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The role and conception of the museum have shifted over time. For reasons having to do both with their own mission and the vicissitudes and transfor-mations of the social, political, and intellectual environment, institutions like MUSAC have been gradually and actively re-inventing themselves as propaga-tors of knowledge and culture. As a result of the paradigm shifts that MUSAC has undergone in recent years, its principal task has come to be the creation of space for the production and articulation of art discourse. That discourse has been fostered through the exhibitions it holds, through its collections of his-torical and cultural artefacts, and—perhaps the most active and intellectually engaged aspect—through the scheduling of conferences, symposia, and other scholarly events that invite spectators, researchers, and theorists to explore the possibilities of reflection and discussion about art and society. It’s true that MUSAC has already being sharing and developing the new dis-courses it has generated by means of its publications—through catalogs, books, and other educational and promotional materials—and for that reason many people may regard those projects as sufficient to expound its mission. However, when the museum is seen as a living and dynamic actor within the context of the urban environment, social reality, and cyberspace, it becomes crucial that the institution extend itself to new planes that relate to its work, its obligations, and its responsibilities, and that it establish an opening for and a commitment to the reflections—both theoretical and artistic—that give it meaning and purpose in its contemporary setting. Setting out from that perspective, RADA R, MUSAC’s Journal of Art and Thought, has been founded as a tool for research, debate, and dialogue. This new articulation of the museum hasn’t been created solely with the intention of supporting the institution’s own programming or in order to provide cove-rage of its collections and activities; it is also conceived of as an independent enterprise in its own right. As an additional department of the museum, and as an embodiment of the actions the museum proposes, it creates a new academic tool for reflecting on themes and issues from the past, present, and future that interest us, that concern us, or that we find noteworthy. It will serve, we hope, as an open doorway onto dialogue and creation.

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In taking on all of these tasks we believe that it’s necessary for MUSAC to establish this forum for debate as a way to periodically introduce other areas of interest to the community at large and, in turn, extend the museum’s com-mitment. This is how we envisage RADA R: a semi-annual bilingual journal, to be distributed internationally by Actar, which will serve as a scholarly me-dium for discussing the issues, reflections, and concerns generated within the intellectual mechanisms of the museum, ones connected, whether closely or distantly, to the projects we produce. each issue will invite theorists, artists, cu-rators, intellectuals, analysts, writers, and sociologists to engage with different spaces for art, culture, and thought, in order to formalize new discourses and reflections on specific monographic themes. RADA R thus wishes to provide a specific yet broad perspective on a particu-lar idea, thought, way of seeing, event, space, or time. It will do this largely through previously unpublished texts by scholars and critics who are creating new discourses and arguments (although we don’t exclude the possibility of republishing and revisiting earlier writings that may shed new light or provide new perspectives on the topic under consideration). While these articles will form the core of the journal, RADA R will also feature—in an effort to balance the realm of communication and the space of creation—a section devoted to specific projects by artists and other creators, whose work will contribute to broadening or raising questions about each issue’s particular theme. This issue #0 is special not only because it inaugurates a new path for MUSAC, but also because it is directly connected—in the manner of a supplement or extension—to the exhibition project that justifies it and from which it takes its title and theme. Model Kits: Thinking latin America from the MUSAC Collection invited us to think about latin America as an eternally possible and therefore ultimately infinite work-in-progress, a project with no fixed point in space or time, with different trajectories, open to multiple worlds. It was construed as a sort of unlimited ars combinatoria, one that wouldn’t exclusively refer to the latin American geographical-cultural environment but that would also foster and encourage various and contrasting readings and conclusions, uncertain storylines, and ambiguous clues, leaving unanswered questions and forking paths. The articles in this issue broaden and deepen those ideas and readings—as well as some of their theoretical, historical or urban implications—through the precise, specific, and personal perspectives of a group of latin American spe-cialists. Andrea Giunta reflects on contemporary interrelationships between art, politics, and society in latin America in the context of biopolitics and the relationship between images of life and art, in order to point out the changes occurring in a setting that has distinct characteristics in regard to the produc-tion, organization, distribution, online promotion, and educational dynamics of art. Nicolás Guagnini devises and outlines a possible history of latin Ame-

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rican art based on texts by distinguished avant-garde poets and writers, so as to shape a kind of signifying collage that highlights some of the confusions and misunderstandings about what today is heralded (and perhaps will continue to be heralded) as contemporary latin American art. Rosina Cazali reviews the decisive experience of action art and performance in Central America through the artists and works that have reflected on the region’s conflicts, sometimes brimming with references to violence and death, and at other times drawing on a new poetics and on physical and psychological concerns. Natalia Majluf analyzes how the concept of “latin America” has been transformed into a commodity of artistic consumption. Demonstrating how this transformation stems, on the one hand, from the real imbalance between the production of artworks and lack of local infrastructure, and, on the other, from the promo-tion of that work in the international art world, she shows how this situation has developed as an unintended consequence of the unexpected success of the struggle to include latin American art within international circuits. Ana María Durán Calisto addresses the phenomenon of the latin American megapolis through an overview of the Amazon basin, making sense of the contrast between the exotic-romantic representation of the region in the media as a mythical and remote land and the contemporary reality of its wealth and resources, the conflicts that these have produced, and the irreversible urban expansion and artificiality they fuel. Raúl Cárdenas interweaves the histori-cal events of twentieth-century Mexico with personalities and ideas from the country’s experience of modernity, as well as recent examples of curatorship, in order to evaluate different stances regarding urbanism and architecture in Mexican contemporary art. Iván de la Nuez responds to personal questions whi-le sketching the inexhaustible universe of history, politics, literature, and art that define “the stain” and “the map” of latin America. The original projects produced for RADA R by Fernanda Gomes, Armando Andrade Tudela, Jhafis Quintero González and Pablo león de la Barra, ranging from formal poetics to subjective projection, and from the personal experience of the social to the juxtaposition and coexistence of urban realities, round off the “model kits” that shape this first issue. Issue #0 is also special because it has been produced, presented, and distributed within the framework of the International Book Fair of Guadalajara, Mexico, where authors and publications from Castile and leon were the focus of at-tention as the special guests of its 24th instalment, and where, with this issue, MUSAC had an honoured position.

Agustín Pérez Rubio, María Inés Rodríguez, Octavio ZayaDirectors of RADA R. MUSAC’s Journal of Art and Thought

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What is it that has brought about the unblocking of a notion like “bio-politics,” and made it into such fertile ground for thinking about new processes of artistic creation? In the last few years, the discussions sur-rounding the genealogy of the irruption and theoretical formulation of this concept have been intense. While the debate over its employment and meaning was coming together, rewritten through the contributions of a number of thinkers—from Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri1—who twisted and complicated the original sense of the term, a series of fields for the application of the concept emerged.2

In the field of art, this interstitial notion, one which promotes the in-tersection of disciplines, has enabled fresh perspectives, leading both to new ways of analyzing existing dynamics (like those of the exhibition, the archive, and curatorship3), and to the devising of new ones. In this case, I am referring to the set of dynamics that have influenced what at first were the emerging, and have since become the dominant, pathways of artistic production over the past fifteen years. To consider the new developments from the perspective of biopolitics allows us to turn from

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the simple description of the changes that have taken place towards pos-sible ways of conceptualizing those developments. The urge to reflect on one’s own time is a common one. let us recall the measuring of the field of intervention that Susan Sontag proposed in her “Notes on ‘Camp’,” where she sought to grasp what “camp” was solely by descriptive means, without adopting any stance in regard to it:

Many things in the world have not been named, and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. one of these is sensibility …which goes by the cult name of “Camp.”4

We can begin, therefore, with the mere description of the facts that provide evidence of change, and focus all of our attention on the emer-gence of the new. We can attempt to derive all of our findings via this process of enumeration, without having to weigh the evidence, without making a value judgment, but simply ascertaining the facts that indi-cate that we are now in a different landscape. 5

Viewed from this perspective, we see before us the unfolding panorama of a new circuit for organizing art. Among its elements are new chan-

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nels for distribution (biennials, on-site events, art fairs), new dynamics of artistic training that lie outside the academic system (workshops, residencies, seminars); different ways of organizing production (collec-tives and networks); and new arenas for the dissemination of informa-tion and publishing (online and through networks). The very concept of what constitutes “an artist” becomes diluted, as ephemeral communi-ties are brought together by a particular event or a common interest, whether it be sharing food at an opening, chatting at a stand or a booth at a biennial, watching videos, reading magazines, or listening to music. We now speak of an “art of post-production,” a term inseparable from its relationship to the culture industry.6 We speak as well of an art that has been de-localized and re-localized, an art that has detached itself from the sphere of nations and re-situated itself in the urban sphere and into itinerancy between the farthest-flung corners of the planet; an art that has abandoned its almost exclusive focus on the context of the art-ist’s own origins in order to engage with the contexts where the works are situated. There is talk of an art that values a state of joy, and the pos-sibility of sharing as a site-specific utopia—specific to a precise, peren-nial place where it is realized—without a project for another future, but centered on the dynamics of exchange. What allows us to conceive of a biopolitical perspective on art? First, and most obvious, is the fact that images have functioned in close prox-imity to power, as devices for the propagation of beliefs, systems of control, state structures, ideas about the family, educational programs, and religious dogmas. But beyond this propagative sense, I’m interested in thinking about the resilient residue that images articulate in order to reinforce alternative life systems. In their own life histories, intact or modified, images survive every attempt to control them. Freed from the structures that would allow the standardization of their inadequacy, they redesign themselves in order to live on. I’m also interested in the process of linking art to political life. It is the tension inherent in the instrumental notion of the avant-garde—the struggle to reunite art and life— which in recent years has brought artists into the streets, and has

