The Ceres Awards are an instance that was born in 2011 to recognize and reward cultural creation in the Biobío Region, and in that sense so that the work of artists linked to the categories of Literature, Performing, Visual, Musical and Audiovisual Artscan be appreciated by the community. 

In the year 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the recognition activity had to be virtual. In total there were 20 awarded works which have been disseminated through a virtual catalog on the website of the contest: http://www.premiosceres.cl

The Faculty of Humanities and Arts of the Universidad de Concepción was present at this important recognition.

Alejandro Gallegos, professor of the Music Department, was awarded the prize in the category of Academic Music for his work "Aljibe de Madera" (Wooden Cistern). In the Visual Arts, the following professors from the Visual Arts Department received awards: Rodrigo Piracés, in the Sculpture category, for his work "Versobjeto"; in the Media Arts category, the award went to professor Natascha de Cortillas, for her work "Caldo de Cultivo"; and professor Luis Almendra, was awarded in the Painting category, for his work "Lunático Esplendor".

Also the UdeC Visual Arts student Sofía Bernasconi was awarded, in the category Audiovisual Arts Fiction, for her work “Deshilacha”; and the former UdeC Visual Arts student Andrea Mahnke in the Visual Arts Illustration category, for her work "Portada e Ilustraciones para la revista Illustrati de Logos Edizioni" (Cover and Illustrations for Logos Edizioni's Illustrati magazine).

In this regard, the professor of the Music Department, Alejandro Gallegos, expressed his gratitude for this distinction. "I share this recognition with my colleagues, Professor Dr. Juan Cid of the Spanish Department and the outstanding visual artist Carlos Vergara, who collaborated and enhanced my proposal with their art. I also thank each one of those who joined in the process and made it an open and dialoguing proposal. I feel that the award is a stimulus to continue working in the development of my discipline, whether in the classroom, creation or management.

Professor Natascha de Cortillas expressed her satisfaction and also thanked the people who applied for her work. "I dedicate myself to art because I believe in its transforming power, in the collectivized model of work and above all because it is there that the analogous look with the territories is determined, so vital to connect us with life".

The academic said that "if my peers feel that there is something to be recognized in my person and in my work, I receive it with great generosity. However, I feel fortunate to be able to develop languages that allow me to make visible the work of peasant women, community gardens, and all those spaces reduced in the scale of productive value of our resources. I extend my gratitude to all of them, as well as to all those collaborators who are always behind each work". Finally, he indicated that "today, we find ourselves in complex circumstances for the local artistic world. We are once again submerged in the fragility of cultural institutions to contain and support art workers.

Professor Rodrigo Piracés González explained that "Versobjetos" was a project presented at the Federico Ramírez Culture Point in Concepción and "sought the crossover between literature and visual arts, which is basically my line of work". "Fundamentally, I sought to provoke a situation that would unfold relatively through a central device, which was an object built with objects collected from popular fairs. There is a work of a certain archeological practice from the urban point of view, of recovering vestiges, and making these objects speak through assemblages and forcing them in form and context that are determined by the texts that accompany them," said Rodrigo Piracés.

The professor from the Visual Arts Department added that "however, these texts do not symbolically intersect with the object. That is to say, they do not question it. And that collision, between the text and the object, is what seeks to generate in some way that suspension of meaning, which makes the object and the text, in this case the verse, enter a strange territory. Finally, what this line of research seeks is to exalt emptiness as an absolute presence".

For his part, the academic Luis Almendra Villagrán, said that his work also corresponds to a project that won the Fondart Year 2018 and is composed of a series of 14 paintings of medium and large format, accompanied by 2 video animations. "This work was presented on two occasions. The first at the Pinacoteca de la UdeC in 2018; and the second, at the Sala Marta Colvin, in 2019, at the Universidad del Biobío. It is a project that promotes painting in Concepción. It tries to give an innovative look to the traditional practice. This Ceres Award, enhances that search in which one insists. In renewing the language of painting. To keep alive the fire for painting and its tradition in the arts of the Biobío region. And I believe that one of the keys to this is to try to look for other points of view, other perspectives.

He emphasized that it is about "refreshing the figure of the human body in the development of the arts in the region. And that fills me with joy, because I am fortunate to teach classes, to be with a group of people working, who are my students, and this Ceres Award gives more energy to the elective and also emphasizes this search".