Choco Residencies brings artists, writers and musicians into this remote Colombian region. Here they can develop their work, share experiences and skills with local communities, learn from these communities and present the best joint projects on the internet and through national exhibitions, publications and events. At least one annual residency will be linked to another national and international residency with our partner organisations.

Is a new programme to create partnerships and opportunities for disadvantaged people working in the creative field. Since 1999 when we first began to help groups and individuals in Colombia, we have seen how it's possible to transform lives with relatively small financial input. Through on-going advice, it's also possible to create a sustainable future for those receiving support.

Grains Of Sand supports micro cultural projects that have a social emphasis. In return for financial support or other goods and training, recipients will create a work of art or craft using their specialized skills. This is given to the project's supporter.

A video strand includes the abstract-documentary approach that Arias has imprinted on his own work and has been supported by the Prince Claus Fund. Future projects involve collaborations with artists whose work is relevant to Más Arte Más Acción's vision. This is also connected to other programme strands with video works emerging from Silent Voices and Grains Of Sand. Arias will also extend his project Humanos Derechos to other conflict zones through DocumentARIAS.

Writers, critics and social commentators assess Más Arte Más Acción's projects. The results are published on our website, through catalogues and dvd's.

Fernando Arias and Jonathan Colin won a Ministry of Culture Award to co-curate the XIII Regional Salon 2009/10. Through open submission and direct invitation around fifteen projects will be selected.

Starting with a talk given by a bacteriologist in laboratories across the region, this theoretical and practical session focussed on the principles of life seen through the microscope. This interaction between art and science creates space for new dialogues to enrich the arts across the region.

Based on this session, participants are invited to develop projects using the metaphor of the microscopic world as their starting point. Social, cultural, political, economic or other themes are developed that reveal uncomfortable, hidden realities and explore them from personal, regional and universal perspectives. Projects are encouraged to take account of human scale and how this impacts on our perceptions of various issues. The selected projects will form the XIII Regional Salon of Artists 2009/10.

Mision Vision is a creative workshop funded by the Ministry of Culture. Directed by Fernando Arias and Elkin Calderon it coaches artists in how to work with audiovisual technology by exploring a theme 'the city as a living organism'. Calderón is a professor of video art at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota.

The city as a living organism serves as a base to investigate the 'life' of a city. The way in which the human body functions on a microscopic level has similarities with the dynamics and organisation within a city. From this starting point, Mision Vision uses video to explore the artists' daily life and their intimate relationship with the city. The project forms part of MICROmacro with selected videos being shown during the exhibition.

ISRAEL - PALESTINE
A Prince Claus Fund award enabled Arias to travel to Israel and Palestine in March 2009. His aim was to produce a work based on the same principles as Humanos Derechos in Colombia.

The three-week visit led to complex and unsettling findings, challenging Arias' initial aim to reveal each side's common humanity. On this visit he interviewed people involved in the conflict and also intervened in Israel using graffiti, documenting it and producing a series of photographs that question the idea of state and territory. Arias will return to the region in December 2009 to complete his work.

COLOMBIA
Humanos Derechos focuses on the human aspects of people directly involved in conflicts and wars. It also looks at how our social environment and the circumstances within which we are raised lead to hatred and intolerance.

"Realising how complex the issues in Colombia's conflict have become made me want to strip away these layers of complexities and touch base once more with our common humanity" says Arias. READ MORE

Pais Para Quien is an exhibition planned for Bogotá at the end of 2009. Mapa Teatro, a crumbling colonial house in a busy street in central Bogota has been chosen to present a series of Arias' recent works that confront power, politics, war and religion. These include Humanos Derechos installation, three handmade textiles, cast bronze works and several individual videos.

In 2006 Colombia's first Presidential re-elections took place. The popular right-wing president Alvaro Uribe initiated constitutional changes that allowed him to stand for a second term, despite human rights groups accusing him of being linked to paramilitary operations.

On May 28th Colombians living in the United Kingdom could cast their votes at their consulate. To coincide with this historic moment, Arias arranged for a group of four friends to stand outside the consulate holding placards with the silhouette of a crouching armed man and the word RE-ERRECCION emerging from his groin. An armband with the initials AUV identified him as the President. AUC are the initials of the country's paramilitary and most Colombians could make an association.

Arias invited voters to comment on the poster and recorded their responses. However, one of the Uribe supporters reported the group to the police, saying she was frightened of these people and that they supported armed groups in Colombia. Without asking who they were, the police officers swooped on the group and arrested one of them for causing public disorder.