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led them to design forms of art production located within a collective and ephemeral time and space, such as that of a public demonstration. Finally, I’m interested in considering to what degree certain images, ones that oscillate between the realm of artistic production and that of mass communication, take the place of remembrance. Remembrance as re-collection, as a revisiting within the heart, within the sensibility, of the disappeared, of the presence of an absence. Re-cordis: memory, the opposite of forgetting. This brief essay seeks to highlight some facts and activities that take on new dimensions when we inscribe them within the territory of the bio-political. From this perspective, they’re no longer chronological facts; they aren’t events; they are images that set the parameters for a concept of life. They are generated within the tumultuous center of life itself, and seek to perpetuate that life. They do so not by means of the kind of passive reproduction that institutions favor, but in the form of records that keep memory alive, in the form of dynamics aimed at produc-ing forms of association—that is, of life—which, though they do not exclude the use of any medium, are largely expressed not through the two-dimensional surface of the canvas or the three-dimensional sur-face of the sculptural block, but through the ephemeral and social mo-ment of joint actions. During the past few years, latin American cities have inaugurated an impressive series of contemporary art museums, meeting, exhibition and residency centers, and online programs. In doing so they have cre-ated a dynamic that is aligned with that of the international art world in terms of itinerancy, if not necessarily of visibility. The residency programs went through a preliminary phase with the Triangle Arts Trust project, founded in london in 1982 by Robert loder and Anthony Caro, and were adapted locally through initiatives that multiplied with particular speed after the year 2000. examples include Argentina el Basilisco, Casa 13, el levante and RIIA in Argentina; CRAC in Val-paraíso7, among many others.8 These residencies have been presented as opportunities for learning, production, and sociability. They create a

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time of communal living, discussing joint projects, searching for ideas, exchanging insights about images—moments that culminate in celebra-tion, parties, the exhibition of completed work, beer, and table football. The medium for communicating and making tangible a shared time in which priority is placed on experience rather than producing mar-ketable objects is often the production of a publication. This sociability, and its pronounced relation to the city, are likewise present in discus-sion groups and networking initiatives such as Duplus or Trama in Ar-gentina, the gallery Metropolitana and Hoffmann’s House in Santiago de Chile, Capacete in Rio de Janeiro, la Rebeca in Colombia, espacio Aglutinador in Havana, and others. 9

In addition to these initiatives, contemporary art collections, as well as museums in various cities designed to house those collections, have pro-liferated. What is interesting is the manner in which these initiatives have been carried out. For example, by 2004, in the context of recovery from the greatest economic and social crisis Argentina has undergone in twenty years (following the events of December 19 and 20, 2001), museums were opened in Neuquén, Rosario, Salta, and Misiones. Dur-ing the same period a policy for collecting “emerging art” was put into effect in Buenos Aires, a policy which, even if it failed to establish a solid market, managed to create a new valorization of the most recent art. This movement contributed to the gentrification process in cities, to the modification of urban social fabrics, to the appreciation of places, and to the creation of new routes. As museums, cultural centers, and residencies became directly engaged in the restructuring of the city, they exercised various degrees of impact on the growth of new areas, and in the surge of movement to areas of the cities that hadn’t previ-ously been frequented by young artists, areas such as Avellaneda with el Basilisco, or the Abasto with the new Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas. Art played a crucial part in the process of redesigning the ur-ban dynamic during a time of crisis. It shifted epicentres that had been traditionally linked to the gallery circuit. Residencies, rather than cafés, became the new preferred external gathering places for artists. Parties

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and workshops became the new spaces for sociability, the gathering spots along the city’s new art routes. At the same time, forms of collective production multiplied. In certain contexts, such as that of Argentina, those forms made it possible for a crisis situation—one similar to what Agamben calls a “state of excep-tion”10—to be transformed into a creative moment. The art collectives fostered the design of formats that filtered art productions through the contemporary situation of impoverishment. In some cases, this was simply because creating in shared spaces and dynamics lowered produc-tion costs. In other cases, where artists were faced with the impossibil-ity of paying for materials after currency devaluation, they poeticized impossibility. An example was oligatega Numeric, whose members ex-plored conversions between technologies—from analog to digital—that were never intended to communicate with each other. In still others cases, art groups became engaged with urban movements, leading to a special productive relationship between public protest and the produc-tion of images. When, for example, workers evicted from recovered factories in Argentina, such as Bruckman, occupied the city square next to the factory, individuals and art collectives installed their work at the same location. These installations served as additional ways of mak-ing the protests visible, of keeping them going, alongside other potent forms of visibility, like the roadblocks where black clouds of smoke from burning tires rose up like tornados in the sky. We are referring, in a sense, to the life that is lived by images. one re-markable development, also in Argentina, was the incorporation of iconographies from the past. In an unprecedented synchronization between history, academia, and artistic production, many of the key works of Argentine art housed in museums were “re-semanticized” and “re-appropriated” from the perspective of contemporary artistic discourse. The guiding purpose of this project was to provide access to the hidden sides of those familiar images, thus revealing a critical his-tory of art that simultaneously was approached from the university. As the images were exposed to this process (here it is appropriate to cite

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artists like Daniel ontiveros, leonel luna or Daniel Santoro11) new fac-ets were discovered in them.At the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the UNAM in Mexico, Miguel Ventura’s horrifying installation juxtaposed scientific and political discourse with the full power of montage. Hundreds of rats, tamed by specialists, traversed the heart of what the artist himself described as an “excessive and crazed” labyrinthine structure, in which hundreds of photographs and documents from Nazi Germany were hung next to foam swastikas or photographs of feces fashioned into or-namental shapes.12 The various elements were gathered in an animal re-search laboratory space whose chaos brought to mind Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau in Hanover, destroyed during World War II. A web of archives found articulation in a montage whose critical effect of distancing was intensified by the revolting sensations their repugnance produced, and through the critical element that informs laughter, irony, and sarcasm.13 A new form of thinking about new world geopolitics was being pro-posed, in which, as Sarah Thornton14 demonstrates, wars multiply while the art market becomes more spectacular. “The language of contempo-rary art,” Miguel Ventura declares, “is very similar to the language of finance; they both derive from homogenous strategies covering every part of the world.15” He made this explicit with the monumental mon-tage of text and image that documented his animal laboratory. Among the texts were several written by José Vasconcelos, the first education Minister of the Mexican Revolution, after the pro-Nazi party financed a publication for him. The present mixed with substrates from obscured pasts; a confrontation in which elements from every era were detonated together. The passage through the installation showed us that facts and our beliefs were at odds, that the past could be re-activated and re-launched into the present and the future. This iconographic display pro-voked reactions and legal actions that reactivated the life of some of im-ages, highlighting the conditions of their emergence and their mutabil-ity, as well as the attempts to control them, domesticate them, serialize them and systematize them, limits that were all put continuously to the

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test and subverted according to the reactivity of the images themselves.But the application of biopolitics to the field of art is also about images of life and death, or, more specifically, about the right to life. These are images whose purpose is to intervene, from their specific and uncanny power, in the strategies that are articulated by human life, and to make demands on behalf of both the existence and the dignity of that life; to intervene against wars and massacres; to demand that those who have disappeared reappear alive; to take a stand, together with political discourse, on behalf of the meaningfulness of lives that are no longer, that were surrendered and taken away for the sake of ideas in the revo-lutionary confrontation. Images that intersect the fields of politics and esthetics; that are produced within the circuit of the art world, or that come from a visual realm external to the art world, distributed on a daily basis by the press, as happens with the notices that are published in the newspaper Página /12. Images and exhibitions that are produced collaboratively, with very precise objectives. It’s surprising how much of a relationship there is between artistic pro-ductions, an expanded body of mass media imagery, and the politics of human rights. The notion of biopolitics allows for borderlands think-ing,16 in this case, about a heterogeneous body of images, created under a variety of circumstances and in different contexts, sharing a meeting point characterized, in the first place, by the idea of acting in behalf of life, and in the second, by a continuous transformation of its strategies for visual formulation, with the aim of avoiding the erosion caused by repetition. In this sense, these images are versatile; they carry on a dia-logue among themselves and with their own genealogies, with agree-ments and frictions that make them into shifting representations whose dynamics reproduce the conditions of their own survival. one case is particularly eloquent: the power of the portrait, of the im-ages of identification card pictures, in the shaping of the political strate-gies of human rights organizations and in the poetics linked to those strategies. Consider the case of Chile, where the portrait played a lead-ing role in the work produced during the transition period from dicta-

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torship to democracy. Consider eugenio Dittborn’s work and the por-traits he created from newspaper photographs which had in turn been obtained from police archives17; consider Gonzalo Díaz and his portraits of heroes, artists, and saints, overprinted in a true palimpsest of images and historical periods, overlapped so as to operate through transparency and superimposition. Unlike juxtaposed times, which are compared with the intention of producing confrontation, these are superimposed times in which the past never stops acting along with the present, in which both are simultaneously active. Here we have a biopolitics of the image reactivated by the passage of the iconography of human rights organi-zations through the erudite world of art. As happens with the scarves that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wear covering their hair and that Daniel ontiveros groups together into the form of daisies, inscribing between them the phrase pronounced by Belgrano, “Ay Patria Mía” (oh My Homeland); or when Rosana Fuentes paints scarves in tiny squares in order to reach 30,000, the emblematic number that guided the de-mands of human rights organizations—a work of art that began in 1997 and is still in progress—or with the images and texts that, day after day, withstand all forms of forgetting, like the notices that the newspaper Página/12 publishes at the request of relatives of people who were taken alive on that date to a place from which they never returned. Texts—like epigrams, in the sense of inscriptions—that accompany the images cho-sen by family members to give a better account of who that person was, of what their moments of happiness were, and to remind us that noth-ing is forgotten. Faced with the question of what the connection might now be between art, politics, and society, an approach from the notion of biopolitics declassifies the avant-garde’s classic urgency to unite art with life, as well the rare moments in which this link is fulfilled. Images, as shift-ing, living representations; the presence of bodies in collective expres-sions; the fact that the new institutionalization of art—more flexible and more mobile—intervenes in the processes of urban transformation, acting as a trendsetter; the close relationship between the politics of the

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image and the politics of life put in practice by human rights organi-zations: these are the new scenarios that permit us to analyse, from an interstitial perspective, the articulation of the connection that, far from weakening in the face of the challenges of formalism, speaks of the new scenarios of art work and sociability that keep the art world alive. To be clear, not the world of art spectacle, but the world of frictions and critical reformulations, which lend the richest sense to any poetic—and therefore also political—proposal.

