TOUR BY THEMATIC NODES

Regina José Galindo (Guatemala, 1974)

The Great Return, 2019

Performance recording 

Full HD video, color/sound, 12'56"

 

A band of 45 professional musicians performs a reverse march through the streets of Guatemala City while playing martial music. The performance functions as a metaphor for social and political regression experienced by some Latin American territories. It seeks to mobilize the body and its memory, striving to not repeat the atrocious pasts. According to the author, the work establishes a connection with the work of Guatemalan poet Luis de Lion, and in particular with this eloquent fragment: "And when they remembered everything, they began to walk forward". 

 

 

1st node: Singularities

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Emilio Chapela (Mexico, 1978) 

Hidebehind, 2016

4K video, color/stereo sound, 3'11".

 

The video presents us with an intimate entanglement between the clouds, the telescope, the camera, and the artist, as they reveal and obscure each other in space and time. The artist stands in front of the camera, unaware of what is happening behind him, unable to control the environment. This underscores the elusiveness of refractions and diffractions as they emerge from specific entities and forces that influence, move and change in various directions. 

 

Ilián González (Mexico, 1970) 

Hollowman, 2017

Full HD video, color/sound, 3'12"

 

Here’s a dialogue about emptiness, totality, and identity, visually represented through cut-outs and blends. The body shifts and transforms as it interacts with the environment, moving from natural to urban contexts, while mimicking them. Some sequences were filmed in Mexico to become part of the character's internal landscape in Canada, others were filmed in Canada to become part of the internal landscape of the character situated in Mexico. This piece was produced at the Banff Centre in Alberta and Mexico City.  

 

Made with the help of Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, FONCA, and the BANFF Centre Artist Residency.

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Lysette Yoselevitz (Mexico, 1972) 

Roots, 2012  

Video performance

Full HD video, color/sound, 9'50".

 

With red thread, Yoselevitz entangles small stones as if she were embroidering on them. She ties her ankles with the threads, metaphors for social and cultural dependencies. The pain caused by dragging stones tied to the feet refers to the burden of carrying the experiences of affliction lodged in memory. This work, which seeks to unite what is human with nature,  invites us to enter a place where landscape and time become intimate.

 

This piece was produced with the collaboration of Abraham Lifshitz, Catherine Van Der Donckt, Benoît Dame. 

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2nd node: Monument and Counter-Monument

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Iván Argote (Colombia, 1983) 

Au revoir Joseph Gallieni, 2021

4K video, color/sound, 13'30".

 

In Place Vauban, in the center of Paris, France, the statue of Joseph Gallieni, a military ideologue of colonization and forced labor still stands today. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he left a legacy of violence and destruction in several countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Through a performative exercise,  formulated as a wish, as anticipation, Argote and his team carried out the symbolic removal of the statue to trigger a discussion on what inhabits memory and public space. 

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Laura Valencia Lozada (Mexico, 1974) 

Cuenda, 2011

Video documentation of a participatory art project and artistic activism.

Video, color/sound, 10'43".

 

In this is a collective artistic intervention, 14 statues of historical figures located on Paseo de la Reforma, an emblematic avenue in Mexico City,  were wrapped with black cotton cable. The artist, in collaboration with the relatives of persons that vanished, sought to give a body and a presence to Mexico’s missing. This is a response to the aggravation of this problem since 2006. Through this ephemeral "in negative" memorial, the public space was re-signified to build a new map for memory in which the demand for justice continues to this very day. 

 

This piece was produced with the collaboration and support of Andrés Villalobos, Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, Seminario de Medios Múltiples - UNAM & Centro Cultural de España en México - AECID. 

 

Perla Ramos (Mexico, 1985)

Patrimony Weights, 2017

Performance recording

Full HD video, color/sound, 6'35".

 

In a place like the Historic Center of Quito -the first American city to be named "World Heritage Site"-, heritage is present in everyday life as a source of tension in its relation to the right to housing. By stealing and moving a piece of cobblestone from the center of this city - an allusion to the local legend of the indigenous Cantuña - the artist underscores the necessity of challenging the notion of heritage. She asks what sustains memory, how it's sustained, and lastly, how much this memory,  built around what we consider cultural heritage, really does weigh. 

