May 7, 2010

Eleventh Class - Jota Castro

Date: 18.05.10
Venue: Meat Market, North Melbourne (C/ Y3K)
Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Host: Jota Castro
Topic: tba

Jota Castro is a Peruvian-born artist (Yurimaguas, 1965), based in Brussels, Belgium, who worked in the diplomatic service for two decades. In the late 1990s he left his career as a diplomat at the United Nations and the European Union and decided to devote himself totally to the field of art. Through his different professional activities, Castro has gained in-depth knowledge of the world of international politics; moreover, he considers his university studies in Law and Political Science as his real training in art.His works point to certain mechanisms at work in present day Western society, with its imbalances and weaknesses, which are skillfully highlighted by the artist to reveal the incongruities at work in political and social structures.He is consulting editor for Janus magazine in Belgium and Nolens Volens in Spain. He is a lecturer at the European University of Madrid. His work has been extensively shown around the world. He has participated in the Venice, Tirana, Prague and Gwangju Biennales. He won the Gwangju Biennale Prize in 2004 in South Korea.

Me in a Single Sentence
Jota, that's me, the son of a woman who is the daughter of a son of a bitch and a gentleman of the Third World, I suffered from neglect when I was little and I stopped talking for a year when I was five years old, I was a soldier, I played sports, I studied, I traveled a lot, I wrote a book-no good-I met my wife in Madrid, I married her in Belfast, I almost lost her, I almost lost me, I came back to my dreams, it makes me laugh knowing that Freud loved cocaine as much as me, I've got kidney problems but I'm taking care of myself, I dreamed of a destiny whereas I already had one, I love sex like I love life, I was tortured and I still feel guilty, I have been rich and I didn't like, I have been poor and I didn't like, I don't know where I'm gonna die, I have no children, I haven't got a mother tongue any more, I picked up art because I couldn't stand lying, I've always liked writing poetry, I lost a woman I loved, my father died without me ever seeing him again, I haven't seen my mother in 20 years, I feel lonely sometimes, I'm crazy about soccer, when I was little my motto was die rather than sin, sometimes certain friends call me el hijo del sol, I've traveled more than my imagination, I was in Berlin when the wall came down, I was in Moscow during Perestroika, mathematics calms me down, I once dreamed of a star that walked, I read the sports newspaper Equipe every day, I love the rain when I'm at home, I have a retarded little brother called Fidel, I love Cy Twombly, I feel right at home in Scotland, I feel right at home in Italy, I've seen Pelé and Maradona play, I painted the stairs in my house orange, I'm fascinated by Morrison's "low pad" armchair, I'm not white, I feel guilty, I was born in the Amazonia.