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Allora&Calzadilla Alexander Apóstol Dias&Riedweg Juan Manuel Echavarría René Francisco Yoshua Okón Javier Téllez Miguel Ángel Ríos
Common Places The Collective Experience in Latin American Video
JAVIER TÉLLEZ Oedipus Marshal, 2006. 16 mm. film transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 30’. Courtesy of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
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In his A Grammar of the Multitude 1, the philosopher Paolo Virno distinguishes between the two concept types present in all actions and discourse. There are special places and common places. The first are the modes of doing and saying which vary according to the context; these are means and expressions which depend upon our interlocutor and where we happen to be. Common places, contrary to the trite and hackneyed definition, are the basic forms of enunciating, regardless of the subject or the interlocutor, or even of the context, which reside in all forms of doing and saying. With regards to the unique and transitory nature of the special place, Virno proposes a challenge in finding shared spaces today which are at the most basic level of expression and activity; spaces which allow for the redefinition of ideas on community, collectivism and the collective experience. By no means exhaustive, this exhibition presents eight projects produced by Latin American artists who, through video, explore the relationship of the artist with the collective and with the community. At times metaphorical, at others, parodist, and at still others, interventionist, this relationship, which is the object of the connections derived from site-specific art in recent years, does not escape questioning 2. The first of these examines the role of the artist. As Hal Foster 3 shows, the artist uses anthropological strategies and constructs his or her relationship with the community in cold and distant terms. Not only does his or her authority go unquestioned when he or she takes action in a foreign and unknown environment, but like a glass showcase at a colonial museum, the artist displays the place and the participants as primitivist objects; no longer coming from the South Seas or of darkest Africa, but from an undiscovered territory, that of subordination. This scientific look, which conceives of the community associated with the idea of marginality inasmuch as a grouping of more modest social classes which present their otherness as authenticity, is the object of critique in a parodist work by Yoshua Okón (Mexico City, Mexico, 1970). 1. VIRNO, P. A Grammar of the multitude. For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. Editorial Colihue, Buenos Aires, 2003, pgs. 25-32. 2. See KWON, M. One place after another. Site-specific art and locational identity. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2002, pgs. 138-156. 3. FOSTER, H. “The artist as ethnographer”, in The Return of the Real. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996, pgs. 171-204.
Common Places The Collective Experience in Latin American Video
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YOSHUA OKÓN Lago Bolsena, 2005. Three-channel video transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 19’. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Espacio Mínimo, Madrid.
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Using the stereotype of the anthropological artist, the artist, together with residents of the Santa Julia neighborhood in Mexico City, plays at simulating a field study which examines the life of the neighborhood with the detail of a multiple and supposedly objective eye of a scientist. Lago Bolsena is a three-channel video installation, each one with its own documentary-style perspective: an excessive first perspective which seems to ironically illustrate the idea that poverty and inequality are owing to the defects of the individual; a middle perspective, which would show the similarity between the neighborhood’s inhabitants, while incidentally reassuring the observer of the subordinate nature by showing equality in inequality; and lastly, a general perspective, for the perfect conclusion of the old determinist concept that it is inevitable that a weak context would not affect the personality of the individual. What is most noteworthy is that the entire exercise never stops being an agreement between Okón and the inhabitants of Santa Julia, who end up giving the observer exactly what he expects to see. In a parody of the idea of the other as savage, but also of the surrealist desire for otherness to break down reason, the inhabitants begin to behave like a frenzied mob, somewhere between the zombie film subgenre and a National Geographic documentary. Together with this neo-primitivist approximation, other critics 4 have pointed to how the artist deactivates any negotiation or disagreement in the collective space, setting himself up as representative of the community in the museum space in order to, paradoxically, produce a work which has nothing to do with the interests and issues of this community. One reaction to this critique is in the work of Cuban artist René Francisco (Holguín, Cuba, 1960). While the stance of the artist as referee or delegate of the community 4. KWON, M. Op.cit., pgs. 142-144. 2
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RENÉ FRANCISCO A la cas/za de Rosa, 2004. Video transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 17’20”. Courtesy of the artist.
sound, 19 . Courtesy of the artist and Galería Espacio Mínimo, Madrid.
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implies the dissolution of his or her multiplicity in the artistic production, René Francisco abandons any pretense of specialization in order to show such multiplicity. Going beyond simply incorporating the tensions of the collectivity in his work, the artist determines that such tensions will provide its artistic agenda. A la cas/za de Rosa and El Patio de Nin are two video documentaries made in the El Romerillo neighborhood of Havana, Cuba. In both, interviews are used as representations of the desires and frustrations of the community and the artistic work as a de-specialization craft which intervenes in the context, creating short instances of change and utopia. A la cas/za de Rosa begins with a survey poll of some 40 people in El Romerillo: Who is the person that I can help who has contributed the most and who lives the most alone and defenseless? The question ends up changing into an exploration of co- existence in the neighborhood and, after deciding that the response is Rosa, the artist and his work group, following the wishes of this octogenarian, end up fixing the house where this woman will spend her last days. With regards to the use which the artist makes of the community, on this occasion it is the community that decides which use to give the artist; that of a mere non-specialized workforce. The critique of the artist as representative of the Other brings us to the second issue, whether the assumptions in which the art specific to a place (a community) are not erroneous in principle. With regards to the thesis they defend, whereby the ideal community is a compact and homogenous social group with complementing identity relationships between each one of its members, the exact opposite opinion is formed, which defines the community as something not reducible to uniform principles. As a metaphor for this position, the work Return by Miguel Ángel Ríos (Catamarca, Argentina, 1953) is presented. It is a monochannel video beginning with the muffled and monotonous 3
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MIGUEL ÁNGEL RÍOS Return, 2003. 16 mm. film transferred to DVD, b/w, sound, 3’23”. Courtesy of the artist and Colección Daros-Latinoamérica, Zurich, Switzerland.