 

Produced with the support of No Lugar, Quito, Ecuador.

 

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3rd node: Disparities from the art Spheres

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Eder Castillo (Mexico, 1977) 

GuggenSITO, 2011, 

Video documentation of interventions

Full HD video, color/sound, 3'06".

 

GuggenSITO is a portable museum, an inflatable structure, similar to children's playground equipment, that parodies the great modern art museums. Its deliberately clumsy form mimics the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Unlike the original, this museum is not made to be seen, but to operate and to be used as a space to play and socialize. GuggenSITO appropriates the legitimizing capacity of the museum and returns it to the world of reality, to a world of direct performativities, as it underscores the social exclusions and disparities perpetuated by contemporary Western "culture". 

 

Stanley Février (Haiti / Canada, 1976)

An Invisible Minority, 2018

Full HD video, color/sound, 4'11"

 

The piece criticizes the modes of recognition produced from art institutions, asking what narratives are constructed from them and what other possible narratives and practices are made invisible. After noticing the quasi total absence of works by artists of color in the collection of the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, and, conversely, the strong presence of security guards of color, Février infiltrated the museum space with Michaëlle Sergile and Aime Mbuyi to work as guards, and thus underscore these contrasts and inequalities. 

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INVASORIX (Feminist group created in Mexico, 2013) 

Intellectual Macho, 2015 

Music video and postcard

HD video, color/sound, 3'16".

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INVASORIX is a feminist-queer collective interested in songs and video clips as a form of protest. Through a parody of gender roles, the work denounces how the art sphere has been inhabited by deeply macho modes of representation and visualities.  Intellectual Macho is a performative masquerade set to the rhythm of cumbia that re-enacts fourteen seminal photos of 20th century artists groups taken in front of art institutions in Mexico City. The video is accompanied by a postal intervention created especially for this exhibition.  

 

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4th node: Memories and orality

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Tania Ximena (Mexico, 1985) & Yollotl Alvarado (Mexico, 1989)

Enchantment Hill; The Chichón Volcano, 2016

Full HD video, color/sound, 4'00".

 

This art piece was created in direct collaboration with the community of Esquipulas, northwest of Chiapas, Mexico, to resignify the territory destroyed by the eruption of the Chichón Volcano in 1982. As the inhabitants who seek to rebuild their lives in this territory meet again, the artists recover and interweave oral narratives to investigate the past. This occurs through Zoque cosmogony and its symbolism of the territory, the reconstitution of personal and collective memory, and the imaginary reconstruction of the settlement that ceased to exist after the tragic event. 

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Joaquín Segura (Mexico, 1983) 

Essays on reconstruction (José Martí), 2014.

Full HD video, color/sound, 9'29".

 

Here’s an In situ project that takes place in El Pantanal, an irregular settlement located in the marginal areas of Granada, Nicaragua. This project is the product of an analysis of the history of the place and its central plaza. Hidden among the tropical vegetation, it resurfaces through the memory of its inhabitants, interviews, and oral narratives. As a result, everything indicates it was built between the fall of the Somoza dictatorship (1979) and 1992, and that it was intended as a memorial to the Cuban thinker, philosopher, poet, and politician José Martí. 

 

 

5th Node: Visibilization, restitution, healing

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Roberto de la Torre (Mexico, 1967)

A cielo abierto; search, death, and resurrection, 2014-2016, 

Action 

Full HD video, color/sound, 12'55".

 

This intervention is about the forced disappearance of 43 students of the teacher's rural School of Ayotzinapa on September 26, 2014, in the town of Iguala, Guerrero, in Mexico, and the probable relation of the incident with the open-pit mining activities of Canadian based transnational companies operating in the region. The artistic intervention, a collective process that occurred in the ArtScape YoungPlace building in Toronto, explores the painful event that shook Mexican society, as well as its social and political repercussions, in addition to the tireless search that family members undertake in a territory plagued by clandestine graves. 

