How do artistic practices draw us closer to our present? How do they resonate with our future? Is it possible to sketch the complex panorama of a vast geographic and political region through fragments? Based on these questions, "Chronicles: resonances" proposes to reflect on contemporary issues that affect our regions – deploying from Mexico, but also to the south and north of the continent – through exercises of imagination, acts of resistance, and processes of memory.   

On the one hand, we appropriate the word "chronicle", which refers to the cyclical, returns repeatedly and embeds itself in our social and daily processes. On the other hand, this word also refers to microhistory, which is narrated in the first person and which, in its fragmentary and local specificity, overflows and gives us indications of a broader reality. Echoing a literary genre that has characterized Latin American writing, in the words of the writer Martín Caparrós, the chronicle is "the small story that can tell so many. The drop that is the prism of many others."    

"Chronicles: resonances" is a group exhibition in which the audiovisual language functions as a space that articulates concerns and approaches related to common contexts and issues in the second decade of this century (2011-2021), with an emphasis on performance, process art, and visual experimentation.  In this inquiry, we have circumscribed the rumor of the present through specific reflections structured as thematic nodes that dialogue with each other.  They underline the importance of stirring up singular and collective memory, the urgency of questioning heritage and the symbolic weight of its monuments; but they also emphasize the way in which systemic inequalities trickle into the artistic field and how, from there, resistance to patriarchy, racism, and social inequality are formulated. Hence, processes of denunciation and resilience resonate in proposal, realities that, without respite, overtake and afflict us, such as enforced disappearances and gender violence. 

From this perspective, the exhibition oscillates between works that resonate from bodies that confront personal experience and its environment, and others that record shared memory, the social and political environments from the individual and collective artistic point of view.  In these artworks, we see an aesthetic that is nourished by the cyclical evolution of the geographical contexts we inhabit and share daily. As a whole, the works trigger resonances and narrative cycles that allude to the chronicle that expands in the extensive dialogue through our territory. 

Maribel Escobar Varillas, Melisa Lio, Valeria Macías Rodríguez, F. Tito Rivas

December 2021