1 We can cite, as a selection of some of the fundamental texts, Michel Foucault, Historia de la sexua-lidad. 1- la voluntad de saber, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1987, p. 161-194; “la gubernamentalidad” and “las mallas del poder”, in Estética, ética y hermenéutica. Obras completas III, Barcelona, Paidós, 1989, p. 175-197 and 235-254 respectively; Giorgio Agamben, �el campo de concentración como paradigma biopolítico de lo moderno, in Homo Sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2006, p. 151-239; Antonio Negri, �el monstruo politico. Vida desnuda y potencia�, in Gabriel Giorgi and Fermín Rodríguez (Comp.), Ensayos sobre biopolítica. Excesos de vida, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2005, p. 93-139.2 See, for example, Ignacio Mendiola Gonzalo (ed.), Rastros y rostros de la biopolítica, Barcelona, Anthropos, 2009.3 Cf. Borís Groys, �el arte en la era de la biopolítica: De la obra de arte a la documentación de arte”, in Obra de arte total Stalin. Topología del arte, la Habana, Criterios, 2008, p. 165-183; Joaquín Barrien-dos, (2009) “(Bio)políticas de archivo: archivando y desarchivando los sesenta desde el museo de arte / Archive (bio)politics: archiving and de-archiving the 1960s from the art museum” in Artecontexto, No. 24, Madrid, 2009, p. 17-23.4 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”, in Against Interpretation.5 Cf. Jacques Rancière, El maestro ignorante. Cinco lecciones sobre la emancipación intelectual, Buenos Aires, libros del Zorzal, 2007.6 Cf. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproducción, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo, 2007.7 Cf. Crac Valparaiso, Residency center for contemporary artists. Report 2006-2008 and 20098 For a provisional list of residencies see: http://www.artscollaboratory.org/organisations/triangle9 Cf. Memoria de las experiencias, encuentros y actividades que se desarrollaron en torno a las residencias de artistas, CRAC Valparaiso, Chile, 2007-2008, CRAC, Valparaiso, 2009; Duplus, El pez, la bicicleta y la máquina de escribir. Un libro sobre el encuentro de espacios y grupos de arte independiente de América Latina y el Caribe, Buenos Aires, Proa, 2005.10 Giorgio Agamben, Estado de excepción, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo, 2007.11 Regarding leonel luna�s work see laura Malosetti Costa, �Tradición, familia, desocupación, in Seminario Los Estudios del Arte desde América Latina, at http://servidor.esteticas.unam.mx:16080/edartedal/bahia.html12 Miguel Ventura, Cantos Cívicos. Un proyecto de NILC en colaboración con Miguel Ventura, Mexico City, UNAM-MUAC, 2008.13 For a brilliant analysis of the powers of montage see Georges Didi-Huberman, Cuando las imágenes toman posición, El ojo de la historia, Madrid, A. Machado libros, 2008.14 Sarah Thornton, Siete días en el mundo del arte, Buenos Aires, edhasa, 2009.15 Ventura, op. cit. p. 142.16 Ignacio Mendiola Gonzalo, La biopolítica como un pensar fronterizo, op. cit. pp. 9-14.17 Regarding Dittborn’s portraits see Miguel Valderrama, La aparición paulatina de la desaparición en el arte, Santiago de Chile, Palinodia, 2009.

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let us consider the following seven phrases:

“We will not serve nature.”“The objective world offers us elements which we convert systematically into a subjective world, thus returning them to the objective world in the form of new facts.”“Aesthetics legitimizes the judgments which our intuition makes about art with arguments constructed a posteriori.”“let us appreciate blacks who are really black, and whites who are re-ally white.”“We are the primitive people of a new era. let us suppress ideas and other paralyses.”“A single image surpasses or condenses what a dense treatise can tell the intellect.”“our America, especially in view of the Yankee failure, is humanity’s only hope.”

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These declarations, some of them general and therefore vague, others quite precise, compose a manifesto, almost a creed. Their anti-imperi-alist tone and their position in regards to racial matters seem to situate our incipient program in the environs of May 1968. The pocket diatribe against nature and the call for the creation of a new objectivity are clearly of concretist or neo-concretist roots. Perhaps, then, our little pre-scriptive manual dates back to the late 1940s, or to the following decade? The appeal to intuition and the confidence in the power of the com-municative language of the image have “surrealist” roots. one might then deduce that our text is from the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the ‘30s. Almost instinctively, out of regionalist habit, we situate the movement that gave rise to this manifesto on the eastern coast of South America. Its works are probably not very large in scale, white and black with a bit of colour, frequently red or light blue. The best ex-amples are in the Cisneros Collection, in the Museum of latin Ameri-can Art in Buenos Aires (MAlBA), or in Texas. or perhaps its creators

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are still treasuring yellowing papers, photos, and original publications, anxiously awaiting the call from the Tate or the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which will finally pull them out of their existence in the middle of the middle class and propel them into the upper middle class and into History with a capital H. The truth is that the above sentences are literal quotations, or my own free paraphrases with minimal alterations, of fragments of works by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge luis Borges, oliverio Girondo, Mario de An-drade, oswald de Andrade, Arturo Uslar Pietri, José Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui, and leopoldo lugones. They were written between 1914 and 1931. Naturally, they come from texts of manifests linked to Ultraism, martifierrismo, the poetry of the Pau-Brasil movement, An-thropophagism, and other literary vanguards. I disavow any attempt at accuracy. To provide exact references as to place, form, and time of publication would be counterproductive for my argument. This little collage, this continental exquisite corpse, this mutual détour-nement of textual monuments, has but one objective: to prove that the model for the visual arts --in fact for all of the arts--which has been de-veloped in latin America is fundamentally a literary one. Furthermore, it is a model based on poetic avant-gardes, because it was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenti-eth, at a time when poetry was still the great political and ideological theatre where “identitary” questions were settled.Accepting as given the previous argument--whose demonstration would require examples1--we find ourselves in a violently melancholy position. If poetry is the model, and if the figure of the poet as the great demiurge who generates ideological and aesthetic markets has disap-peared (having finally been replaced, in the past two decades, by that of the architect), we are then faced with an art whose decoding depends on a kind of knowledge which has become extinct. This predicament is aggravated by an issue of cultural geopolitics. As objects flow from South to North, and as various institutions in the US

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and europe purchase them, at prices that are laughable in comparison with those received for works by artists of the period between 1940 and 1970 who belong to a central culture, (but still high enough to divorce the works from their local markets), the discourses which guarantee their legibility don’t necessarily travel along with the works. There ex-ist two dominant positions guiding the display of these productions: a contextual model based on geography, which is historicist and tends to protect aspects of the original discourses; and the formal and “isomor-phic” one, which looks for visual or structural analogies (or both). Natu-rally there are hybrids, and the criteria of each model migrate towards the other with results that are sometimes happy and sometimes not. In the best of cases, where the historicist model dominates, the contextual facts are preserved. But then we arrive at the moment of interpretation and find ourselves amid the academic structure of the West, permeated by the powerful scaffolding constructed by October magazine around structuralism, the Frankfurt School (particularly Adorno), and a sani-tized version of Bataille –a Bataille without Sade— which has produced misunderstandings. It’s a sad example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The problem is that this other knowledge, the knowledge about the theoretical models of the latin American literary avant-garde, which of course runs through the open veins of North American academia as well, is compartmentalized within another discipline, one which has no contact with the field of art history. In the United Status it’s a political matter. latin Americans are the larg-est minority and they sway elections in Florida, California, and Texas, states that can wind up determining even the outcome of presiden-tial elections as a result of the absurd system of the electoral College, perhaps the most significant flaw in the almost perfectly republican structure of the Constitution. The issue of political representation is amplified by the politically correct question of cultural representation. Paradoxes and absurdities multiply. The finest Brazilian art occupies the

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storage facilities of a museum in Texas, a state whose overwhelmingly Mexican Hispanic population has never heard of neo-concretism, and whose life and cultural experience is as divorced from that of a carioca as it is from that of a New england patrician. In New York, the most populous groups are Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, followed by ec-uadorians and Mexicans. of these groups, only the first two exert any form of rudimentary political organization. The art that is exhibited in the museums and that is shown in universities stems, in large part, from the eastern coast of South America, from Brazil, Argentina, Ven-ezuela, Uruguay. All of these are countries without significant immi-gration to the United States in quantitative terms (in qualitative terms, it’s a different story: oiticica, Ricardo Piglia, liliana Porter, luis Cam-nitzer, Juan Downey, Reinaldo laddaga and many other artists have spent crucial decades of their lives on the east Coast of North America). The past must either be modern or it won’t exist at all. And the divi-sion of modernity into avant-garde and neo avant-garde, into pre- and post-war, while fully operative for the narrative of the transit from Paris to New York via Auschwitz, is completely useless when trying to understand, let’s say, the passage of lygia Clark from gestaltist abstrac-tion to a model of subject and body therapy that lies beyond the realm of language —yet she has been included in anthologies and conceptual art exhibitions. There is a second misunderstanding, of a purely political nature, re-stricted to the artistic productions of the late 1950s and after, one that is easier to remedy given that it refers to knowledge that is more “alive” and which has receded less on the epistemic horizon than the poetic literary debate. I am referring to the philosophical, theological, and ideological currents that informed revolutionary attempts against the global backdrop of the Cold War, the Condor plan, the interventionism of the CIA, and the ominous influence of Henry Kissinger. To enu-merate those currents: Sartre’s existentialism, crucial for the first and third Massotta and for Ferreira Gullar in formulating the theory of

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the non-object; the foquismo of Regis Debray, heightened by the heroic figure of Che Guevara, and virtually a formula for generating artistic phenomena like Tucumán Arde; a peculiar reading of structuralism and of Roland Barthes finely minced with Mcluhan and Borges, at the DiTella; the relentless shadow of the liberation Theology of Boff and Gutiérrez and of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed in the aware-ness that the basic operation is the subversion of structures of power (the Church, education, or language) from within, an interventionist methodology that ranges from Cildo Meireles and luis Camnitzer to Juan Downey. Suspended between those losses and misunderstandings, we thus live a little.We live on adversities. epistemic adversities. We live. Misunderstood.

