International graphic art circuits as "negotiators of diversity"
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The last fifty years of the 20th century witnessed the consolidation, on the artistic stage, of an international circuit of graphic art shows, of a biennial or triennial nature, the Ljubljana Biennial (in today's Slovenia), founded in 1955, being the pioneer and one of the most prestigious venues in this saga. This circulation of graphic arts around the world was simultaneously structured with a series of technological and communicational changes, which began to adopt global forms when a world-wide market was developed, in which money and the production of goods and messages were dissociated from specific territories; geographic frontiers became porous; and customs offices often ineffectual. This process concluded with the consequent erosion of the bipolar division of the world, opening a new globalizing stage, in which interdependency among societies is accentuated, and new supranational interconnections are generated.⁹
In the cultural realm, the repercussion of artistic events has reduced the national character of aesthetic production, partially erasing national artistic identities. The relatively simultaneous circulation of international shows, fairs and biennials, together with the dissemination of information about them, generated a movement of itinerant artists, who traveled, and still travel, with flexibility between many centers in various continents. These circular movements set the basis to believe that art and culture tended to homologize in cosmopolitan cultural patterns, which, built upon a Euro-centric basis, created a sort of international style that - launched from the United States - flattened and manipulated cultural differences. These fears were realistic: the transnational expansion of our times needed international languages, institutions, and uses that make communication possible on a global scale.¹⁰ In this sense, globalization would make us closer, which would lead us to think of a convergence towards a more consolidated human race.
On the other hand, in contrast to Postmodernism, Neo-liberalism, and all other brutal globalizations, an inverse phenomenon is growing in the United States and various countries in Europe, whose cultural currents are beginning to appear Latinized, Africanized. Asianized, and "feminized" from within.¹¹ It would appear that globalization has simultaneously leaned towards a higher pluralization. producing the appearance of new social subjects, the conscience of multi-culturalism and cultural trans-territorialization. However, it is in this pluralism where globalization makes its darker sides apparent, since - at the same time - it multiplies the differences, it bears inequality, it unleashes massive migrations and inter-ethnic clashes, which, together with the poverty of peripheral areas, would not render a vision of a convergent future, but rather a future defined by fractures and segregation.
Today, visual arts ought to have read- justed themselves to all of these new articulations between the global and the national, situating themselves between the tension generated by the globalizing tendencies that established a homogenizing "international language" for art, and the valorization of artistic practices as opportunities for renovating or continuing symbolic differences. Between these two antagonistic postures, some thinkers emphasize intermediate actions that could help to compensate the single-directional globalizing mechanisms that seemingly are only produced in a North-South or center-periphery direction. Néstor Garcia Canclini proposes an original methodological principle to overcome the polarization between what is global and what is local that affect today's culture. This intermediate position would resort to the use of networks dedicated to the "negotiation of diversity". This expression is used by some theorists¹² to characterize how representations in central countries regarding peripheral groups may be reformulated through tile actions of non-governmental entities that may accomplish the inverse phenomenon: to project peripheral perspectives on a transnational scale. From this perspective, two good examples of "negotiation of diversity" in the printmaking field are the San Juan Biennial for Lain American and Caribbean Comaries and the Czech magazine Grapheion.

The work that the Latin American artist Patricia Villalobos Echeverria installed in the Triennial is part of a larger series. It is as much a response to transcultural issues as it is a reply to the nature of identity in this age of transnational and global connectivity. She is particularly interested in the colored/gendered/sexual body, relating the systematic erasure of the body in the 70-90's in Central and South America - de-fleshed, tortured, dissected - with (he current view of the body with similar detachment through a set of different circumstances - as the continuous medical and institutional scrutiny creates a self less tied to locality and geography. Via photos, prints, sound/video and installations her work engages these ideas using personal texts and images, biography and the history of Nicaragua: its wars and natural disasters. Disembodied, de-centered, she questions our own (post) human nature. "posthumana" continued her series of Cortocircuito/Short-Circuit as she uses her own body to create a transhuman body -connected to its own reflection/memory, in a short-circuit where reality and illusion collide.