Extranjerías

Perhaps in “Extranjerías”, whose curatorship he shares with Andrea Giunta and Alejandra Labastida, the question, rather than finding an answer, goes even further and encompasses one of the possible limits of the concept of ‘place’ − remoteness − and one of its gaps − the event. The different artistic proposals exhibited constitute a kind of calendar recording the new models that range from relocations to exile, perhaps repeated too many times over the course of the history not only of the visual arts, but of the universe of creation in general.

There is an intention to offer a (textually, “experiential”) didacticism in each of the exhibition rooms aimed at highlighting the sometimes fragile empathy that the works maintain with the discourse that emphasizes each of the authors’ condition of being a foreigner, but it is in the breaking down of the term into different spatial syntaxes that the ties corresponding to the new limit that is created when one relocates, and even more so, when one is included in or excluded from the host system-country, may be found.

Both Begoña Morales (Peru, 1977) in Jaula de oro and Jorge Macchi (Argentina, 1963) in New wave, resort to that impossible geometry that implies a form never used before, possessing the mediums and formats to establish a paradox that generates landscape − horizon and garden − although in this other place, the new home, the surface to do so is actually non-existent. Visitors situate themselves inside “Extranjerías” as if they were in some attic where they could project their shadow, in such a way that they assign to that absence of clear definition the weight of the temporal quality affixed to an image: that which is not recognized, even if it is present in a space, and that which, without being there, is re-discovered.

The operation becomes even more complex when a real and visible bridge is drawn over the concept referred to transit, as is the case in Graciela Sacco’s (Argentina, 1956) video-installation Trilogía del metro cuadrado: cualquier salida puede ser un encierro, or in Mariano Sardón’s N. Pitágoras, a mechanized multi-media piece. The former features − contained in a large-format prism − the sea and its swinging movement, which generates a simulacrum of adventures and risks, schematized through a suspension bridge; while the latter piece structures a postcard, via de projection in small format and on the floor, of the Pythagorean semantics contained in the famous theorem. In both formats a problem with language is posed by evoking that which cannot be described in words or represented, and which therefore, rather than potentiating the expression of those who communicate, produces a phenomenon of isolation, of silent and brief contemplation. We are confronted with assimilation versus the condition of being a foreigner and the way in which repeated acts gradually give shape to a usable method, a sort of language in transit that is beyond people’s will.

Based on the description of this ensemble of works, it may be understood that “Extranjerías” is not situated in a predetermined temporality but in the interregnum between possible and impossible events, when the title catches up on the inscribed, when the work finds the viewer. In this dimension, the author is but an interval: he/she points out the exile’s resistance, which involves desire as a sign of renovation and new beginnings. The search for identity is implemented through languages faithful to a cause not involving a homeland. It is thus that music appears and modifies the behavior of the listener and of the environment, since technology and the Internet foster such voracity and its satiation.

The form and content of a bites archive champion, in “Extranjerías”, the postulates of different levels of needs, while music lends a meaning to everyday life, and memory to the relationship which until then has not occurred, has not corresponded with the newly arrived, but which eventually transforms the tour of the show into a kind of feature film. Such is the case of Carlos Amorales’s (Mexico, 1970) work Historia de la piratería musical (Necrópolis), and of Mieke Bal’s (The Netherlands, 1946) triptych-video Última frontera, made up of Becoming Vera, Colony and Elena. All of these are subversive works that forcibly partake of the intention of the show but that evidence, from a documentary point of view, the derivations that the original search for the horizon may channel: the ambition to possess, hopelessness regarding the future, and the abuse of every good intention.

It is interesting that the tour of the exhibition should be a round tour, since such museological design forces the viewer to end his/her visit at the beginning, that is, with Regina Silveira’s (Brazil, 1939) work, Dark swamp (Nest). A gigantic black egg in perfect and paradoxical balance rests upon a vinyl which draws a floor infested with alligators which points out the paradox of the origin containing its own extinction. The show also includes a work by Leonardo Solaas (Argentina, 1971), Wish café: a communication platform based on which the digitally exhibited desires become data and are later offered to the spectator with their whole intrinsic, quasi infinite possibility for combination, but also subject to the dependence of believing in the actual existence of everything that appears on the Internet. In this mapping, the spectator moves and stops, he/she becomes nomadic and sedentary; he/she recognizes him/herself as subject, and moves from amazement and illusion to the nostalgia of memory or to hopelessness.