Harlem 2010

NB: This sketch is dedicated to José Falconi and to his coffee table, both of which were instrumental.

1 From Borges onwards, Argentine art has been modeled like a series of fictions. The modified piano of Xul Solar never sounded a note, the rules of the panjogo are volatile, just like the grammar and the vocabulary of the panlingua. They are not systems, but rather enunciations. The concrete artists and Madi brought to Paris an exhibition with several fictional artists, with photos for the catalogue and an apocryphal name included. The auto-generated historiography of the movement, filled with more lies than facts, makes fiction into its operative key. Finally, the “art of the media” proposes to replace the work of art by its representation in the mass media, in other words, a theorization of the social projection and the raison d’être of fiction.

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Collections don’t create history—not automatically, and not in isolation. one need only study the boom in collecting latin American art over the last decade. In the entire history of the region there has never been a time during which a greater number of works have been integrated into museum and private collections in europe and North America; there has also probably never been another curatorial practice more bereft of narratives and guiding discourses. one might reply that this is only a symptom of a more general condition, of what today is designated as “the contemporary”;1 but the resistance to formulating narratives has even extended to the curatorship of periods that can already be regarded as “historical.”In spite of the absence of guiding discourses, however, it’s still possible to discern in this process a succession of canons that determine changes in the course of the art market with impressive speed. The positioning of modernism as the new cosmopolitan model, displacing the construc-tion of a “fantastic” America, is already firmly established; in its place is a new chapter of latin American “conceptualism,” which in the last

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years has redefined both the market and the practice of curating region-al art. This new order is entrenched in those collections which have cre-ated, in both the private and the public spheres (spheres which today are inevitably enmeshed), a space for latin American art outside of latin America. But it would seem that there’s no longer really an “outside” in a glo-balized world system that affirmatively and emphatically incorporates productions created in places situated on the periphery. The interna-tional market, the globalized collections, the heterogenous sites of artis-tic and critical production, have in fact reformulated the contemporary art space as a non-place. Collectors, artists and curators from various parts of the world participate actively in market processes and circuits and on the international museum scene. They are intimately linked to-gether in an activity that provides them with support and offers them the possibility of relationships with the globalized system. Paradoxi-cally, this supposedly decentralized activity operates, necessarily, by

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employing categories that insist on geographic specificity. The labels “Africa,” “Asia,” or “latin America” allow the creation of manageable units that impose order and allow the possibility of comprehension in the administration of a universe that has expanded to the point that it is now in many ways impossible to encompass.Regional categories are thus employed as organizing instruments at in-stitutions like the Museum for latin American Art in long Beach, Cal-ifornia, the latin American collection of the University of essex, and the Museo del Barrio in New York; and by specialized curatorial staff at the los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, as well as by other collections which have been created or reinforced in the last decade as a consequence of the demands for inclusion that resulted both from the multicultural debates of the 1980s and ‘90s and from pressure applied by latin American collectors and curators in the United States. The region’s art is also represented through private initiatives such as Daros latin America or the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. But even when the term “latin America” is not used to designate a niche within the administrative structure of museums, para-curatorial authorities arise that insist on reference to the region. The committees that oversee the acquisition of latin American art at major museums like the Muse-um of Modern Art in New York or the Tate Modern extra-officially in-stitute the category as a part of their practice. As a consequence, “latin America” has become a pragmatic designation, one that facilitates the administration of an expanded art corpus in museums that have gone from representing modernism to representing the world. This employment of the term “latin America” today is less than ideo-logical and more than rhetorical. It has been emptied of all meaning; its essentialist drive, its totalizing representations, its place in the discourse on identity--all of which have been challenged in the critical discourse of the last decades2--are no longer the vectors of the debate. The result-ing void can thus be understood as a positive step, as the liberation from

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old paradigms;3 but even in its new and apparent limpidity the term persists as a framework that defines and organizes a curatorial field. The problem lies in the imbalance that underlies the structure of that field, in the fact that latin America as a category remains particu-larly elusive even when approached from the very region it designates. The fact that critical discourse surrounding latin America has de-veloped in the region doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of a cor-responding museum structure. Seen in this regard, perhaps only the Museo de Arte latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MAlBA) can claim a place in this new approach, which deploys the regional category as the core concept for building its collections. It’s a project with little precedent and few parallels.4

like the collections, the projects that engage the region in broader un-dertakings almost always seem to originate from outside as well. one example is the project called Documents of 20th-century Latin American Art and Latino Art, directed by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, which convokes and incorporates local teams to research and digitize documents. The project’s very conception and development would be possible only in the United States, within the context of the particular requirements of that country’s internal politics. The teams participating in the project, in Bogota, Buenos Aires, lima, Mexico, São Paulo and Santiago, frame their work from a national standpoint, as local history projects. The entire undertaking, the compilation and digitization of thousands of documents on the art of the region in the 20th century, is to be integrated into a free-access website, where national projects will, inevitably, be subsumed and dispersed under the rubric of “latin America.”To state it clearly, latin America as a region doesn’t exist as an operative possibility for the museum practice of the region itself. The problem is a structural and logistical one: there are no collections, libraries, sub-sidies, or channels in which to circulate works, books, or agents that would enable the construction of an idea of the region from within the

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region. In the specific field of collection building, “latin America” thus ends up referring to an asset or a value of artistic consumption5, one that reveals a serious imbalance in the production and circulation of art on the global scene. Today we’re paying the price for the unexpected success of the struggle to include latin American works within international art circuits. No one foresaw such precipitous growth, nor the impressive expansion of the market. To the dismay and frustration of many regional collectors, critics, and curators, a growing number of pieces, of both historical and recent vintage, are now enriching the holdings of museums in europe and North America. There are major episodes in the history of latin American art that will scarcely be able to be represented in the places where the works were created and in the contexts that gave them form and meaning. The isolated efforts of some latin American institutions are insufficient to compensate for the loss of local cultural patrimony. Above and beyond the issue of heritage, the problem is that the pos-sibility of access to and representation of certain traditions of modern and contemporary art in their places of origin is almost irremediably limited. The debate that arose following the acquisition of the Adolpho leirner collection by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston exposed the Brazilian critics’ lack of narratives to explain this breakdown of the lo-cal art system, a system which is otherwise one of the most developed in latin America. This isn’t the place to try to explain this failure, which has more to do with institutional efficiency than with any narrative based exclusively on the disparity in resources (witness, for example, the donations made to european and North American museums by latin American collectors and entrepreneurs over the last decade). For now it’s enough to recognize the absence of a local infrastructure suf-ficiently solid and financially endowed to be able to compete in the new global arena. The result, an unequal distribution of the art corpus, le-gitimized by the international system, is aggravated by the growing up-ward pressure on prices.6 It’s hard to imagine that the region’s museums

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could come to compete on an equal footing, in the short run or even over the medium term, with institutions in europe and North America. For this reason, one of the most pressing tasks for museums in the re-gion for the foreseeable future will be the creation of local collections. Having said that, however, there is no reason to necessarily idealize the collecting practices of the few museums in latin America that do maintain an effective acquisition policy.Nevertheless, there are responses that can make a difference. Research projects designed from the standpoint of local micro-histories make it possible to reinforce institutional activities that are often overwhelmed by administrative requirements. The work of the Southern Conceptual-isms Network, which brings together a group of nearly fifty research-ers from different countries in an open conversation about the recent history of contemporary art, proposes a different formula for historio-graphic production, one that is activated through specific and intermit-tent insertions in museums and universities. It’s a decentralized model, but one that is politically positioned to promote the recovery of a new historic fabric.7

The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, curated by olivier Debroise, Pilar García, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Álvaro Vázquez, suggests another model. Its starting point was a twofold find-ing: the absence of local historiography and public collecting in Mexico since the 1960s, combined with the misinformation and stereotypes that governed the critical reception of contemporary Mexican art in in-ternational circuits during the 1990s.8 Patient work in the archives and the recovery of lost or forgotten works gave rise to an exhibition that became, tacitly, an exercise in curating collections for a museum in the process of being created, the MUCA—now known as MUAC. Whether or not its objective was realized the result is a benchmark that provides a starting point for the debate about contemporary art in Mexico.It’s difficult to imagine that histories constituted in this way could be produced today by means of international collecting. The fact that one

