José Garnería
Director, Valencia Biennial

Remembering the Biennial of Valencia is impossible without looking back in time and remembering a few things. The event was organized by the City Council for Youth and with two different municipal legislatures, begun with the Councillor Manuel Mata and celebrated with the Councillor José Rafael García-Fuster y González-Alegre. It achieved having His Royal Highness the Prince Don Felipe de Borbón, heir to the Spanish throne, as Honorary President of the Organizing Committee of the Biennial, as proven by the photo in the catalogue he himself dedicated to all the young artists.
Those were politically fervent times as well for Europe, that gave birth to new countries. During this edition, in spite of the fact that Lisbon would have been Capital of Culture, the assignation of the 1994 edition remained in limbo, since the Association Arts and Ideas, representative of Portugal, could not guarantee its accomplishment before a possible political shift, postponing the problem until the beginning of 1993.
The participants were about seven hundred, distributed in various hotels throughout the city and using many spaces for the exhibitions, such as the Palau de la Música, where the opening ceremony took place, the seat of the meeting, and the Ateneo Mercantil, press center in front of the City Hall.
The edition of 1992 counted on the presence of the cities of Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Republic of San Marino, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, who distributed their activities (exhibitions, performances, roundtables, cinema, music, etc.) in various venues: Palau de la Música, Museo de la Ciudad, Casa-Museo Benlliure, Centro de Artesanía, Tinglado del Puerto, Sala Escalante, Filmoteca Valenciana, Centro Cultural Bancaja, Universidad de Valencia, Instituto Francés, Teatro Olimpia, the Woody disco and the Teatro performance theater.
The Biennial was structured in the following disciplines: Performance, Architecture, Scenic Arts, Visual Arts, Graphic Design, Industrial and Jewelry Design, Photography, Gastronomy, Comics, Moving Images:: Cinema and Video, Inventions, Literature, Fashion, Music and Cultural Projects. We also have to emphasize the fact that, years later, many of the Valencian participants achieved recognition and fame they had initiated back then. This is the case of the group El Desván, for Scenic Arts; Victor Blasco and the Equipo Lìmite for Visual Arts; Diego Ruiz de la Torre, best known as MacDiego, for Graphic Design; Alberto Carrere, for Photography; Pablo Llorens, who became internationally famous, for Animation images: Carles Recio and Esther Quirós, for Literature, as well as Ximo Tebas with his Jazz Group, for Music. To us the correct and insightful judgment of our juries meant an endorsement to the success of the event of 1992. Nevertheless not only these artists, but all the participants in that edition evolved over the years.
As in every Biennial, we also had our failures and we tried to resolve them during the participants' stay, since we were involved in these problems as much as the organizers and the participating cities. In any case, I think that once everything was over and time passed what has to be emphasized once again are the results we achieved and that the young public enjoyed Valencia, its atmosphere and hospitality. That was the objective, and it was fulfilled. Years have gone by and we all have changed, but... the Biennial still continues, and that is the important thing.