Latin America: Back to the Future, at MACBA

The proposed works itinerary addresses issues such as the refounding of the languages ​​of visuality, the reconfiguration of urban environments, new conceptions of time and space or the generation of images as emblems of utopian projects of transformation of everyday life.

Curator Federico Baeza says:

How to establish a map of relations between the modernizing Latin American projects of the mid-20th century and the current cultural horizon in which various artistic practices coexist? Latin America: Going back to the future is an exhibition that alters chronologies and puts the most recurrent lineages in crisis to reveal a topography of unsuspected connections and contiguities that were previously ignored. It is a sample that articulates a vast geographical and temporal threshold in which a set of survivals and returns emerge that make explode any linear conception of the temporal passage.

Between the decades of 1940 and 1960 the project of the constructive avant-garde landed definitively in Latin America. In a region free from the traumas of war that ravaged the old continent, the concrete inheritance seemed to find its promised land: a scenario in which to refound languages, arts, sciences, industries, States, cities, is say, all the imaginary and material environments in which everyday life takes place. This movement soon found a currency capable of linking artistic inquiry and material progress: the link between experimentation and development. But at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s that modernizing optimism found its limit. The tensions of the cold war, the hardening of the state repression and the political radicalization collapsed the consensus that supported that development project.

Contemporaneity has been characterized by a spatialized experience of time, a perpetual present populated by kaleidoscopic fragments that are no longer animated by the teleological vector of the future. Perhaps our only common perception of the future is the vision of the ecological, economic and cultural catastrophe that science fiction shows us. In this panorama, Latin America: returning to the future is questioned by the traces of modernizing projects in current artistic production. How to rethink those inquiries about visuality when the notion of novelty has been deactivated? How to deal with the phantasmagoria of modernism disseminated in now ruinous environments? What strategies to implement to make intelligible a proliferating and chaotic time like the one that marks our present horizon?

There will be work by Roberto Aizenberg, Manuel Álvarez, Sergio Avello, Amadeo Azar, Carla Bertone, Gabriela Böer, Erica Bohm, Martha Boto, Juan Sebastian Bruno, Valeria Calvo, Ulises Carrión, Emilio Chapela, Lothar Charoux, Marta Chilindrón, Marcelo Cidade , Marcos Coelho Benjamim, Elías Crespín, Carlos Cruz Diez, João José Da Silva Costa, Mariano dal Verme, José Dávila, Marcolina Di Pierro, Verónica Di Toro, Lucio Dorr, Manuel Espinosa, Maria Freire, Marcius Galan, Andrea Galvani, Silvia Gurfein , Graciela Hasper, Carlos Huffman, Enio Iommi, Daniel Joglar, Irina Kirchuk, Gyula Kosice, Marlena Kudlicka, Guillermo Kuitca, Silvana Lacarra, Estefanía Landesmann, Federico Lanzi, Lux Linder, The Carpenters, Raúl Lozza, Macaparaná, Víctor Magariños, Marco Maggi , María Martorell, Nicolás Mastracchio, Julia Masvernat, Miguel Mitlag, Ascânio MMM, Iván Navarro, Marie Oresnanz, Damián Ortega, Alejandro Otero, Matilde Pérez, Gilda Picabea, Rogelio Polesello, Déborah Prude n, Martina Quesada, Inés Raitieri, Kazuya Sakai, Zilia Sanchez, Tomás Saraceno, Mariela Scafati, Mira Schendel, Analia Segal, Gabriel Sierra, Pablo Siquier, Juan Sorrentino, Julian Terán, Ana Tiscornia and Osias Yanov.