The Biennial

An amphibious city where art, culture, technologies, sciences and the environment bring a Biennial to life

ART A native color (Bertolé), one built from back to front, a color that holds the Time of the River. A complex identity, perhaps incomplete, one that needs encounter to be seen. A drive of senses that need the world to solve the local mystery (Supisiche), because it is the River that mediates to reveal the weave beneath appearances (Espino). A necessary connection and knowledge among those who received the same “humidity” to understand the world (Grela). Synthesis, encounter, dialogue between the local and the global, the symbolic and the material, the colonial and the decolonial was always there, because there was a River. That agent of identity is not static; it is a becoming, like the city since its non-colonial founding. Rosario was born desiring and becoming in its diversity of thoughts, times and spaces. It is a timeless work (Serón), full of contradictions (Prieto, 2022), born like a blank page.

CULTURES The break with linearity in the aesthetics of its public spaces can help us understand its diverse origins. Envisioning itself as a cosmopolitan city back in the 19th century also reveals its confluence of imaginaries. The horizontal, distributed seed —at once contradictory and in tension with the centrality of Buenos Aires— gives local cultural life a distinctive element that would become key to its renowned cultural and tourist “scene”. Rosario is culture because it is doing and becoming. That is its cultural identity: intuitive, disruptive, without times or definitions, a collective invention.

SCIENCES The city is a powerhouse of knowledge, like so many other cities in the country and the region. But it adds its own alternative, innovative imprint. It is a hub that accounts for 60% of the country’s biotechnological development. The first city to create a degree of that kind, together with various milestones achieved by CONICET and by renowned figures from the arts, the humanities and culture, it is an innovation zone with a light of its own. That innovation can be understood as energy with a language where times, the new and the different intersect. Like all energy, it needs resistance in order to exist, and that resistance comes from those original contradictions that still persist, giving way to a collective science. A scientific energy that exists in situ because it is interdisciplinary, open and in dialogue with the world. It is in that light (shadow) that the mystery lies (Vitali in Castagnino, 2024), because “To observe farther in space means to observe further back in time. Light is the echo of the cosmos” (Stia in Castagnino, 2024). In that process lies immensity, the sublime. Just like the River with its times (Malba, 2024). Thus the River is also an energy that seems motionless when in fact it owes its immensity to change, to process, to movement.

TECHNOLOGIES It is in that collective invention and drive that our technology is understood as a process rather than a model tied to the techno-solutionism of our time. And that entails a Science that goes beyond mere observation, in dialogue with a public and cooperative Technology. Because, like the River, science is movement, experimentation and action.

ENVIRONMENT The River brings transparency to Nature. A need to flow, not to be interrupted. It gives it democracy and, once again, a hybridity of origins and times. For example, the native fauna —the fish of the Paraná— come from both salt water and fresh water. They live in that diversity (Oldani, 2020); it is that borderless diversity that makes the City-River an opportunity.

The Bienal RosaRIO 2027 is a project promoted by REDiCC —the Local Network for Scientific and Cultural Diplomacy— established in Rosario in 2024 at the initiative of the Area of Open Policies and Scientific Cultural Diplomacy (HyA-UNR). It was first presented internationally at the Open Science Forum of Latin America and the Caribbean (Colombia).

The network brings together institutions from academia, government, the private sector and civil society.

The Biennial was born as a central instrument of the city’s scientific, cultural and technological diplomacy, within the framework of Rosario’s Tricentennial. Its direct precedent is FUTUREAR (launched in November 2024), an exploratory event from which the inter-institutional commitment emerged: the Futurear Cities Manifesto, a document of principles developed by REDiCC that guides the collective process of the event.

The Biennial is therefore conceived as a space, a platform, a project for the concrete application of scientific and cultural diplomacy, taking into account the city’s history, its actors and its agendas. It is within this framework that Cooperation Agreements are signed among the members of REDiCC for the organization of the Biennial.

Emerging practices of scientific, cultural and technological diplomacy show how relevant such an event is in our city. As reflected throughout the program of the Open Science Forum of Latin America and the Caribbean (2024), a new and innovative form of dialogue is needed in the face of the complexity driven by environmental agendas, artificial intelligence, open science and cultural rights. The Humanities and the Arts are urgently being called upon to contribute their perspective to cooperation, so as to broaden our region’s critical role in global discussions. In that context, biennials have traditionally been, for decades, one of the greatest instruments of cultural diplomacy and of the dialogue of ideas. That is why Rosario can be understood as the interface that fosters those dialogues through the synergy between science, art, environment, public space and technology. A Biennial that, with its senses, provocations and the time of the River, deepens what its time has to say. A Biennial that enables experimentation, the power to do (Cusicanqui, 2018), beyond mere observation. Promoting the city as bridge, heartbeat and algorithm. To that end, positioning Rosario internationally through a Biennial that recognizes its cultural trajectory, avant-gardes, scientific strength, cooperative technologies, the enjoyment of public space and public-private co-creation in the course of its management is, as the River dictates, its own destiny. The Bienal de RosaRIO sets out to question cooperation, cities and critical thought by exploring All times, one river.

