III Latin American Biennial of Contemporary Jewellery 2021 winners

This III Biennial version went completely online. This and several other Latin American exhibitions will be opening through August and September, and the whole event can be visited at www.labienal.ar. Selected and winning pieces will be exhibited Online from August 17 to October 17, 2021.

Tali Wasserman led, the organizers Paula Isola and Laura Giusti, the jurors Fabiana Gadano and Jorge Castañón, Verónica Soncini, coordinator of the La Ventana Gallery, where the exhibition of the Abran Cancha contest is exhibited, Vicky Salinas, director of the Museum of the Historia del Traje, where it will be exhibited in March and April 2022, and Delia Piña, a journalist specializing in contemporary jewelry. The contestants, selection judges, and other award judges were present via zoom, and the guests and enthusiastic public attended through the labienal.ar platform, the youtube channel, and the Joyeros Argentinos Facebook page.

Awards Winners:
1st Prize: Vania Ruiz, Chauchera Rota (Chile).  (Joya Brava Member).
2nd Prize: Adriana Gómez, Phagocytosed Otherness (Argentina).
3rd Prize: Verónica Núñez, The street screams  (Chile).

Joya Argentina Award:
Gabriela Nirino, Traveling Chuspa.

Outstanding Pieces of the competition:
Mónica Díaz. (Joya Brava Member).

Mention prize:
1st Prize: Susana Ortiz 
2nd Prize: Alejandro Gonzalez
3rd Prize: Cristina Celis 

Incentive mentions to the Argentine jeweler:
Andrea Serini - The skin that inhabits me III - Andrea Serini
María Eugenia Ramos - Time 
Patricia Báez - With the water around my neck

Special mention from the jury:
Valeria Dowding - Atacama Moon 

The Jury Team:
Jorge Castañón (ARG), Fabiana Gadano (ARG), Nuria Carulla (COL), Celio Braga (BRA).

About Vania Ruiz piece:
My pieces are homages that reflect protection and affection to survive a world of helplessness and uncertainty. They take references from popular culture linked to a domestic, powerful and invisible feminine world. For this piece, I picked up an antique bronze mesh coin purse that I bought at the flea market in Valparaíso, Chile, 20 years ago. The purse had so much to repair that I didn't know where to start. From turning it over so much, a flap suddenly formed and I couldn't help but making the relationship, once again, with the vulva (a recurring theme in my work). A universal association, present in our popular culture. In Chile, we call the vagina “chauchera” (coin purse), because of their resemblance. The connection of this broken “chauchera”, coming from Germany and brought to Valparaíso during a prosperous past (a city raised by immigrants from Germany, England, Italy and Croatia), with this nowadays decadently beautiful, impoverished, vandalized city with curtains down, spoke to me of the fragility of our future. Of broken dreams, unemployment, resignation, economic dependency, uncertainty, hunger, lockdowns, violence, and an overall sense of desolation, where women always get the worst part.

About Adriana Gómez Piece:
The question of who we are, as individuals and as a society, is imposed on us to differentiate ourselves and position ourselves in front of others, as a necessity, and as a way of existing. Identity implies affirming ourselves in what we have in common, it includes and excludes. This Latin American search for some kind of unity that unites us and links us has a risk:   engulfing those many others who inhabit this territory, losing them.

About Verónica Núñez piece:
The vindication of play and play is essential in my pieces, and not only as an element necessarily related to childhood but as something universal, transversal, suitable for any age and circumstance. For me, it is inevitable to think that the most direct way to capture the idea of ​​the game as an act of purest creation is to do it with a toy artifact. I have learned to play through jewels, capturing and mixing these universes known since childhood to create "sub-universes" recognizable for those who wear them. It is for this reason that in this piece I apply in the form of colorful symbols, mechanisms and movement, a critique of the social-political moment that my motherland is experiencing.

About Monica Díaz piece:
They said that we lived in an oasis ... but it was a mirage. As the real landscape emerged, Chile went into a whirlwind and the pawns screamed like a collective body. Geographic distances were not an impediment for social discontent to rise, and a recurrent thought was united in one voice: Dignity.