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of the curators of The Age of Discrepancies was also the first curator of latin American collections at the Tate Modern suggests that the posi-tion from which narratives of regional art history are generated mat-ters—in fact, that it matters a great deal. In all likelihood, a significant number of the works included in that exhibition will never be part of the collections of metropolitan museums, and it’s also unlikely that the local histories that lend meaning to these works will bear much weight when the pieces are seen from an international perspective. But only from this historical perspective will it be possible to lend relevance to productions that would otherwise remain suspended in the present-time of an artistic contemporaneity that is ultimately controlled by the market. Here, then, in the density of the information and in the precision of the data with which their narratives are constructed, lies the usefulness of projects like the Southern Conceptualism Network and The Age of Dis-crepancies. As they create their own contexts, they can weave alternative histories that don’t depend on grand narratives or on established catego-ries. The micro-practices of their research focus their analysis, and also situate the knowledge within stories and precise debates. In this way, they allow for the creation of an alternative to narratives that draw on old geographic categories, vague thematic coincidences, or worse, on the return, whether admitted or not, to the concept of style. To the extent that it is not embraced as a defining condition but only as a tactical position in the face of the processes of internationalization, local knowledge can also avoid the greater danger of becoming aligned with nationalist discourses or of remaining entrenched in a naïve pro-vincial point of view. But such an undertaking doesn’t just lead to the creation of local histories; it also proposes the weaving of much broader fabrics. It even allows us to imagine the possibility of a micro-history of globalization.To go from micro-history to micro-curatorship requires that we move from academic speculation to institutional work, and that we reformu-

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late the idea of context in order to re-think notions of audiences and of the public that are not objectified as instrumental praxis. But the po-tential of this option can only be realized if the deep gap that currently separates the university from the museum, and research from curator-ship, is closed. Viewed from either side, the issue underlines the impor-tance of creating a political practice of curatorship, one determined by precise strategies and objectives, one in which the debate doesn’t end simply in an institutional critique but results in the adoption of new stances. In any of the various histories and collections that could thus be constructed, maybe, just maybe, latin America might begin to repre-sent a relevant category.

1 Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006), p. 681-707. Also see the two issues of e-flux journal on the topic “What is contemporary art” No. 11 (December 2009) and No. 12 (January 2010).2 See Juan Pablo Pérez’s interview with Gerardo Mosquera, “Contra el arte latinoamericano.” Ramona, Buenos Aires, no. 91 (2009).3 For example, Néstor García Canclini, “Geopolítica del arte: nociones en desuso” salonkritik March 21, 2010: http://salonkritik.net/09-10/2010/03/geopolitica_del_arte_nociones.php.4 other than the latin American collection of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, perhaps the only regional collection that one could cite would be the Art Museum of the Americas of the oAS, in Washington D.C., which remains an epitome of the failure of international diplomacy in the art field. once again, precedents are scarce. During the Cold War, the region was an arena for friction within hemispheric politics, but it didn’t lead to the creation of a space within the art market, much less within the realm of collecting. In the 1960s and 1970s, collections like the Museo de la Solidaridad con Chile, or the Galería latinoamericana (today the Colección de Arte de Nuestra América, Casa de las Américas) in Havana, were created as structures for political action, in which mere adherence to the institution, as a personal act on the part of each artist notwithstanding any aesthetical or regional position, determined the guidelines for collecting. Today these projects are virtually at a standstill. 5 Joaquín Barriendos, “Museographic Imaginaries: Geopolitics of Global Art in the era of the expanded Internationalism” in The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2, no. 1 (2009), p. 189-201.6 See comments by Paulo Herkenhoff and Suely Rolnik in the context of the roundtable discussion “la voz subalterna: latinoamérica” in 10.000 francos de recompensa (el museo de arte contemporáneo vivo o muerto), Manuel Borja-Villel and Yolanda Romero, eds. (Spain: Asociación de Directores de Arte Contemporáneo de españa, 2009), p. 202-203.7 Information about the network at http://conceptual.inexistente.net/8 See olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Genealogía de una exposición,” in olivier De-broise, ed., la era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968-1997, Mexico, Museo Uni-versitario de Ciencias y Arte, 2007, p. 18-23.

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The year 2000 was not only the year that saw the inauguration of a new millennium, but also the moment when the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra presented his piece 12 Workers Paid to Remain Inside Card-board Boxes at the ACe gallery in New York. A reference to that event wouldn’t belong in the present text were it not for the special signifi-cance the author and the work had for Guatemala. The first version of the piece was created by Sierra in 1999, on the rooftop of an unfinished building in the center of the capital of that Central American coun-try. The action itself, and the presence of the artist, heralded a series of defining inspirations. Some were formed out of the intuition of lo-cal artists, mainly those who found in actionism and in performance art a space to trigger critical strategies, many of which were stark and provoked ethical dilemmas. The generation that began with the mil-lennium coincided with Sierra’s interest in exploring the fissures in the logic of the state through actions that made manifest the power games of institutional thinking. In Guatemala, a country distinguished

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by a 36-year long civil war and a complex social and economic structure where colonial dynamics of privilege and exclusion are still in force, the discussion of these two realities promised to be short-lived if it con-tinued to be approached by means of existing narratives. In this regard, the notion of “revolution” became anachronistic with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996. After the long decades of violence exercised by the state against its civilian population, Guatemala finally reached the end of a dark chapter. In its aftermath, the celebration of the Octubre Azul (Blue october) festival was the largest public action to take place in the so-called “post-war” period. Celebrated in october 2000 to coincide with the 56th anniversary of the october 1944 revolution, the festival employed a monochromatic blue banner—as opposed to the red flag tra-ditionally identified with revolutionary activity—to suggest a turn to-wards a generational vision and a distinctive cultural space. As happens in cities where the power of public squares is recognized, and where urban planning includes those spaces and makes them by design into

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centers for public demonstrations and civil actions, Octubre Azul was associated with a symbolic appropriation of the city’s historic center and with the flowering of a boisterous art scene able to capture media attention and reveal the existence of other forms of art. Ten years have since passed; the expectations generated by events such as Octubre Azul have vanished into a spiral in which the old mechanisms of violence have revived and been reestablished. With the conclusion of the peace processes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and el Salvador1, and as a result of the effects that these events had on the entire Central American region, a common need arose to reflect upon the disenchantment prevalent at the end of the civil wars and the manner in which the politicians of the moment were re-orienting it. In this context, “action art” had already secured a place for itself in the debate. The pieces that were developed over the course of the decade pointed the way towards promising cri-tiques and fundamental explorations within actionism. every July 19, in the city of Managua, the artist ernesto Salmerón used to take photos of people in the streets and around the city plaza where they had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the Sandinista Revo-lution. As he became aware of the erosion of the Sandinista discourse within the very context that had produced it, and as he saw that cele-brating the political event was becoming increasingly void of meaning, he began to compile a body of materials and reflections that would form the basis of projects like Auras de Guerra (Auras of War) as well as the complex action with which, in 2009, he participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale. For the latter, he brought to the Venetian Arsenal a truck des-ignated “el Gringo.” With the truck came its cargo: a wall fragment, originally from Nicaragua, on which graffiti depicting the guerrilla fighter Augusto C. Sandino had been splashed. Through his account of the bureaucratic red tape involved in exporting an object of apparent insignificance, and through the very gesture of undermining any sense of monumentality, Salmerón alluded to the decay of the values that once sustained the most brilliant revolutionary precepts. In Guatemala,

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the art world has approached the exploration of the body with greater clarity, through public exhibition of its nude form, and as a way of re-staging the events that underlie the country’s social traumas. Cynicism, humor, the absurd, the fragmentary, ethical debate, and the inclusion of the other in the art event have been the chief devices structuring the practice of actions and performances like those of the Guatemalan art-ists Aníbal lópez, Regina Galindo, José osorio, and Alejandro Paz. But the cynicism that distinguishes lópez’s work is the clearest reflection of a specific and culturally codified context from within the latent state of emergency. examples are El Préstamo (The loan), a text that relates the story of the assault of a passerby on a public street; and Hugo, a dinner at which the guests, in an echo of the cannibalistic practices of the Gua-temalan Kaibiles, are invited to prepare and eat a pig that had been adopted and cared for by the artist himself. His participation in the MeRCoSUR Biennial (2007), where he took advantage of the three-way border between Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil and the smuggling routes in the area in order to launch a group of empty plastic-wrapped boxes into the river, revealed his interest in the conceptual use of social relations and their conditioning through power structures. By the end of the 1990s, the presence of women artists had become essential in Guatemala for approaching feminine universes from within women’s own bodies, which were converted into altars for performance. Jessica lagunas and María Adela Díaz exemplified these artists’ interest in the poetic and metaphoric investigation of the body freed from masculine desire. Through a certain anthropological logic, Sandra Monterroso carried on this examination of the dilemmas of culture and identity and their respective exercises of power. But it was Regina Galindo whose emergence on the artistic stage attracted uncommon attention. From her first public presentation, her works became benchmarks for psychological and physical risks taken to unimaginable limits. In 2005, during the celebration of the 51st Venice Biennale, she received the Gold lion award for her presentation of three videos that documented per-

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formances like the one titled Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty). In it, the surgical reconstruction of the hymen practiced on her own body be-came a reflection on the culture of plastic surgery and the moral degra-dation under way in societies with high levels of violence. Along these lines, Galindo has developed sweepingly baroque conceptual works that make precise references to Guatemalan contexts. While in Guatemala action art has been pervaded by references to violence and death, in Honduras the same themes were treated in less aggressive ways. one of the most active groups between 2002 and 2004 was the collective la Cuartería, formed by artists including César Manzanares, Johanna Montero, Jorge oquilí, leonardo, Fernando Cortés, and Adán Vallecillo. As the Cuban critic Denisse Rondón sees it, it is these artists who have made the most relevant contributions to performance practice. In Rondón’s opinion the Honduran productions, though often naïve in their presentation, have articulated a methodology, discipline, and rigor that allow the consolidation of strategies and the assimilation of more sophisticated codes and languages.2 Freed from the discourse of brutal-ity, these artists have developed a poetics reflective of the fragility of the economic, social, and political structures of the Central American na-tion. one example is César Manzanares’ work Momento mori, in which a skull containing soapy water is presented to spectators who then use it to produce soap bubbles. ever since Priscilla Monge’s piece entitled Bloody Day (1997)3, which left a deep impression on the Central Ameri-can performance field, productions in Costa Rica have developed in an isolated manner and have been situated in hybrid territories, highlight-ing the formidable local theatre and dance traditions. If this is sugges-tive of anything, it is that action art turns out to be a medium with shallower roots in a country that did not go through the same chapters of conflict as the rest of the region. In el Salvador, the name of the artist Alexia Miranda is the essential point of reference for performance practitioners. Her works continue to explore general preoccupations concerning women’s roles in society and the conventions associated

