Pandora Project
Artists in dialogue

In Greek mythology, a box was given to Pandora, the first woman on earth, but the box was not to be opened under any circumstances. Impelled for her curiosity, Pandora opened the box, and all evil contained inside of it escaped and spread all over the earth. She hastened to close the lid, but the whole contents of the jar had escaped, except for one thing that laid at the bottom: Hope – which remains to this day, mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. As in the Pandora myth, a symbol of hope lies beneath this collection of works.

The Pandora Project was an international collaborative project involving 15 artists from Argentina, Chile, United States and Uruguay,  that jointly developed an edition of non-traditional paper objects based on the Greek Myth “Pandora’s Box”.

The project was directed and conceptualized by artist and professor, Rimer Cardillo, from the State University of New York at New Paltz, in the United States and Alicia Candiani, artist and director of Proyecto´ace, an international centre for innovative print media located in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

After three months of separate work, (one group in North America and the other in South America), the Pandora’s artists gathered together at Proyecto´ace in Buenos Aires in the month of July of 2006. The encounters took place from the 8th to the 22nd of that month. Through various innovative printing, digital and photographic techniques, pop ups in paper, collage and sewing, the participants were able to document global subjects involving environmental, anthropological and social issues of our time. The printed objects were collected and housed in a portfolio/ “art container”.  Seen as a contemporary Pandora’s box, the container became a symbol of the collaboration among the artists who participated in intensive days of cultural and artistic diversity.