Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Michelle Marxuach is the co-director and co-founder of Beta-Local. Her practice stems from her interest to enhance the creative field and encourage interdisciplinary practices that allow people to rethink and redesign their own forms and structures to articulate answers and invent solutions to current issues. The incongruity of detached consumption habits from our specific geographical reality, the passivity of speech in a place that constantly pushes status quo platform, the lack of investment in the local economy and bureaucracy that hinders individual creative and alternative practices that push or reformulate formats, constitute a sense of urgency and action for Marxuach. She believes that creative, aesthetic thinking is essential for healthy social change.
Between 2005 and 2007, she took a sabbatical from the field of contemporary art to engage in the restoration and design of a historic structure in Old San Juan which is now home to the first level of Beta-Local program. There is particular interest in implementing ideas and concepts of the imaginary to the real, useful ideas and ideas on sustainability and effectiveness of materials and local context. From 1999 to 2004, Marxuach founded and directed the art space, M & M projects, an alternative space nonprofit dedicated to strengthening the production of contemporary art in Puerto Rico and its promotion internationally.
As part of the space created a workshop for local residents and international artists, M & M projects arose from the general apathy and control of institutions unwilling to present contemporary art. M & M projects invited more than 60 international artists to Puerto Rico, raised funds for local artists, arranged for alternative space exhibitions, published a number of records (books, brochures and other texts) that documented the scene and participated in discussions about art both locally and internationally. Between 1999 and 2004, she was the creative director of three international events in Puerto Rico seeking to promote the local to international and vice versa: Puerto Rico 00 [Parentheses in the city], Puerto Rico 02 [Scheduled] and Puerto Rico 04 [Tribute to the Messenger]. Marxuach has organised countless local and international exhibitions in the Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona, Ex Teresa, Mexico, Museum of Modern Art of Sto. Domingo, and the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, among others. Her curatorial practice established a forum for dialogue and camaraderie among artists where projects were discussed and potentiated beyond selection space for exhibition consumption.
POSTED in 2013