“Not Me”: Subject to Change/ (“No yo”: sujeto a cambio)

The curatorial proposal explores the ways in which artists use the body and the senses in their navigation through the complexity of contemporary existence: “one replete with rapidly changing conditions, boundaries, borders and timelines”. Its success resides in its way of addressing the multiple forms in which the works transcend these boundaries and create readings of reality that show the infinite reserve of possibilities we humans have o transform it.

Combining brilliant previous creations such as the painting machine Raymond Roussel described in his writings, Albaroa proposes to the viewer another possible way to integrate known tools. Following Marshall Mc Luhan’s conceptions, all the pieces are “extensions of the hand”, modes of operating on the world, but since the new machines have no known use, the task of the imagination is to invent possibilities parallel to those which the artist’s reference opens to infinite combinations. Applying the rule of fragments and of the manual object, the possible number of new objects that may be created is countless.

Avoiding the recording of destruction that was present in other versions of her installation Tools for Infinite Monkeys…, the new version presented at CIFO by Aranda contains a typewriter intervened on in such a way that it only includes the letter “S”, repeated ad infinitum on mirrors and walls that reproduce it, typed for a group of monkeys in the course of an experiment. This was focused on how, allowed unlimited time, they might create a text on a par with Shakespeare’s writings. In the new version, order prevails, and a kind of stillness renders more latent the potential of that first letter which might eventually produce a Borgesian library. Perhaps this harmless “S” resembles Aranda’s attempts to alter information systems, financial systems, or even art systems through what she defines as “a combination of small poetic and political acts” that create unusual ways of touching the world, and give rise to other imaginaries.

In different ways, the works expand the frontiers of the body, of the senses, and of imagination itself, transcending the conventions on the limitations of dimensions that range from the geographic to the political, from the physical to the affective, through exercises that often contain a strong ludic component and require from the viewer an active gaze. Novoa mounted the on-site drawings for the installation Obstáculos específicos (Specific Obstacles), created jointly with the physically challenged dancer John Beauregard, in such a way that the body is forced to adopt an unnatural position in order to view them. In another work, he recreated his intervention in Houston’s Project Row House artists’ residency, to conjure the presence of activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died as a result of a hunger strike. Parallel to this, in Distinction, Daniela Ortíz (Peru, 1985) employs the actual names of immigrants who have died in detention centers to inscribe them as memorabilia in counterfeit honorary plates destined for these doubtfully humanitarian “service” centers, which she ends up installing as tombstones in CIFO’s garden.

Aninat produced a sewn map that evokes the whole of Latin America through the pieces of the canvas she handed out using the fabric fragments intervened by the patients waiting in lines to be treated at Chilean hospitals. By sewing each of their interventions on the canvas − many had their names inscribed on it − these disperse, sick bodies construct a poetic territory over the surface of the map, and they become the body of the continent, acquiring a new visibility.

In the splitting of Pérez Bravo’s work in her videos titled Apariciones tangibles (Tangible apparitions) − one of them showing her hand stroking a mold of her own hand made of ice until the heat melts it, and another projecting, in loop, her hand that continually strokes the hair of one of her twin daughters on top of a photograph of her other daughter − there is a poetics referred to the being that perhaps seeks to go back to the non-habitual state of the sacred, where there are no distinctions between the I and the Other.

In a parallel way, in the investigations that Marisa Rubio carries out in her exercises for a Theory of Quotidian Acting Activities for Performers, her creation of multiple heteronymous characters imparts confessional atmospheres, so intimate, or so emotionally vulnerable that they converge in the vortex of the most intimate, where we can blend with any other being, and discover that nothing is foreign to us. While these works require multiple lyrics and a portrayal resorting to wardrobes and scenery to produce this identification effect, in Guimarães’s sound piece, recorded in a set just before the shooting of a film in France, two words, “silence” and “action”, incessantly repeated −each on a different side of acetate records − suffice to materialize the energy of time concentrated in an instant of collective creation.

The exhibition shifts the coordinates based on which we establish readings of a world which renders it urgent for us to imagine, like Aranda did in an earlier installation, a “machine of perpetual possibilities”, no longer with the dust of fiction books, but with the fragments of a global reality.