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with them. With just a few years of experience, her tenaciousness has already created a stimulating atmosphere that is conducive to inspiring other artists. Finally, an essential chapter in this story is the Panama-nian experience. The works of Jonathan Harker and Humberto Velez have been decisive in terms of exploring the construction of models of representation. Although reinforced by photographic and video docu-mentation, Harker’s work is carried out through a variety of situations provoked by prepared scenarios in which, as the central character, he performs generally absurd and stereotypical gestures. His interactivity and transvestitism weave his vision--an eternally conflictive one--through the simplistic classifications of Panamanian identity. From a distance, Humberto Velez has built an important repertoire of actions and performances that represent in one motion the processes of emigra-tion and deterritorialization. According to the Panamanian curator Adrienne Samos, Velez’s works have the characteristic of producing ac-tions in the wrong places and at the wrong times. Velez, for instance, built and destroyed a piñata with a community in Shanghai; organized a boxing match at the Tate Modern in london; and arranged a body-building contest in the Canary Islands and a beauty contest for camels in Cuenca, ecuador. Currently, he is organizing an action at a public pool, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 4 His work relies on incorrectness, a quality that can best be gauged by someone who is at once both close enough to and far enough away from a society’s codes of conduct, and who recognizes what destabilizes its normalcy.5 From its abyssal differences and shared histories, the experience of action art and performance in Central America has been ignored, rejected, and deval-ued, as much by the institutional art system as by a social environment that is scarcely receptive to anything that is potentially subversive. In Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, the various periods of crisis or political conflict, as well as the determination to render new dialogues with the city and urban life, have been essential keys for un-derstanding that the artists have not replicated foreign experiences but

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1 Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala suffered through a civil war in which the so-called Guate-malan Genocide took place. In el Salvador, there were conflicts between the government military of the Armed Forces of el Salvador and the insurgent forces of the Farabundo Martí Front for National liberation (FMlN). This armed conflict lasted from 1980 to 1992. In Nicaragua the process that began in 1978 and ended in 1990, which marked the end of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, is known as the Sandinista Revolution or the Nicaraguan Revolution. 2 Denisse Rondón, “Notas para un nuevo mapa. Recapitulaciones sobre el arte contemporáneo hondureño”, unpublished writing.3 The artist goes for a walk through the streets of the central part of the city, an introspective expression on her face, while wearing a pair of pants constructed from sanitary napkins stained with her own menstrual blood. This took place in San José, 1997.4 From direct communication with Adrienne Samos.5 A factor that may certainly have been instrumental in involving artists like Harper, Vélez and others was the production of Ciudad Múltiple (Multiple City), an international urban art event orga-nized and curated by Adrienne Samos and Gerardo Mosquera that was held in 2003 in Panama City. The project called upon local and international artists to work within a unique urban landscape, one which combined the omnipresence of the Panama Canal, skyscrapers, an historic old town, popular neighbourhoods, free-trade zones, and an extensive forested area. The interaction of the artists with this space and its inhabitants was largely effected through performance art.

explored their own; for example, by joining the long latin American tradition of approaching the city square as a place of public gathering, or by treating the body—a space traditionally subject to moral scruti-ny—as a new political presence. Guatemala, a country that has lived through a war that left a tally of 200,000 dead or missing, and which is now living through the process of overcoming that statistical reality, is a country where the body has acquired an essential role in the analysis of representations of a wounded society. Action art has therefore been the most efficient platform to defer, disturb, survive, and conjugate all the verbs associated with its traumas.

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GloBAl CITIeS AND THe

GHeTToIZING oF THe AMAZoN

BASINANA MARÍA DURÁN CAlISTo

“Our traditional cities are based on the fiction that there are inexhaustible fountains located outside the city that permit indefinite extraction.” Izaskun Chinchilla

“Then learn this of me: to have, is to have; for it is a figure in rhetoric, that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other.”William ShakespeareAs You Like It

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The voyage

To sail the Amazon from west to east, to descend from Quito in the An-des to the outpouring of the river-sea into the Atlantic ocean, is to come upon the phenomenon of the megalopolis from the point at which its traces are least visible or apparent. The gradient of the river unwinds like a roll of photographic film, unspooling slowly from “the raw to the cooked1,” from the wild to the domesticated. The cross-section that is forced upon us by this guillotine of water invokes Peter Greenway’s camera in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The ship glides from the kitchen of the planet into its living room, descends to the bath-room, lowers us into the sewer, returns to the living room, escapes into the bedroom, emerges at the car park… The jungle profile, asphyxiated between the two firmaments of air and water, persists; it decomposes into urban images along the pioneering route opened by Francisco de orellana in 1541-42. The corridor of vegetation dissolves into oil pipe-

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lines; it rears up in the form of a building truss or an incinerator; it is transformed into a derrick or a tower; it is reflected in the water as a silo or a power plant. The Amazon is urban, a river megalopolis, a metro-politan mega-Venice.

The media

Why has the urbanization of the Amazon basin remained relatively invisible in the media? Remoteness is a geographical concept, defined on the basis of parameters of distance and access; or a temporal con-cept, as in “remote in time.” But remoteness is also a category defined by the mass media, in which the Amazon is construed as a non-urban, or anti-urban space, lacking construction, industry, or citizens who might question the heaven / hell duality through which it is generally represented. even web browsers, which are assumed to be open systems capable of harboring alternative voices, produce images that are mostly green or blue, zoological or ethnographic, when the query “Amazon” is typed in, reinforcing the romantic idea of the region as the exotic place par excellence. Here and there a hotel brochure or book jacket will be splashed with images of the “cultured jungle,”2 explaining to some extent why the myth of the Amazon continues to live on in the media even as its complicated reality tells other stories. Those refuges from the contemporary world, those last bastions of physical escapism and isola-tion, cannot be represented as “urban”--precisely that which is being fled--but must instead be the living portrayal of “nature in its purest state,” of utopia, the place that no longer exists. At the other extreme of the paradises constructed by ecotourism, which packages geographi-cal commodities, and ethnotourism, which markets indigenous cul-tures, is the anti-myth: the Amazon as hell and harbinger of the apoca-lypse. The incriminating images depict expanding agricultural borders, smoking tree trunks, roads plunged into gigantic patches of deforesta-tion. In this diptych of global consumption, the Amazon as the object

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of the urge to explore and the Amazon as the provider of raw materials, lie the roots of its real and tangible conflicts, and perhaps an epitome of the dilemma of the contemporary world.

The exotic:The myth of the remoteThe myth of the pureThe myth of isolationon February 27 2008, Wang Shu, Dean of the Academy of Arts in China, opened a conference at the Graduate School of Design at Har-vard University by showing a series of paintings taken from the land-scape tradition of his country. one by one, traced in red or blank ink, the most beautiful illustrations of rugged mountains appeared on the screen. eventually, these pictures began to alternate with other im-ages, panoramic photographs of mountain ranges in China. “In my country, people used to worship mountains,” he explained, “now they mine them.” Huge craters carved out by mechanical shovels in differ-ent landscapes were interspersed with pictures of the spring-towers that rise, as if by magic, in the instant cities of the oriental dragon. “In order not to contribute to the further erosion of mountains, we use the waste products of the construction industry,” Wang Shu continued, while he displayed the structures that he designed and built with his group at Amateur Architecture Studio. His educational centers and museums are monumental mineral edifices whose walls accumulate, like geological faults, the sedimentary strata of construction debris. Different degrees of grinding produce a variety of textures and tonalities in a pastry-like architecture that can be regarded as raw material, as constructed geolo-gy, or as future mine. Wang Shu’s architecture reminds us that matter—the hard side of energy—can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transformed. And it becomes clear that as far as matter is concerned, the remote is near at hand --it’s literally at home--, the artificial is natural, the other is the self, and the Amazon is São Paulo, Beijing, or Toronto.

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The new cartographies

If the tree house and the cave house are the archetypes of the first dwelling, then architecture is the archetype of the first collective text (marks carved on tree trunks are merely signs, signals). The most irrefu-table historical document, the one that doesn’t tell lies, is the palimpsest of geography. Today, every landscape is cultural and has been domesti-cated to some degree. In the text of the territory traversed by the Ama-zon River—its precarious and unstable calligraphies jointly inscribed by man and nature—, the thick branches of infrastructure that grow fatter as resources become scarcer are etched with greater and greater speed, and become the latest tentacles of global trade.3 Along its channels flow oil, natural gas, wood, steel, electricity, copper, gold, rubber, soy, biodie-sel, parrots, cocaine, people… In the opposite direction come tourists, voices, images, letters, information and industrial products; along with them arrive settlers who will live in entropic tumbledown villages, while the lineal clearings, the patches of deforestation, the plantations, and the megalopolises spread out.

