Rimer cardillo biography of christopher

Acts of Empathy1
Arnd Schneider

In a recent keynote lecture at a major international conference on contemporary art and anthropology, Rimer Cardillo focused on how the practices of his art making were inspired by the engagement with the lives and cultural manifestations of the peoples, past and present, in various parts of Latin America — his native Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Venezuela.1 How can these encounters be characterised?
inom suggest that we have to conceive of the appropriation of otherness in contemporary art as a hermeneutic strategy,3 not simply as an act of copying, assimilation, or incorporation of difference. This hermeneutic approach implies notions of ‘understanding’ and ‘learning’ on the part of the appropriating artists, without falling into a simple trap of an idealistically conceived ‘dialogue’ — which, in any case, must remain incomplete, precisely because of cultural differences, and disparities of econo

•