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Livia Daza Paris (Venezuela / Canada 1965) 

Antigone, diary of rituals N.4: At the End, The Beginning, 2012-2014. 

HD video, color/sound, single-channel version, 10'51".

 

This work is part of a series of performative proposals of long duration - 4 to 12 hours- linked to specific spaces. This project, with its strong poetic connotations, seeks to restore the memory of Iván Daza, the artist’s father, a victim of enforced disappearance during the armed struggle in Venezuela in the 1960s. The title refers to Sophocles' "Antigone", who defied the established power so that her dissident brother would receive the proper funeral rites. With this project, she underscores the need of making absence visible and of generating deep mourning processes.

 

Work produced with the collaboration of Eliana González, Xi Feng and Alba Daza.

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Christine Brault (Canada)

#nonosvamosacallar25N, 2020,  

Video performance, 

Video, color/sound, 3'24".

 

For Brault, the other contagion in times of COVID-19 is the normalization of gender violence that has dramatically increased in contexts of confinement. This art piece responds to this problem by creating links and alliances. Every week, since November 2020, a group of women from different backgrounds, from Montreal and several cities in Mexico, meet virtually to talk, listen, share experiences, write and embroider. During this collective action, they appropriate the "mask" as a means for protest, so that this violence is forced out of the intimate space into the public realm... so that it's "heard". 

 

Work produced with the participation of Christine Brault, Reena Almoneda Chang, Maria Andreína Escalona, Galia González Rosas, Norma Miriam Hernández Rosas, Citlalli López Rendón, Ydalid Melo Escobedo, Priscilla Opazo Castillo, Mónica Ornelas, Sarabeth Triviño. This video presents us with the beginning of a creative collaboration experience that later became the Soy Nosotras Collective in 2021.

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Lorena Orozco Quiyono (Mexico, 1967) 

Found: Woman’s Body, 2021

Video action

Full HD video, color/sound, 5'53".

 

The work entails coming to terms with actual data related to domestic violence and femicides that occurred in specific places in Mexico City and its suburbs. The intervention echoes journalistic excerpts, in which, most often, given the impossibility of recognizing the victim's bodies, the latter are identified as "just another one". The work seeks to state that this data, these bodies, and these names are not alien: that they belong to us. The skin merges with the screen and becomes an artistic support. 

 

Artwork produced with the collaboration of Héctor Barbone.

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Felipe Osornio, Lechedevirgen Trimegisto (Mexico, 1991)

aFErrarse, 2013, 

Videoperformance 

Full HD video, color/sound, 8'29".

 

As part of the series "Estrategias para desaparecer", the artwork explores relationships between the body, public space, and disappearance as an ever-present problem in the Latin American context. In this video performance, the artist embodies the metaphor of absence through commonplace things that dissolve in the bowels of the city. After he marks his own silhouette with bird seeds on the ground of a public square, the pigeons feed on it until it disappears. Although the body and its trace fade away, resistance remains: there is a need to subsist, to cling to and feed memory and the city.  

 

This piece was produced with the collaboration of Herani Enríquez and Daniela Ibarra.

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Elvira Santamaria (Mexico, 1967)

Parable III, Penitentiary and flag, 2015, 

Video documentation of urban intervention, 

Full HD video, color/sound, 5'12".

 

A Symbolic journey through the streets of Mérida, Yucatán, in Mexico. Santamaría's work is infused with the necessity of processing the trauma linked to the violence that Mexico has been experiencing. For decades, Mexicans have had to live with the impacts of violence perpetrated on them and their loved ones, and with the absence of justice. The author presents a variety of artistic interventions in the public space, gestures, and poetic rituals, that seek to resonate with the passerby’s personal imagination - unconscious or conscious- to accompany and/or stimulate the mourning and trauma-linked processes that inhabit them.  

 

This piece was produced with the collaboration of Rendija Teatro, Alejandro Atocha and Fausto Luna.