About

Casa de Duende is dedicated to commissioning, curating, and producing art exhibits and performances with contemporary artists which focus on the social relevance of art and art making as a tool for questioning both, the meaning and role of art and the artist in contemporary culture. Casa de Duende seeks to contribute to creating a discourse between artist and communities at the local, national and international level, on a wide-range of socio, political, religious, cultural, and environmental concerns among others.

Casa de Duende views art as a creative process unlimited by form or medium. We seek to explore this creative process through collaboration with artists, filmmakers, curators, art institutions, galleries, cultural centers and communities. Casa de Duende is dedicated to presenting artists as insightful social critics whose products transform the language through which we view, hear and see ourselves and our world.

Casa de Duende is a project of Duende Presents, LLC.

Vision Statement

All movements for social change embody an artistic sensibility which inevitably rallies artists to their cause. This process reconceptualizes, transforms and changes the socio-political discourse (at least in part), through an aesthetic lens: a conversation between individuals and communities informed by art and art making. Duende Presents takes this as the starting point for examining the creative process that occurs in the collaborative dialogue between artists and their communities. Duende Presents is dedicated to giving artists a platform for socially relevant work and to expanding a discourse between artist and community, between creator and audience.

Duende is a fairy- or goblin-like creature in Spanish and Latin American mythology. Duende was first used by Federico Garcia Lorca as a theoretical concept to denote artistic inspiration in his seminal and important essay on artistic inspiration "Theory and Play of the Duende". (Composed and delivered in both Havana and then again in Buenos Aires at a lecture to the Sociedad de Amigos del Arte in 1934.)

Lorca's theory departs from most western concepts of divine inspiration such as the Greek Muse or the German "Daimon", to posit artistic inspiration as innately tied to the soil from which it rises, enters the body and is given expression. While Lorca uses the bull fight, Canto Jondo" (deep song), and the blues in the United States as instances to illustrate the Duende's manifestation, Duende encompasses an earthy concept of divine artistic inspiration from which all art is born. To have "Duende" is to have soul!

David Acosta, Artistic Director