In one of Ushuaia’s tourist ports, Alicia Herrero’s The Paradigm Confine Tour acted a kind of (de)constructive search for historical and critical temporalities. The "tour" consisted of a three hour navigational experience across the frontier waters of the Beagle Canal had almost 40 passengers on board. The "guided" tour was presented as a contemporary reflection away from the scientifically and exotically oriented paradigm of "landscape" and "confine." It was a purposeful strategy given the frequency of contemporary readings within the discursive platforms of Modernism. The installation of a discussion platform whose artistic practice allowed the status of today’s biennials to be appreciated "in their situation", was encouraged as a result of a flexible laboratory integrated by Carla Zaccagnini and Alicia Herrero, along with thinkers such as Francisco Alí­-Brouchaud, Mieren Jaio and Jaime Iregui, predominantly active within the realm of institutional criticism. A magazine, MIS6 (magazine in situ, sixth edition, an ongoing project by Herrero since 2004), dealing with "service oriented" art, discusses the biennial’s format (although not without assistance from biennials themselves) addressing the issue of the problematic distinction between exchange and participation that the political biosphere manages in terms of our experience of contemporary life. Herrero posits an escape from the subject-object confinement situation by creating other criteria of coexistence between art and life; a coexistence meant to challenge the "art" institution. Without a doubt, Francisco Alí­-Brouchoud’s participation was a playful attempt to signal out the "reclusion" suffered by art at the hands of the spectacle society articulates throuogh its cultural machinery. The sagacity of his text Gran Hotel Abismo alludes to the famous image that Lukács used to describe the symptomatic deterioration of the German intelligentsia against whom he fiercely fought.

Proyecto Casa Nómada by the Grupo Del Borde, is presented as a temporal and mobile make-shift dwelling that travels from one place to another on a tree trunk. Lacking any sort of fixed residence, it moves constantly. The project was parked for only a day at the Paseo de las Rosas in Ushuaia, before embarking on another journey. They move unto the Bahí­a Encerrada, perform and stop once again momentarily at the Barrio Felipe Varela, not without first inviting all those who wish to stop by and visit with them to dance a tango, drink some hot brew, or simply chat with them at their house. In another more distant dialogue, Haro Callesten and Stautsager draw upon the similarities between Ushuaia and a Danish city help of publications, conversation, field recordings and photographic records.

Daniel Trama’s work insists upon going over a different territory: the installation format. His proposal’s concern with how to recycle temperatures translates itself into a simulacrum toying with the idea of circuitry. Ice blocks, represented on blue wax, melt with the aid of cables fed by hot stoves crossing a landscape and back again. The cable becomes a line in the drawing and serves as an energy conduit in a self-sustaining feeding system. The cables are also a system of passages and transformations on the state of the material that turn it into a self-referencing circuit. Helical lights act as a conceptual oscillation and manage to project a very potent rectangle of light on the wall, transforming the drawing into something pictorial and thereby disarticulating the limits proposed by the format.

4.
Aves Migratorias, a project carried out in several stages and coordinated with the assistance of schools by Edith Matzen Hirsch and Fernando Goin as well as Prácticas Sensibles, directed by Marcelo Giménez and Alicia Romero, were initiatives linked to the educational sphere. In this way, an in situ platform and a virtual one were articulated as part of the promotional effort, teaching, training, and artistic discussion. Interviews and information were available through a website showing the activity by the artists of the Patagonia region. Environmental concern was to be found in videos by Andrea Juan, who worked with a team of glaciologists and geographers registering performances in the Antarctic.

Charly Nijenshon also inscribed his work in this line through his lanscape projects. Among other artists who also focused on ecological emergencies, Jorge Fargas presented the Modelo de centinela climático, a gigantic information collecting sunflower that is sensitive to meteorological changes.

5.
Finally, we might say that what is specific to a site can be thought of only through repetition. This biennial amounts to a first exercise of perception upon place. Self-Reflexivity is no doubt a point of departure. Only insistence and (dis)continuity will give this movement new possibilities capable of actualizing a small story that is to begin at the end of the world.