Alejandro Quinteros
artist_builder_professor_
Alejandro Quinteros was born in Lima, Peru in 1968. He is an electronic media artist-sculptor, informal architect-builder, researcher, and sailboat rescuer-fixer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Lima, Perú. He is a professor at the Department of Fine Arts at The University of Puerto Rico. He created The Art and Technology Workshop ARTEC and teaches interactive design, physical computing, photography, 3D design, 4D time-arts , trans-technological practices, sculpture and spatial practices. His work has been exhibited in Cairo, Chicago, New York, Canada, Barcelona, France, Perú, México, Serbia, Greece, and Puerto Rico. He received a BFA and a MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and a PhD from The School of Art, Design and Architecture. University of Plymouth, UK. His PhD thesis researches the syncretic practices that arise from the conflicts and intersections between art and architecture’s socio-spatial practices in the site of marginalized communities in Latin America. He is currently working on a book on the role of the artist as a colonizer agent and in association with Casa Taft on assembling the City-Lab: Art-Design and Intervention, a centre for research and critical pedagogy on socially engaged spatial practices. He continues to work on sailboats in the Caribbean and dwellings in the mountains of Puerto Rico and in the highlands of Perú.
Research Interests_
After a long hiatus from art making to become a full-time father -twice- and achieve a PhD... I am returning.
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In my work I construct scaffoldings, platforms for layered signs and meaning to be reveal and transformed by the public’s participation*. Thus, the framing of a context for the work and therefore, inevitably its content.
*The public’s participation is an oxymoron combination. Both terms are constructed fictions to support a status quo of populist discourse where ‘we’, –a priori and uncritically assume to mean ‘access to all’. Who are the public? and who are allowed to participate? are fundamental questions of any design. The public and participation are both distinct and exclusive socio-political spheres open only to a particular segment of the population that fit the proper requisite behaviour, phenotype and somatic norm –class, race, gender.
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Therefore, design is fundamentally behavioural design. Thus, any artwork and architecture are behavioural structures that camouflage as individual agency.
I am currently further researching the role of the artist as a colonizer agent together with a critique of the academy and art institutions towards an book tentatively titled;
Artist Colonizer. Agency, Labour and Extractivist pedagogies. (2022)
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I had written critically in my PhD dissertation, about the role artists and architects embody as agents of epistemic authority in marginalized communities. The context of the artist's and architect's intervention is a conflictual site and definition.
Sedimented definitions that serve and support the hegemony of art institutions and academia have to be challenge if we are willing –as artists & architects, to redefine our social function beyond the extractivist practices embedded into our design thinking.
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Following feminist architect Meike Schalk's (2017), we need " new positions from which to reclaim sustainable futures with long-term perspectives."
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To move beyond the authoritarian patriarchal performance of the artist's & architect's role, away from epistemic extractivisms, injustices and errors, another way of doing art & architecture is possible.
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To disrupt the authority of the practice and pedagogy.
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To close the methodological & cognitive gaps left open in our experience error'** and the rhetoric of privileged, epistemic ignorance and excuse ***, ‘knowing and doing otherwise’ **** towards a practice of solidarity and justice is possible.
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** Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1962
*** Miranda Flicker. 2007.
****Elizabeth Grosz. 1999.
Education_
2021 PhD. School of Art, Design and Architecture . University of Plymouth. UK.
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2016 MPhil. Arts and Humanities.University of Plymouth. UK.
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1993 MFA. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Chicago, IL.
1990 BFA. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1986-88 University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
