Through the idea of an imaginary encyclopaedia as an exhibition, the Bad Savage & the Society of
Dogs elaborate their second curatorial essay. The venue is Sala de Exposiciones ASAB, an exhibition room located in downtown Bogotá within the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.

An encyclopaedia of mules, an inscription of beasts of burden and other indigencies, a colonial catalogue of mendacities that constantly return as disimulated ghosts. In this encyclopaedia, properly a delirious mise-en-scène, can be readen an index of productions and artistic processes that points out to the animal as a critical stance that simultaneously generate and transgress political, economical and artistic borders – a wild bunch of mules crossing cultural boundaries and shifting colonial frontiers.

Under this figuration of beasts of burden is been constructed a catalogue of curiosities that address and put into question notions such as ‘the contemporary’, ‘the colonial’, ‘the aesthetics of liberation or revolution’, ‘the reiterated issue on violence’, ‘the (de)activisms in art’, and ‘the return of the avant- garde’, all the forementioned as a pletora of scriptures and actions that deliberately are produced as symbolic commodities of a take for granted global time. A notion of syncronicity under the paradigm of capitalist entrepreneurs and immediacy of temporality that inevitably is expanded to the artistic field and conforms it.

Against this notion of the contemporary artistic taxonomies based in geopolitical fictions of globality – with their well builded walls – artists based in distant coordinates of North and South America, elaborate diverse questions in which the animal, instead of theme or content, can be articulated as an operative of critique and radical practices. Artists from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and the United States take part on the exhibition. The public programme of the Great Encyclopaedia of Mules presents a series of talks and lectures, and generates an International Art Residency ‘Indifference: cover up’s and concealments’ directed by Curatoría Forense.

Great Encyclopaedia of Mules. Volume II – On Indigence and Other Beasts has been produced by the Bad Savage and the Society of Dogs (under comission of Andrés Jurando and Julio García Murillo), and in cooperation with Curatoría Forense (Jorge Sepúlveda T. and Ilze Petroni).

Artists: Javier Arango Garfias, Fernando Caridi, Leonel Castañeda Galeano, Jimmy Espinosa Porras, Adrián E. Gómez, Bruno Juliano, Alberto Lezaca, Alejandro Méndez, Manu Mojito, Rodrigo Ortega, Mónica Pulido, Constanza Ramírez, Gustavo Romero, Laura Snyder, Arlén Vásquez.