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whirring of a top, which is interrupted by the rapid successive launch of more tops, the continuous spinning of all of these begins to intensify the first whirring by dampening it and describes a rich and complex movement, but it is also this same movement which produces the shock, the displacement and, in the end, the stopping action. On a playful level, the thesis of this work is to demonstrate that interaction depends on the ability to integrate the conflict. The difference, as Laclau and Mouffe 5 have studied, is a complex system of relationships which must be continuously renegotiated, but which constitutes the engine of all community. And, as it seems, the community cannot be defined by its attributes, members or purpose, but by the same experience as it produces. “There is no common being, but being in common”, as Jean-Luc Nancy has expressed it, referring to how the community may only be understood from the experience of the common, the experience which allows us to be 6. The individual only is if he or she is with the other; to be in common is to be with. This is the approach of Juan Manuel Echavarría (Medellín, Colombia, 1947) for the community of people displaced by the armed conflict in which Colombia has lived for decades. In Bocas de Ceniza, Echavarría leaves the displaced persons themselves to tell their story from a spontaneous material culture, the short popular songs written and sung by them themselves. Told in first person, facing the spectator, Bocas de ceniza is the testimony of a community in crisis which, in a time where events are made into spectacle and history is accelerated, returns to the naked and peaceful power of the word in order to produce the experience of a historical drama. 5. See, for example, LACLAU, E. and MOUFFE, CH. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. Siglo XXI, Madrid, 1987. 6. NANCY, Jean-Luc. The inoperative community. Arena Libros, Madrid, 2001, pg. 54. 4
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JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA Bocas de Ceniza, 2003-2004. Video transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 18’. Courtesy of Colección Daros- Latinoamérica, Zurich, Switzerland.
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In a similar way, in Devotionalia, Dias & Riedweg (Río de Janeiro, 1964, and Lucerna, 1955, respectively) consider the open experience as a model for an egalitarian and liberating pedagogy 7. For a year, the artists worked with over 600 children and adolescents of the Lapa neighborhood, in the favelas [slums] of Río de Janeiro. Devotionalia begins with a mobile workshop study for children and adolescents, in which numerous social agents also collaborate. Over five hours of video shows the manufacture of 1,286 casts of teenagers’ hands and feet, presented as a fragmented and indigent body composed of hand- and footprints of an imaginary community. Each votive offering, selected because it was the only sculptural format recognizable by the participants, expressed as a desire, dream, request or need captured on video. After its exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Río de Janeiro, attracting the people of Lapa for the first time and in great number, and in the National Congress of Brasilia, as well as at different European institutions, the Brazilian political class promised one hundred grants for street children in exchange for the donation of the ex-votos to the Ministry of Culture. Today, the grants have still not been distributed and the exvotos remain in storage. In 2003, Dias & Riedweg reintroduced Devotionalia in an investigation about the current life of its participants; more than half of the adolescents had died. As Guy Brett has written, the interviews went from being a space for a community in need without stereotypes to “a relentless documentary on the social crime which is constituted by the deliberate and consented murder by the population and the civil war which is sweeping the country” 8. 7. Regarding an egalitarian pedagogy, see the essay by BORJA-VILLEL, M. “El (posible) privilegio del arte”, in El País, 13/03/2008, Madrid, which may be read at http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/posible/privilegio/arte/elpepicul/20080313elpepicul_7/Tes 8. AA. VV. Parangolé. Fragments from the 90’s: Brazil. Dardo and Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2007, pgs. 213-214. 5
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DIAS & RIEDWEG Devotionalia, 1994-2003. DVD, colour, sound, 30’. Courtesy of the artists.