If we had to imagine a cartography that could express, on a global scale, the relationship between the Amazon and other remote areas on the one hand, and the megalopolises on the other, it would have to show how the urban blotches of major cities and their suburbs fan out, while at the same time it would sketch the patches of deforestation, the pro-liferation of oil wells, the expanding branches of transport, energy and telecommunication infrastructure, the sprouting of tourist enclaves, and the shrinking of indigenous territories. This combination produces a very specific form of counter-urbanism; the ghettoizing of geography seems to be the flipside of urban expansion. Remote landscapes become a negative of the urban mega-positive, because areas that are rich in natural resources and raw materials are exploited primarily in order to build and sustain the megalopolises. To look at cities without looking at

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those areas forces one to rethink the latter, to redefine them as a mine, as energy, as geography and infrastructure, as global trade.

Products with a history:The hyper-realism behind mercantilist fictions

The word “remote” can also means “that which is not plausible, or very far from happening.”4 The globalization of productive systems produced a disjuncture between consumers and the sources of the raw materi-als of the products that they consume. The harsh realities behind the origin of products in the global supermarket appear implausible when their forging in the earth is the only thing that is known for certain. The landscapes of extraction and those of its opposite, waste, are the hidden reality behind the theme parks of international commerce. As it turns out, reality is a fiction and at its base are products that are dis-tributed without a history, without reference to the geography that they pulverize and displace. They are selected in catalogues, ordered on the internet; they are plucked from store display windows as if they had sprouted there by magic, the fruit of a ubiquitous and invisible tree.

on an architectonic scale, proposals for artificial topographies built in the name of ecology and marketed as “green” steadily increase in the contemporary world, while those topographies that already exist—and which until recently remained remote—deteriorate along with the sus-tenance of the people who live on them and vital resources like water. The world replaces one set of products without history with another, also without history, that takes advantage of the commercial possibili-ties offered by the discourse of sustainability. Conventional cars, pre-sented as monstrosities from petrochemical Hell, are replaced by others, the hybrid “green” cars of the electric Paradise. From its lofty heights, the Salar de Uyuni awaits its turn in the clearance sale auction of South American geography,5 a territory of reserves, whose resources have been

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inventoried so that they can be extracted and transported, while “anti-imperialist” leaders negotiate terms and sums with transnational and national companies of various origins. As we slowly migrate from one resource to the next, from an oil-based economy to a post-oil economy—without altering growth patterns of the real estate market that are predominantly based on suburban sprawl—the Amazon in ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and the western Brazil is being fragmented into tranches through prospecting concessions to multinational corporations.6

Ancestral Youth

Before designing a proposal for a specific site, the landscape architects and artists Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot of Cao-Perrot Studio travel to the location in order to avoid misconceptions and to learn the history behind the elements that they employ. They observe and study raw ma-terials and local traditions so as to reformulate them as a contemporary global exercise. Their practice constitutes a rare case of renovation in a world that has been taught by the market to favor only what is new and newsworthy, and which has, as a result, forgotten the charm of an-cestral youth. Architecture has not managed to escape the mercantilist mindset that feeds on two types of obsolescence: one technological and the other imposed by shifts in fashion, contributing to the disastrous vicious cycle of extraction and waste.

every landscape is a way of thinking, and in the shrinking of Amazon cultures one could lose the key to the “natural contract” that Michel Serres upholds, a contract that cannot be deferred in the face of the martial effects of a market that doesn’t sign truces or treaties. The fu-ture of the megalopolises is completely linked to the future of the re-mote areas that sustain them. Conservation projects, whose resources are channeled to various ecosystems, should also invest in the cities themselves. If the Western eden is a garden, rather than a mountain

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of gold, it’s time to reappraise the value of the green mantle—its water and its life—that until now has been sacrificed in pursuit of the miner-als that lie beneath. The road to social transformation may lie in biol-ogy and its technologies, and tropical forests may be the best hope for life in contemporary cities.

1 lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques Volume One. University of Chicago Press edition, 1983.2 Descola, Philippe. La Selva Culta: simbolismo y praxis en la ecología de los Achuar. Quito. ABYA AYAlA, 1987.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/science/earth/31energy.html4 “Que no es verosímil, o está muy distante de suceder.” Diccionario de la Lengua Española: http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/5 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03lithium.html?_r=16 For a more detailed and cartographic view of this phenomenon see http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002932

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WHAT BUIlDING IN THe CITY

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Such was the question that the artist Gustavo Artigas posed to the peo-ple of the city of los Angeles, as part of the development of a project for the lAXART gallery in the same city. Voto para demolición (Vote for Demolition) invited the public to participate in an open referendum to choose a building which, owing to its lack of aesthetic value, deserved to be torn down. Into the mix the project added the idiosyncrasies and prejudices of a group of local architects who helped select the short list of candidates for demolition. If the public at large wanted to participate they were able do so by submitting their votes online1. The results were documented so that they could be forwarded, together with a formal letter, to the appropriate local government agency.

It was not the first time that Artigas had organized this particular ex-ercise in citizen participation, in doing so generating a platform that allowed people to decide how their urban landscape might be improved by the “disappearance” of urban landmarks. He had introduced the

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project in 2007 at the lisbon Art Triennial, where the curatorial frame-work had been structured around the idea of “urban voids.” Mexico’s entry at the Triennial had been organized by a group of young archi-tects who had been involved with the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale the previous year.2 This group, led by enrique Martin Moreno3, decided to summon a group of artists—each of whom, to a greater or lesser degree, had a direct relation to urban space and to various social spheres—as well as a number of architects who had dem-onstrated a vision for reassessing the profession they had been trained in. The representatives from Mexico included, in addition to Artigas, Jonathan Hernández, Tercerunquinto, Teddy Cruz, Iván Hernández / ludens, Homeless, Minerva Cuevas, María Alos, Rodrigo Alcocer, Taro Zorrilla, and Raúl Cárdenas / Torolab. Perhaps the most interesting as-pect of the team’s proposal was the exploration of how the projects they developed clashed with the context of the Triennial, a context which, within the dynamics of its own presentation, was just as conservative

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as the projects presented by the pavilions of the participating countries. In the face of the architectural profession’s custom (or rather, reputed custom) of planning and calculating its work down to the smallest al-gorithmic detail, combined with the curatorial group’s decision to ex-plore the possibilities of collaboration with a group of artists, many of whom had developed projects that involve the participation of “users,” Guillermo Ruiza de Teresa,4 a member of the curatorial and production team of the Mexican pavilion, addressed the question of what motivated them to select people from outside the country’s established architec-tural circles:

“We viewed the selection of participants, as it per-tained to artists or architects, more or less as a way to use critique and reflection as elements of interference and direct transformation, as tools and as a means of approaching the implicit problems in a city.”

With those words, one might argue, Ruiz is outlining a territory at odds with his own professional training. Historically, architecture has de-fined itself and reevaluated itself by means of conflicts that have taken place along constantly shifting fault lines. In latin America, these have been related to an economic and geopolitical environment governed by the elusive yet powerful and exclusive caste of “the client,” a caste that is more economic than social in nature. As a rule, and perhaps for perfectly legitimate reasons, the arts have been populated with all sorts of commonplace notions, judgments formed on the basis of who is consuming the works, on who hap-pens to be the user or client. This shouldn’t, however, be the kind of thinking that underlies a practice like architecture. This is because architecture, as opposed to the arts, involves the very functions that make a city work, and is therefore implicated in human survival itself. Nevertheless, there are so many loose ends and incongruities in this

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business-school discourse that borders become porous and permeated by dialogues with art; and architects, for their part, end up creating what looks like, and in many cases is, art.

200 Years of Semi-linear History; or, Form, Function, and All ThatI have no intention of writing about history but there are, in fact, certain parallels that are hard to avoid. The most obvious lie with the movements of emancipation from the Spanish crown initiated in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Venezuela in the early years of the 19th century. But there are also paral-lels to the active responses to structural changes in the european pow-ers and to the nearly instantaneous birth of the immense enterprise of the “never-ending project” of constructing sovereign nations. As Klaus Dodds has remarked:

“The ideas and practices associated with sovereignty are critical in shaping the prevailing geopolitical ar-chitecture based on states, borders, and national ter-ritories … National governments, while endorsing the importance of sovereignty, have frequently violated those ideas and principles.”5.

It all becomes a great deal more complicated once the initial euphoria surrounding the “victory” of the independence movements has receded, and even more so in view of the geographical condition of the conti-nent, where another nascent power—the United States of America—is also a player.

In coming to latin American shores, Modernism underwent one of its strangest journeys; as I see it, it was born in the United States but only came to us, decades later, via europe. The odyssey began with Horatio

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Greenough, a North American sculptor, best known for his statue of George Washington6. Greenough is a pivotal figure because of his es-says on art, in which he launched a fervent attack on the architectural conventions of his time. He ignited a bomb—one that would later come to be known as functionalism7—when he stated that, in design, form should be subservient to function.8 With time, Greenough’s theories, along with John Ruskin’s writings proposing new models of social and even spiritual economies, led to the advent of the modern european avant-garde. Against this background--a favorite of many contempo-rary art historians--new technologies and radical changes in european geopolitics sparked one of the most rapid periods of artistic develop-ment in history, one in which the mingling of various arts and disci-plines, of concept, function, and form, produced a new aesthetics with a distinct whiff of revolution. With the innocence of childhood and the arrogance imparted by reason, the age of manifestos was born.

Some of the most important manifestos were already gestating—and at least one had already been published9–one hundred years after the first era of emancipation. After losing more than half of its territory to the United States, and after surviving a woefully misbegotten French inva-sion, it was in Mexico that the first social revolution of the 20th century broke out, in conditions similar to the Bolshevik movement in Russia but preceding the events of the Red october by seven years. This fact is relevant only because of two pivotal figures, Hannes Mayer and leon Trotsky, whose activities on the artistic and political stage cast a special light on the entire history of european migrations in the context of the latin American adventure. This history, tinged with a modern touch, was rearticulated within the framework of the avant-garde.

