Playful and Political art: Federico Zukerfeld and Loreto Garin Guzmán in dOCUMENTA (13)
AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in June 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed.
The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and will compose a map of emergent positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.
For the twelfth event, AND AND AND invited Loreto Garin Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina) cofounders of the group Etcetera… and members of the International Errorist movement. For the AND AND AND series, the artists proposed the CRISIS & REPRESENTATION experiment: a collective wandering in and around the gardens and buildings which surround the public park Parque Centenario, Buenos Aires, in the framework of the 10th Anniversary of the Argentina Social Uprising of December 19 and 20, 2001.
“Since the social crisis of December 19 and 20, 2001, all the parks and other public spaces in Buenos Aires began to be enclosed with fences and security cameras. The guards blow their whistles to control and kick people out of the parks. The action consisted in distributing hundreds of whistles among the people, blowing them at the same time as the security guards and thus creating an urban sound intervention against repression and for the free use of public spaces”, pointed out Frederico Zukerfeld and Loreto Garin Guzmán.
Argentina before 2001 was a laboratory of neoliberal capitalism, an early example of the barbarism which was produced by adjustments, spending cuts and privatizations. The country plunged into a dark burrow as a result of its submission to the decisions of international lending organizations and the pressure of the markets (with the complicity of local agents). The Argentine experiment exemplified what “a country must not do” as its people suffered (and are still suffering) the consequences of these policies. Today, 10 years later, the country is re-introduced into the world as “an example of how a country can get out of the crisis.” As a big paradox of this mirror effect, all those measures which are applied right now in the entire world are exactly the same measures Argentina took immediately before the social economic crash.
The CRISIS & REPRESENTATION experiment plays a social readymade in a contextual displacement: it happens around the gardens and buildings which surround the public park Parque Centenario. The biggest assembly of all the neighborhoods (asamblea interbarrial) took place in this park in 2001. Today, the park is full of fences, and on the site where the assembly took place, there is a mix of flea market / popular fair and young cultural underground spaces (for cooking, drinking, playing music, etc.). The “party” of consumerism and precarious commerce continues as a mirror space of crisis and recovery. Taking “mirror” as a metaphorical and conceptual key, the whole project is organized and developed according to physical optical phenomena: the refraction, reflection and interferences as analogies of social processes to build up collective memory and identity.
The project was launched as a mediumship experience in recent memory, invoking those rebel spirits from the former assembly (now converted into a flea market). It then continues, between dinosaurs around the galleries of the Natural Science Museum celebrating the fall of the Tyrannosaurus, with an anthropophagic picnic-talk, searching communal interpretations of the transformations in the discourses and narratives. Then back again in the park gardens, in a little soccer field, an improvised football match-debate: the militant sport game where “everyone plays in the same team.” The walk finishes at sunset with a stellar performance, in the telescope of the Astronomical Observatory, which allows the enjoyment of both faces of the Moon (and Jupiter) looking up to the new constellation which grows from the oldest cosmogonies of the marxian re-evolution.
dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.
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