Manuela Ribadeneira

In the years that followed, Finland, Op. 26 was performed on countless occasions, almost always under different names, among them, Impromptu, The Awakening, Nocturne, etc., in order to avoid censorship. For those who are minimally acquainted with Manuela Ribadeneira’s trajectory, it came as no surprise that the Ecuadorean artist should have created a work based on this story. Despite the wide variety of mediums she employs, Ribadeneira always builds her work on the basis of some central themes, such as the relationship of a people with the territory they inhabit, the incongruence between people’s wishes and the State’s interests, or the fragility and the ephemeral nature of allegedly unsurpassable barriers and boundaries. But what identifies her work more in depth and is also, one may imagine, what rendered the Finland, Op. 26 episode almost irresistible for her, is the capacity to deal with issues which are substantially political from a point of view and in a tone that are eminently poetical. For the Ecuadorean artist, what is always at the core of territorial, political or identity-related debates, which constitute her field of action, is always man: his aspirations and dreams, his wishes and his true convictions. In several interviews, Ribadeneira has stated that she considers the public’s participation in her works fundamental, be it in a direct way, as in the case of “performative” actions, or in a more open sense, through the spectators’ effort to understand all the implications of a given piece. In this respect, it is symptomatic that in several of her works she should invite visitors to take something with them, a souvenir (whose function, the artist states, is of a “proustian” nature, alluding to the famous madeleine): the artwork is not enclosed within the exhibition space, but it resonates and generates an echo that transcends the artistic context and the art circuit and projects itself on to the world. Beyond the irony which, however, also constitutes a fundamental element in Ribadeneira’s oeuvre, it is based on this sense of democracy that works such as One meter of the Equator (2007) − allegedly comprised of 40,076,000 serial objects, a figure that is the equivalent of the meters that make up the Equatorial line − should be interpreted. In the same way that the US-born artist Allan McCollum developed a complex system in order to be able to draw a single and individual form for each of the inhabitants of the Earth, Manuela Ribadeneira’s Equator is inclusive and pretends to represent, at least potentially, a community comprised of over 40 million persons.
And it was for this community that the artist conceived many of her works, whether in a real or a metaphorical way. The small floor sculpture, Tiwinza Mon Amour (2005), for instance, represents in a 1:1000 scale, the square kilometer of rainforest located in Peruvian territory that an international commission granted to Ecuador as a non-sovereign private property in 1998 with the aim of solving a territorial conflict between the two countries. Placed on a transparent platform on wheels, this scale model of the patch of rainforest is mobile, symbolizing in this way both the variability of political divisions and the possibility for each individual to construct or carry with him/her a piece of the world; that is, the piece of the world to which he/she feels closely linked by affective and personal bonds, which are independent of, alien and even opposed to and clashing with the impositions of “power”. According to Ribadeneira, the place where each individual is born is incidental: Being born in a stable does not make you a horse (2008) is the title, inspired by a phrase attributed to the Duke of Wellington, of a small installation showing two bronze horses, whose heads have been replaced with mirrors, facing one another. The piece makes reference to the decision adopted by the inhabitants of a small region in Nicaragua that chose to separate itself from the rest of the country and annex itself to Costa Rica, placing the people’s wish and their right to decide above the hypothetical omnipotence of the reasons of State. A more recent work presented in the past Mercosur Biennial − El Arte de Navegar (2011) − which features an astrolabe, an instrument used by the Portuguese sailors to determine their position with great precision, also references the mentioned right each person has to define his/her territory and nationality, with the decisive charge these notions imply in the formation of an individual identity. This work is, in a way, directly related to the piece which may be Manuela Ribadeneira’s best-known work, Hago mío este territorio (I declare this territory mine) (2007), which consists of a knife stabbed into a wall, and whose title is engraved on the blade. Created for the Venice Biennial, a context in which implications related to issues concerning nationality, center, and periphery are naturally enhanced, the work was exhibited successively on different occasions, responding in each of them to the stimuli and conditions of each specific place, and therefore acquiring new possibilities for its interpretation.
During its exhibition in Venice, Hago mío este territorio was accompanied by El requerimento (The Requirement), a sound installation reproducing the declaration that the Spanish conquerors read, in Spanish or in Latin, to the indigenous peoples that they met on their arrival in the New World, and which basically informed them of the fact that their lands now belonged to the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Leon, and that those who dare rebel would be destroyed.
Evidently, the ensemble of works (of which we have cited just a few in this article) referred to the process of colonization addresses different issues ranging from the scientific instruments utilized, such as the astrolabe, to the attempt to generate a theological and legal reasoning to justify this colonization, but there is an essential, ontological difference between them: while the knife is stabbed into the wall and aspires to immobility as a means to ensure an eternal domination, the astrolabe is mobile; it carries with it, wherever it goes, its wisdom, its capacity to determine with only the help of the sun, one’s exact position on the Earth’s surface. Quoting Joseph Beuys, in the community imagined by Manuela Ribadeneira, “every man is an artist”, and the astrolabe she has conceived is an instrument by means of which one may draw one’s own world and move freely in it. In this respect, it is extremely significant that one of the German artist’s most famous photographs pictures him precisely in the act of moving, more specifically of walking towards the camera. Superimposed on the image, the phrase “ la rivoluzione siamo noi” (“we are the revolution”) emphasizes the equality, almost the communion between the artist and the rest of the members of society, and it synthesizes the indissoluble relationship between revolution and march, something that the term “movement” itself specifies in an evident way through its highly symbolic intertwining of meanings. And in all these meanings, movement becomes one of the central elements in the work of Manuela Ribadeneira, among them, in the recent Impromptu 26 (2011), the work conceived and executed together with Nelson García on the basis of the already mentioned story of Finland, Op. 26, in which visitors are invited to walk a long corridor that gradually becomes imperceptibly narrower, generating a feeling of anxiety and oppression, until they reach a wall featuring a short text posing the following question: “Are you afraid?”