March mazzei
07/26/2021 4:56 PM
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Art
Updated 07/26/2021 6:41 PM
Although its name bears the mark of cartography, the intention of the International Biennial of the South to
relativize geopolitical positions is strongly
manifested in this edition.
To the south of the south
, the exhibition that opens the European chapter of Bienalsur 2021 on Tuesday, July 27, investigates that drive to
decolonialize the gaze
so vigorous in the present, enhanced by the pandemic, through the works of four Latin American women. From the south, the Argentine
Agustina Woodgate
, the Uruguayan
Paola Monzillo
, the Chilean
Voluspa Jarpa
, along with works by
Graciela Sacco
shed light on invisible realities in a project that takes three rooms plus transit spaces of La Térmica, an ex-hospital converted into a cultural center in Malaga, where it is not accidentally located (the city is considered a bastion of the crossroads of cultures, due to its proximity to Africa). "It has a very strong gender bias because it is the gaze of female artists that is throwing us this theme with such clarity,"
the curator
Diana Wechsler
explained to
Ñ
, in a telephone communication from Spain.
A century of silence around the
human zoos
that reigned in seventy European cities between 1815 and 1958 is the axis of
Zoo
, the work of Voluspa Jarpa, which makes up
Al sur del sur
together with
Dissenting Cartographies
, the collaborative chapter that involves it. Through the study of archives, Jarpa arrived at
this sinister entertainment sub-genre
that involved the forced migration of
some 30 thousand people who, due to their ethnicity and origin,
were the object of "attraction and spectacle" for more than 400 million spectators eager to observe them. men, women and children hailing from Africa, America, Asia and the North Pole
as if they were creatures in the wild
.
"This practice that contributes to deepening the notions of difference, of racism, of exoticism, is
still in force today
, it was the one that led to National Socialism and allowed to justify actions on otherness such as the Armenian and Jewish genocide", reflected Wechsler, also artistic director of Bienalsur.
From the series "Cartography of colonization", by Voluspa Jarpa, 2021 (Photo: Rodrigo Merino / courtesy BIENALSUR)
A large archive of posters promoting these exhibitions, fairs, and shows speaks of the naturalization of the practice.
Authentic
pamphlets of Western superiority speeches
-
that the Internet made accessible but without keys to assimilate. Posters that speak of bloody combats between angry pygmies, cannibals, weird, disfigured ... "the most brutal that has ever been seen." Along with installations, paintings, videos and objects, among other intervened documents, make up this exhibition.
Zoo
becomes an extension of the series with which the Chilean artist represented her country at the Venice Biennale 2019, curated by
Agustín Pérez Rubio
, and was well received at the ARCOmadrid fair that same year.
It all seems like a big file, but for other purposes
. "What contemporary art does is highlight the construction of that archive", Wechsler reflects on spaces such as
libraries, scientific archives and museums, which claim a degree of objectivity
.
"Art shows non-objectivity, non-neutrality and the amount of conceptual presuppositions that are there and they are the ones that we want to deactivate".
The possibility of mapping the colonial centers and those of destiny gave rise to a planisphere of barbarism.
"Cartography of colonization" is called the Jarpa series that
reveals the hegemonic vision
, and it is the link that connects
Zoo
with
dissident Cartographies
, the collaborative exhibition in which four women question the maps and their narratives about the space.
"This is the territory I inhabit", by Paola Monzillo, 2013 (Photo: Juan Pablo Landarín / courtesy BIENALSUR)
"This is the territory I inhabit" is embroidered on a white pillow by
Paola Monzillo
(1986) with the same black thread that, as projected on the wall, forms
a "dream map of the world"
, which is quite similar to the one we usually see, although it's a bit more egalitarian. From the Uruguayan artist, who deals with cartography throughout the body of her work, a series of notebooks are added in the manner of travelers who drew and narrated their vision of the world as they observed, but from a personal and current perspective.
The multifaceted
Agustina Woodgate
(1981) wears down the old roll-up maps of school map libraries with sandpaper so that they become more homogeneous in their colors, casting
doubts on the positions
.
The same with a globe that speaks of the blurring of the limits of the political map, in a subtle and poetic way.
Documentation of the Ballroom process, by Agustina Woodagte, 2014 (Photo: Guillermo León Gómez / courtesy BIENALSUR)
"I began to work with the idea of a square meter from thinking about the minimum space that an individual needs to live, and it was by feeling my own feet within a space one by one that I felt that less was impossible."
Thus, the great artist
Graciela Sacco
(1956-2017) described the origin of her
M2
series,
born in the heat of the 2008 real estate bubble. One of the works in this series, a vinyl cube with the sides stamped with city maps, also has the figure in local currency of the value of the square meter at that site.
from the Bocanada series, by Graciela Sacco, 1993-2014.
"It was a right invented by her, which
is the right to one square meter of land that every human being should have
", Wechsler analyzes. For his work he was inspired by the film
The Great Dictator
(1940) by Chaplin, who juggles a globe while satirizing the fascism of Adolf Hitler. "Graciela invites the public to play like bails play with this cubic meter, and to think about these ups and downs." To finish off, another work by Sacco, from the
Bocanadas
series
, which the artist began in the 90s and is intensely activated in the present: a table with an old map and a nailed fork, with those
Bocanadas
scattered around. From his series
Who was it?
, in the manner of decoys, some
Printed and glued index fingers mark the route
inside the building of the cultural center of the Diputación de Málaga.
Between the global and the local.
The statement that is in the DNA of Bienalsur is manifested in a very concrete way in
Al sur del sur
.
The exhibition, in turn, is part of the
most recurrent themes
of the selected projects
. Another order
is also supported on this need to decolonialize the gaze
.
Destroying borders
, which unites creators from different parts of the world in an exhibition at the Francis Naranjo Foundation, in the
Canary Islands
, which will soon open.
And also to that label he responds
The Listening and the Winds.
Stories and inscriptions of the Gran Chaco,
that on July 8, at the Lola Mora Museum of Fine Arts in Salta, this unusual and resilient edition of the Biennial was inaugurated. It is the problems that the artists propose, due to their recurrence, that define their curatorial axes, and reveal something of
the currents of thought that are in force
in contemporary art.