If the goal is to strengthen collaboration through other practices, it is imperative to re-cognize ourselves as a city. It is in that exercise that we recognize the River as the common element in our drifts, policies, thoughts and avant-gardes. The River as agent, mediator and provoker of local scenarios and practices, yet a global flow. Rosario as the beginning of a cycle of cities in collaboration, as a marker of the vital pulse that nature sets. All times, one river is proposed as a meeting space for knowledges and practices that turn our gaze to the present as a question about the how and the what of common space, from a situated, collaborative perspective. All times, one river is a multi-stakeholder, multi-level, environmentally sustainable and just device, organized into zones/territories/times. As such, it points to and promotes the power of joint action. In this channel, the formulation of problems, artifacts and ideas will unfold into proposals that —constitutively, in their processes of innovative cultural, environmental, scientific and technological cooperation— point to new positions as ways of being in the world. Drawing on the proposal of Ticio Escobar (2026), the Bienal RosaRIO, with its motto All times, one river proposes to “precipitate meanings that do not rest on safe answers; that is, that lead to new questions.”

• Territorially distributed: a central node on the River Strip + distributed nodes in museums, faculties, districts, public space and islands.
• Transdisciplinary: no single-discipline logic. Open science, art, humanities, technology and nature in continuous dialogue.
• Multi-stakeholder and multi-level: public, private, associative, local, regional, global.
• Environmentally sustainable and just.
• Co-created: participatory methodologies before, during and after the event. CONTINUUM.
• Undisciplined and ‘undisciplining’: a key concept in the documents. It is not named by discipline.
• Biennial City: the role of cities as drivers of glocalization. City–University–Cooperation.

The motto All Times, One River organically opens up the channels of the event. The Paraná River does not work as a decorative theme but as a living conceptual axis: agent, mediator and provoker. The corpus documents a rich collective drift around the River: confluence, permanent mutation, environmental justice, linguistics, memory and public space. Rosario’s identity is built from this river–city interface.

All Times, One River as the 2027 motto, therefore, stands as a first political, poetic and material statement of a Biennial that seeks to position itself through an amphibious practice rather than through the disciplinary drive of the process. Because rivers embrace flow and become one, another, many. And they overflow. They are new, without edges and without times to contain them.

Amphibious we are: that is the becoming of identity of a city that, without a founder, is port-island; one that was once Villa del Rosario, City without Edges (Museo de la Ciudad, 2004), once called the Argentine Chicago and forever the Cradle of the Flag. Rosario as city-biennial-river is a proposal based on the particular state of “becoming”; it is a work in progress where technology, art, science and the environment flow, ask questions and challenge you. That state of searching, represented in the amphibious nature of the event, excludes neither chaos nor, with it, anomie. It is a practice that involves overflowing in order to flow toward the wonder of time, which algorithmically flows, settles and transcends all times, one river on the banks of the Paraná.

All times, one river is proposed as a meeting space for knowledges and practices that turn our gaze to the present as a question about the how of common space, from a situated, collaborative perspective. All times, one river is a multi-stakeholder, multi-level, environmentally sustainable and just device, organized into channels of practices, times and feelings. As such, it promotes the power of joint action through a hybrid method. In this channel, the interaction of problems, artifacts and ideas will be expressed in proposals that —constitutively, in their processes of cultural, environmental, scientific and technological cooperation— point to new positions as ways of being in the amphibious world. Enabled by the proposal of Ticio Escobar (2026), the Biennial All times, one river invites us to “precipitate meanings that do not rest on safe answers; that is, that lead to new questions.”…as a public, political, common statement for a genuinely collaborative human practice.

The amphibious identity of the Biennial translates into a curatorial method of a collective nature, based on three main channels-axes, with the Biennial’s central proposal being the concept of overflow as a declaratory act of the emergency of our time: to question the transcendental algorithm of time that marks, settles and flows memory, a being-becoming that calls for wonder and cooperation in the face of mutating futures and narratives.

A Biennial is intrinsically a platform for dialogue, for enabling critical thought and the perspectives of its time. For that reason, it is also framed within:

• International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism 2027 – A/RES/78/260
• International Decade of Culture for Sustainable Development (2027-2036) – A/RES/80/308

The Biennial has been declared of Academic Interest by the Board of the Faculty of Humanities and Arts, National University of Rosario.