of the wrongdefinition.

For me the visualization of the paradigm is a map made of layers, semitransparent not geographically precise: knowledge before the Spaniards and the Portuguese, knowledge after independence, other broken knowledge later on, situated within a series of civil wars, government overtakings and revolutions. To try to put a history of ideas becomes a gigantic puzzle, an incredibly fragmented reality in which each new government has an explanation of their own culture:

Examples at hand could be how Chavez came up with a law that makes it illegal to any citizen of Venezuela to be called Mickey; in other countries, like Argentina, Mauricio Kagel did a lot of his work outside or someone like Fernando Flores that had to leave Chile and had to live in San Francisco. Great knowledge buried among layers and layers of complicated political turmoil.

There is the need of for these 21 countries to become a region and there is a need of the understanding of Latin America as its true entity. Unfortunately, governments of the american continent insist in signing trade agreements instead of political agreements. There is the intent of focusing only in the economy, as to say if the economy is OK everything will be OK. It is also unfortunate that they have missed that mark, and the economy is not OK. Latin America is missing a component of social tissue needed to support the posibility of the creation of a region. 

Latin America is a multilayered place of many fragmented realities, that needs complete understanding about itself to actually being able to discover its potential and all its possible expressions. The wealth is astounding, to mention very few but fundamental examples, the scientific knowledge of the Mayans having  discovered the number zero (revolutionary at its time), the work in cybernetics done in Mexico and in Chile, the invention of the color TV by Camarena which also became the TV system that was used in the Voyager.

My statement on the nature of Latin America works in both directions, a message sent towards the outside and towards the inside. When talking to the outside, is to generate a second look, or a more accurate an a different look, a look that needs more attention to detail because is not organized in the same manner as other regions and other countries. Towards the inside has to do with the adoption of the definition not as an idenityt but as this "supra - identity". When countries are in a path of development you need to generate the tools or resources to become as strong as possible. The concept of a region has to do with generating new strenght.

It is a moment of attitude, It is for us the artists of the region to redesign the metaphor, with any tool at hand, the tool of communications, language, social networks, technology, understanding the problem, generating new thought. We need new maps.  Maybe in an era of social networks the new map is not  anymore in the form of a globe but it is in a form of a social network. We need models that work.

This is the beggining of a job that has to be approached in a group consensus, through the constructions of networks of thought and a common language and agreed definitions. As in the paradigm of GI-GO, Garbage in, Garbage out, if you feed garbage to a perfect model you get garbage, if you feed perfect data to a garbage model you get garbage Clear understanding of our identity can yield out clear thought.