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While Devotionalia deals with the experience of the Other from its non-mediated representation, there is a world in the work 9; Oedipus Marshal, by Javier Téllez (Valencia, Venezuela, 1969) questions representation from the experience. Téllez, interested in so-called exhibition cinema, relates the confinement of madness with the marginalization of subordination. During a residence with the Aspen Art Center of Colorado, and at the suggestion of the members of the Oasis Club House, a group of patients at the psychiatric hospital of Colorado who are the piece’s main actors, Téllez proposes the restaging of Oedipus as one of the last mythological stories of the West, the western. Shot in the imaginary town of Ashcrof with western outfits and set design, but with masks from Japanese theater, Oedipus Marshal, set in 1856, the year of Sigmund Freud’s birth, establishes a complex palimpsest on the construction of discourses which confine madness 10. Together with these works which explore the community as the free experience of the individual with other individuals, the videos of Alexander Apóstol (Venezuela, 1969) and Allora & Calzadilla (Philadelphia, 1974, and Havana, 1971, respectively, living in Puerto Rico) use the experience as a device for action, although for different purposes. In Avenida Libertador, Apóstol explores the tiny gaps in modernity understood as technological progress. The Avenida Libertador, a product of the oil boom of the mid-1950’s, represents the Venezuelan International Style, a double-lane avenue made for cars and which brings together two conflicting neighborhoods in Caracas, Municipio Libertador and Municipio Chacao. Continuing with the idea of integration of the arts as a metaphor for the 9. ROLNIK, S. “Otherness beneath the open sky. The political-poetic laboratory of Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg”, in DAVID, C. (ed). Dias & Riedweg. The Other begins where our senses end”, exh.cat., MACBA, Actar, Barcelona, 2003, pg. 211. 10. ALBORES GLEASON, M. Doppelganger. The double of reality, exh.cat. MARCO, Vigo, 2007. 6
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ALEXANDER APÓSTOL Avenida Libertador, 2006. DVD, b/w, sound, 4’30’’. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Distrito Cuatro, Madrid.
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construction of a new order, the avenue is punctuated with murals sponsored by each one of the neighborhoods, which reflect the Venezuelan contribution to the modern movement: the kinetic abstraction developed since the 1950’s (Alejandro Otero, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz Díez, Gego) and the landscape abstraction since the beginning of the century (Manuel Cabré, Armando Reverón). However, like the Benjaminian rag and bone man, the real occupants of this street are those excluded by such discourse; transsexuals who flirt and offer themselves as merchandise while reciting the names and stereotypes of Venezuelan modernity. The work of Allora & Calzadilla considers the artistic activity as a creative communication of the dissention and protest of a community comprised of environmental activists and small farmers. We are before a case of new collectivism, defined by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette 11 as the ability to produce a social life and to commit to this as a means of expression. The videos of Allora & Calzadilla refer to Land Art, but this is no longer about the sublime and timeless space of the 1970’s; this is a fragile territory polluted by the traces of contemporary geopolitics. Returning a Sound and Under Discussion are two monochannels comprising the Land mark series, which take place on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. As some background for the dystopia there, Vieques is a depopulated tropical paradise, contaminated and covered with craters since the 1940’s, when the United States marines used it as a military testing ground. After a long period of protest and civil disobedience, the island was returned to the residents of Vieques. Allora & Calzadilla participate and lend visibility throughout the project, from the organization of the protest up to the reorganization of a new territory. In Under Discussion
r r, 11. STIMSON, B. y SHOLETTE, G. (eds). Collectivism after modernism. The art of social imagination after 1945. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2003. 7
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ALLORA & CALZADILLA Returning a Sound, 2004. 16 mm. film transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 5’42”. Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
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(2005), the civil disobedience activities force a demilitarisation which, far from producing any debate, opens a period of absolute silence. As a metaphor for the necessary conversations which had to take place, a debate table is made into a boat and a fisherman, as member of the community which began to sound the alarms regarding the contamination of the island, cuts around the perimeter of Vieques. In the video Returning a Sound, with somewhere between a sense of humour and a certain tragic quality, a motorcyclist travels around the reoccupied island in order to show the state of Vieques after the bombing, while in the background a trumpet in the form of an exhaust pipe creates a random ceremonial sound, like a national anthem for the reoccupied territory. This way, at a time when collectivism is thought of as virtual and private communication between consumers in a place dominated by immaterial capitalism, these eight works on video redraw the community from its experience and the difference as an element of creative intervention in the public space.
Texts and Curator: Chema González
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colour, sound, 5 42 . Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
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We thank the following institutions and persons, as well as all the artists, for their participation in this exhibition: Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), Colección Daros-Latinoamérica (Zurich), Galería Distrito Cuatro (Madrid), Galería Espacio Mínimo (Madrid), MARCO de Vigo, Galerie Peter Kilchman (Zurich). Ángeles Agrela, Efraín Bernal, Fernando Castro Flórez, Catherine David, Iñaki Estella, Lola Hinojosa, Natalia Maya Santacruz, Agar Ledo, José Piñar, María Inés Rodríguez.
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Common Places The Collective Experience in Latin American Video
3 june - 5 october 2008 Tuesdays to Saturdays, from 11.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. and from 5.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m. Sundays and Bank Holidays, from 11.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. Closed on Mondays Bus stop: Gran Vía (all except the nº. 5) Free diffusion programme aimed at the various educational levels and collectives in Granada and its province, by appointment (958 247 263). Guided visits for the general public on Tuesdays at 19:00 (except holidays) Centro José Guerrero Calle Oficios, 8. 18001 Granada Tel:+34 958 220109 www.centroguerrero.org blog.centroguerrero.org