Felipe Arturo: Huerequeque Bar Project for an expanded documentary

The event that marks the conclusion of artist Felipe Arturo’s residency, after winning the 2015 illy sustainArt three-month residency at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, takes place on a boat as it crosses the Venice lagoon.

Once he has greeted his guests on board, Felipe Arturo will be showing Huerequeque Bar, an experimental documentary project inspired by Huerequeque, an elderly fellow from Iquitos, Peru’s biggest Amazonian town, where Werner Herzog set his film “Fitzcarraldo”.

Completely by chance, the actor who played Huerequeque became one of the stars of the famous film. The character he played was very much inspired by his own life, as reality and fiction fused into one.

In Felipe Arturo’s film project, the man becomes a living testament to the recent history of the Amazon basin: the events that have defined the identity of Iquitos (the arduous systems for rubber extraction, trading raw materials with colonial nations, the cultural influence of the old continent on indigenous society) all emerge from his tales, memories and poems.

 This presentation is the final event on a pathway that enabled the Colombian artist to live and work at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice for a three-month period, from June to August 2015. As a recipient of the illy sustainArt prize, Felipe lived in close contact with other artists in residence, had the chance to present his work to the public at an initial Artist’s Talk, hosted curators and art professionals on studio visits, and his research benefited from the support of staff at the Institution.

Felipe Arturo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1979. After graduating in architecture from the University of the Andes in Bogotá, he went on to do a Master’s degree in Art at Columbia University in New York. His artistic practice draws elements from town planning, architecture and art, placing them into a relationship with politics, history, geography and economics. His work focuses principally on sculpture, installations and videos in which he explores issues to do with structure, sequence and materiality.

Event Schedule:

5:30 pm | Departure from the Zattere Gesuati landing stage (near the Chiesa Santa Maria del Rosario)

6 pm | On the water

8 pm | Return to the Zattere Gesuati landing stage