The Mercosur Biennial

With firm conceptual roots but without relinquishing visual appeal, the Biennial seeks “alternatives to the conventional notion of nation”, and taking into consideration that art may function as a seismograph of social affairs, it explores with a critical spirit concepts such as state, identity, maps, and frontiers. In this way, the spectators immerse themselves in projects and stories arising from the documents, passports, stamps, customs, flags, coats of arms and the most diverse requisites that are essential for us to inhabit this world. The works of the artists convened by Roca revolve around the theme of the territory and they originate, mainly, in the sad tropics of Latin America.

The Biennial opens in the Quayside Warehouses with an eloquent metaphor on the collapse of national symbols. On a huge wall one may distinguish a series of flags with their poles stuck in it. Although the flags are white, their colors and emblems spill over the wall like liquid paint. The identity of nations dissolves in this fall; it slips away like water between our fingers. White implies the request for a truce, but the work expresses something more than a defeat. Its author, Leslie Shows, lives and works in San Francisco.

The Venezuelan artist Manuela Ribadeneira condenses in a single gesture − as observed by José Roca − the spirit of the whole exhibition. The work is small in size but significant. The artist has stuck a knife into a wall, and in the brief shadow that the handle projects, she has written in her own handwriting: “I claim this territory for myself”. There one may find not only courage and a secular will to conquer, but also the violence that accompanies it.

André Komatsú, from Sao Paulo, constructed in the immense space of the warehouses a seemingly impassable wall, a frontier which, through an action not devoid of humor, he ends up by trespassing by placing a hydraulic jack at its base. Beside it, on the flagpole of an absent flag, he hung a pair of old sneakers. The work, which is certainly disconcerting, is a signal for drug users.

On the other hand, it is worth highlighting that the Mercosur Biennial has allowed itself the luxury of dispensing with spectacle (in the most recent Venice Biennial, its organizers even resorted to Tintoretto’s paintings, strategically escorted by the Carabinieri). Roca omits monumental works, blood or mutilations, and even the artists considered “safe”, whose names are reiterated from north to south. He has convened the experienced Aracy Amaral as guest curator, and hired the Mexican Pablo Helguera with the status of education curator. Both perform non-delegable duties.

The staging of the Biennial is museographic. The surface of the Warehouses appears to be austere; the view is only interrupted by the containers that host the videos of “Geopoetics”, besides the works which are actually countries, kingdoms or fictitious states researched by Roca. Sealand is a five-hundred meter “Micronation” created in 1967 by a British military man, and “NSK State” is a country created by a Slovenian collective that issues passports and fulfills some functions like the rest of the nations, although its territory is limited to the art spaces.

A melancholy video-installation by Edgardo Aragón shows the rigor of the Mexican borders. The characters − some musicians − stand like living statues on the boundary stones under the scorching desert sun. In the meanwhile, without listening to one another, they perform a sorrowful funeral march.

Almost as a concession, beauty is present in the video by the Spanish artist Cristina Lucas, La liberté raisonnée, an appropriation of Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting entitled Liberty Leading the People. The artist instills life into the characters, imparts movement to the painting, and its narrative ends up in disenchantment when Liberty moves forward until it falls and is victimized by the very heroes that accompanied it. The fall of Romanticism is perceived as a terrible event. Beyond the moving message conveyed by undefended Liberty, the work seduces the viewer through the succession of scenes that enhance the dramatic quality achieved by Delacroix.

While Lucas translates the characteristics of painting to the most state-of-the-art video technology, Fernando Bryce transfers onto paper, via drawings and by means of laborious manual procedures, images of newspaper headlines, documents, photographs or fliers. Bryce paints and draws by choice, and in this choice so typical of the present time, he has found his style, a method he calls “mimetic analysis”. Over the course of a year, the artist produced with virtuosity the 219 drawings that make up the “Revolution” series, based on the history of Cuba. Despite the supposed anachronism of the technique, this laborious task guarantees the presence of subjectivity, and offers the possibility to emphasize, to be selective with the details when narrating history through images.

Several of the artists participating in the Biennial − as for example the Peruvian artist Bryce, who lives in Berlin − reside far away from the land where they were born. Of the five participating Argentine artists, four live abroad: Irene Kopelman, Miguel Ángel Ríos, Alberto Lastreto and Pablo Bronstein. Buenos Aires-born Alicia Herrero presents Viaje revolucionario. Novela navegada (Revolutionary trip. Navigated novel), a work that reflects from its very title the romantic spirit of the Che Guevara´s travel notebooks, before the guerrilla arrived in Cuba and became an icon. Then the plot of the novel develops through a schematic drawing.

The Argentine artist Lastreto lives in Montevideo. His film “El prócer” (“The National Hero”), consists in the animation of a photograph where one can see a monument, a horseman on a pedestal keeping balance in unstable positions. Heroes are scarce in the world, and Lastreto observes with irony the rhetorical poses of public sculpture.

Kopelman is also Argentine; she was born in the city of Córdoba and lives in Amsterdam. Together with other artists selected by Amaral, a few months ago she was invited to explore the region of the canyons while her peers left for the Missions or the Pampa. Her works are the result of this expedition: a clay bloc broken into pieces reproduces the faceted forms of the rocks she drew, tirelessly, in a large mountain valley.
Bronstein resides in London and his subject matter, architecture, is universal; Ríos divides his time between the United States and Mexico, and his hypnotic and rhythmical videos reflect the violence of the land he inhabits.

The Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa devotes herself to the investigation of the declassified archives of the US Secret Services, and she has published the “non-history” of the past forty years related to the countries of the Southern Cone. “The interest lies in the data that remain hidden, erased and illegible”, the artist points out, and she shows one of the numerous volumes she exhibits and also gives away.

The author of Cuadernos de viaje (Travel Notebooks), the Chilean Bernardo Oyarzún, is a genuine Mapuche who has modeled with his own hands the enormous mud letters that read in the Guaraní language a phrase he himself translated: “one does not receive a soul that is completely molded; rather, it is assembled throughout life […]”.

With a budget of twelve million reales, the Biennial is deployed all over the city, but its most important enclaves are the Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum, Santander Cultural, where tribute is paid to the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, Casa M and nine strategic spaces in Porto Alegre where different interventions are featured.

The Biennial’s expansion in all of Río Grande do Sul and in more than twenty cities is a crucial objective for Roca; the other objective is time. “The Biennial must not only be expositional; it must extend in time through a continuous action, so that it does not become exhausted like fireworks,” the curator asserts. Casa M was created to enrich the local art scene, and suddenly, Porto Alegre has a pleasant meeting space for chats, debates and interviews, which will undoubtedly survive.

Roca’s proposal demands reading, observing and thinking, and even going back to reexamine the works in detail.

For the intellectual exercise that Geopoetics demands there is the work of the collective comprised of Slavs and Tartars, some beds covered with silky carpets where the viewer can sit.
Amaral’s exhibit, Morada al Sur (Living in the South) is overwhelming, with the phantasmagoria featured in Cao Guimaraes’s videos and the immense landscape excerpted from a satellite image of Rio Grande, which Gal Weinstein transports to the carpet that covers the Museum´s huge central gallery.

“This is not the Biennial of flags or of maps,” Roca assured, although he accepted that they are inevitable. However, in a world where there are market institutions that exercise more power than States, his “Essay”, like Borges’s text “On Rigor in Science”, referred to the “Geographic Disciplines”, sheds light on the difficulty implied in recognizing a map that will never coincide with the territory.