The rest of the day was spent talking to the police, explaining who the artists were until the Chief Superintendent offered a formal apology, alongside the arresting officer. He concluded that the woman who had reported the group to the police had influenced the police officer to believe her views and that the police officer had failed in his duties by not asking the group any questions. Ignorance and fear lay at the heart of these events, issues that concern many Colombians living in their home country.

In this video, Arias encounters a young missionary on the streets of Bogota from the Raeliana sect (the protagonist of a controversial and ethical affair relating to a cloned girl). The sect mixes various quasi-scientific, biblical and science fiction writings to form their beliefs. The video draws out some of the contradictions during the discussion.

For Love and Money was a radio project for Frieze Art Fair 2006. Artists and cultural workers at the thin end of the financial wedge were invited to react to the notion of an art fair, moving the agenda away from profit and towards a greater sympathy concerning the purpose of art in society. The shows were broadcast from the Resonance FM booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2006.

Arias' contribution looked at the art market through the eyes and experiences of people far removed from the glitz of one of the world's most profitable art fairs.

Enriching and enabling the commercial art world to exist, the average artist's income in London in 2005 was below the minimum wage. However the 2005 Freeze Art Fair had a turnover of £33 million. Arias recorded the views of various people to create a three dimensional audio work about this.

- Why are you writing on this board?
Asked one of the guards at the Pabellón Cuba.
I stopped painting and asked him:
- Writing what?
He pointed at the wooden platform I was standing on and replied:
-That.
-Writing what?
I insisted again, inviting him to pronounce the word I was writing.
After a few failed attempts, he turned to his female colleague, also Cuban, and asked her to read it out to me.
- You read it, I can't. I'm getting out of here.
His female colleague now alone read the word in a low voice as if trying to guess something.
INFIDELIDAD
Then she started again and read the first two letters. After a pause she continued with the third, fourth, fifth and sixth and stopped. She looked at me with a nervous smile, then turned away to search for her colleague, leaving me with the answer to my question: They were afraid to say this word out loud.

To coincide with his solo exhibition at London Printworks Trust in Brixton, Arias was commissioned to create a multiple, La Historia de Arias. All twelve copies with an 'appendix' containing the artist's own work were simultaneously exhibited in the following galleries and libraries around Britain:

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Royal College of Art library, Guildhall University Library, Chelsea School of Art library, Bluecoat Gallery Liverpool, Glasgow School of Art Library, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, Edinburgh School of Art Library.

Homage to the children of the war on drugs.

Half-truths was an action based on an editorial published jointly by 31 Colombian papers and journals on 6th February 2008. It denounced censorship by the State that not only violated their right to tell the truth but also the rights of common citizens to be told the truth.

"From the point of view of a Colombian citizen, my concern was how much damage censorship causes and how it contributes to ignorance, blindness and uncertainty. This type of censorship adds to a climate of fear and is used as a form of political control.

"For half-truths I became the personification of a country that lives in a fictitious time and space. I acted as a transmitter between the press and the people, in this case from the daily newspapers El Tiempo (The Time) and El Espacio (The Space). Each day for a week I wore that day's front-page news, printed on the back, and walked the streets. The front of the t-shirts read:

'Neither time nor space can erase what you made me dream' – Kylie Mynogue b. 1968.

'Time and space are just an illusion' - Berkeley 1685 - 1753

"For those seven days I walked the streets of Bogotá in order to remind myself and other Colombians about the reality of living in a society where the news is based on half-truths".

A project conceived by Fernando Arias that presented work by four other Colombian artists in London through residencies, exhibitions, performances and a final event.

A video-project to coincide with the Protest to Survive exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery London. Arias interviewed young people from the local Bangladeshi community living near the Whitechapel about their survival tactics. The video was shown at the gallery during the exhibition. He also produced stickers with the words 'Conform to Survive' and plastered them around the neighbourhood during the exhibition.

On my second day at Big River 2, I was presented with one of the most enigmatic human conditions: M had a manic-depressive crisis. The experience was intense and affected me and everyone else around. M left the workshop for a psychiatric hospital and from that moment I had the strange feeling that I was him.

At the time, I was working with an idea of finding balance within myself. I stared at the sea for hours. I saw the line of the horizon swinging like a spirit level, which never reached total equilibrium. The line was the edge between life and death.

I visited M at the hospital and asked for his permission to use his voice that I had recorded during his crisis. We sat on a bench and talked a little. He was very lucid. We looked at the void. I wanted to go back and swim into the open sea to reach the line of the horizon. I swam for almost an hour. It was only when I got back to the beach and seeing the preoccupation I had caused my colleagues -some thought I had drowned- that I realised the meaning of this action: I wanted to live but at the same time die, I was standing on my own line. READ MORE