A point of convergence in this era can be found in the years between 1919 and 1933 with the brief but influential Bauhaus school, which cre-ated, through its professors and guest speakers, a network of pedagogi-

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cal resources dedicated not only to architecture but also to education as a whole in line with the modernist project. In 1933, when the school was closed because of pressure from Germany’s National Socialist Party, its three directors emigrated to the New World.10 Walter Gropius established himself in Boston, ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe in Chicago. In 1938, Hannes Mayer, an ardent proponent of social reform through design and the closest of the three Bauhaus directors to the political thinking of the left, arrived in Mexico, where he was received by Presi-dent lázaro Cardenas, joined the staff of the National Polytechnic In-stitute, and accepted several positions in government.

In that year of ferment, the avant-garde group UAS (Union of Socialist Architects) was formed in Mexico. Its members established direct con-nections between the fields of art and science by means of an architec-tural practice directly linked to social policies. They saw their projects as systems for change; their architectural projects were launched not through plans or perspectives but by means of machine diagrams that reflected the usefulness and poetic metaphors of the context. At this time, as louise Noelle11 has noted, Juan o’Gorman published a fiery ar-ticle in the magazine Frente a Frente, in which he criticized the govern-ment of the Federal District of Mexico for engaging in the shameful--and anything but revolutionary-- practice of supporting neoclassical architecture to the detriment of the national modernist avant-garde. In this same article, a group of “the most advanced architects of Mexico” signed on to his denunciation. They included UAS members like Alber-to T. Arai and, of course, Ricardo Rivas, whose lerma River waterworks project in collaboration Diego Rivera will be discussed below.

our other pivotal figure is the revolutionary leader leon Trotsky, who arrived in Mexico in 1937 and soon began a love-hate relationship with the Mexican muralists, living with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera until he fell out with the latter permanently in 1939. (David Alfaro Siqueiros

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himself would attempt to kill Trotsky in 1940.) It was through Rivera and Kahlo that Trotsky met André Breton. In July 1938, they composed the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. This document, which for “tactical” reasons was signed only by Rivera and Breton, called for “the independence of art—for the revolution; the revolution—for the independence of art.”

It’s common knowledge that Rivera was the cornerstone of the con-struction of Muralism within the Mexican nationalist movement and its logical plastic integrations with functionalism.12 Such was the case with the project for the building of the lerma river water system that Rivera undertook in collaboration with the architect Ricardo Rivas, and with works like El agua en la evolución de la especie (Water in the evolu-tion of the Species) in 195113. The special feature of the latter was the blurring of borders between disciplines, technologies, and expressions. This encouraged practices through which it became increasingly easier to establish baselines that were unwritten yet committed to multi-disciplinary collaboration and cross-disciplinary projects. The founda-tion was thus laid for encounters between art and architecture that had no need to redefine practices but instead established a common ground over which to move and operate.

Post-revolutionary Mexico exercised a special magnetism because of the fact that the revolution was a modernist endeavor. The creation of the Ciudad Universitaria, the campus of the National Autonomous Univer-sity of Mexico, was an example not only of architecture, but of a pro-gram for the creation of the new modern Mexican citizen. In the words of the anthropologist Tarek elhiak14, “the notion of an anthropological isomorphic/euclidian culture is needed to define a revolutionary and nationalist project such as Mexico’s, situated through the modernization project with a lag-time in terms of defined objectives from the rural to the urban.”15 This lends the established models for a country like Mexico

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a weight based on the schizophrenia of reality, and produces an illu-sion of modernity based on territorial and political realties. José Castillo refers to this as “the combination of modernity beyond the control of spatial discourse; there is Tlatelolco and there is Chimalhuacán; there is UNAM and there is Neza. This is accompanied by the departure of art from the gallery spaces in the 1960s”16. In an effort to paraphrase Nes-tor Canclini: a paradox of modernism, an exuberant culture combined with a deficient modernity; when all is said and done we remain pre-modern. Here the avant-garde and its ideas are created or destroyed on the basis of frank need, from recurrent models to forms that go beyond the language of architecture. The norms that are established between a population, its demography, urbanism, and the nurturing of this popu-lation as a community project leave gaps between different negotia-tions and transactions that neither institutions nor conventions attend to. Freedom of movement within this fluid territory is a natural action, one that can be not only redefined through artistic practice but also slated for diagnosis and exploration.

To cite a few examples, today in Mexico we see works like those of Fran-cis Alÿs, whose study of urbanism is made evident in his promenades; the spatial definitions of Gabriel orozco; Teresa Margolles with her articulations and life cycles of the human body and of the bodies of buildings. In the United States we find Rick lowe with his Row Houses project; Gordon Matta-Clark; or Vito Hannibal Acconci who cre-ated, together with Steven Holl, the Storefront for Art and Architecture* project where the program of the space itself gives rise to these territo-ries of dialogue between professions. These are born from the same need that Ayn Rand saw in her book The Fountainhead, when her main char-acter carries on even after his expulsion from the architecture school of the Stanton Institute of Technology. Before expelling him, the director of the program reproaches him, declaring that “…all the projects that you have had to draw… you have made … by violating the principles that

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1 Voto para demolición project website: http://www.votodemo.com/2 Cities, Architecture and Society. 10th Venice Architecture Biennale, 20063 enrique Martín-Moreno (Mexico 1974). Holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University. Cu-rator of the Mexican pavilions at the lisbon Architecture Triennial 2007, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006, and the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale 2005. 4 Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa (Mexico 1982). Architect; editor of the art, architecture, and design newspa-per supplement ExcélsiorTOMO; founding member of Pase usted. Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa interviewed by Raúl Cárdenas osuna, Abril 2010.5 Klaus Dodds Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, oxford University Press, p. 56-57.6 George Washington (1840), by Horacio Greenough. Currently exhibited on the second floor of the National Museum of American History.7 It should be noted that the phrase “form follows function” as such was coined years later by the American architect louis Sullivan, teacher of Frank lloyd Wright. F.l.W. worked as an apprentice at Adler & Sullivan from 1888-1893, in a very close relationship with Sullivan, whom he would later refer to as lieber Meister, “Dear Master.” (Years With Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius, edgar Tafel, Mineola, N.Y. 1985, Dover Publications. p. 31), Architectural Research Quarterly 7, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, p. 157–167. 8 Horatio Greenough’s ideas were captured in essays that were published in 1947 under the title: Form and Function: Remarks on Art by Horatio Greenough. edited by Harold A. Small. Berkeley, University of California Press.9 Futurist Manifesto. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 1908, published by the French newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909.10 Walter Gropius, after a brief stay in London, emigrated to Boston, taught at Harvard’s School of Design, and founded the TAC group.11 Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Spring, Year/Vol. XXIII, Number 078, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Mexico City. p.189-20212 Ibid.13 orlando S. Suárez, Inventario del muralismo mexicano, Mexico. UNAM, 1972, p. 28014 Tarek Elhaik, PhD, University of California at Berkeley, professor of anthropology at Rice University and UC Berkeley.15 According to 19th-century notions of cultural anthropology, the basic isomorphic link for the understanding of modern culture has a euclidean correlation in the bonds between territory, people, and customs. Tarek elhaik, interviewed by Raúl Cárdenas osuna, April 2010.16 Jose Castillo, México, 1969. Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana, Master’s and PhD in Architecture and Urban Planning, Harvard University. Researcher, Curator, and Head of the Department of the School of Architecture of the Universidad Iberoamericana and at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. Interviewed by Raúl Cárdenas osuna, Abril 2010

*editors Note: Although Acconci and Holl were directly involved in the design and construction of Storefront, and exercised a major influence on the project, the founder and first Director of this New York important venue was the urban critic and activist Kyong Park.

we are trying to teach you, countering all the established precedents and artistic traditions. You may think of yourself as a modernist… it’s nothing but mere folly.”

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The moment that I hear anyone propose to speak—or to act—on behalf of latin America alarm bells go off in my head and, if possible, I run for cover. especially now, when with the commemoration of the bicenten-nial of independence exaltation has become a mandatory item on the ceremonial agenda.The moment that I hear anyone propose to speak—or to act—on behalf of latin America, I also know that it’s time to reach for the equalizer, time to run a filter over the rhetoric that invariably accompanies such an undertaking, with its hodgepodge of pretexts, its overblown ontology, and its dose—or overdose—of messianism, those combustible elements of the fuel that has fed all sorts of experiments, oligarchic and liberal, Marxist and neo-liberal, tyrannical and parlia-mentary, guerrilla and paramilitary, mythological and apocalyptical (Atlantis is rarely far away). Almost every time, the elements have been processed through the filter of populism, a suitable style for governments regardless of ideology (or even in the absence of any ideology at all).

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When the time comes to take precautions, run for cover, and adjust the dial, it’s not just political projects that have to be taken into account. Cultural models haven’t lagged behind at the hour of raising the tem-ples. The Baroque and the Boom, Modernism and Anthropophagy, Ari-el and Caliban, Postmodernism and Utopia: it’s not that one ought to fight tooth and nail to deny the contributions, some of them formida-ble, of these currents. (even tourist clichés have their place.) But one does need to be on guard against the demonstrable fact that what we construe as latin America, in any of its guises, has persisted in a lan-guage of euphemisms and a pretended unity that have often done little more than reproduce colonial gestures. When all is said and done, what we construe as “latin American” remains a narrative—which doesn’t imply that that it is necessarily fiction. Whether laid out on the map sketched by Jorge luis Borges or in what Carlos Fuentes has designated as “the territory of la Mancha,” both of which are located within the region, a first draft, a pre-judgment—a prejudice—has taken prece-

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dence, and the model has absorbed its successors, a fact which may go a long way towards explaining the origin of many of our disappoint-ments. This abduction has not been the exclusive doing of natives. The history of external “appropriations” is a long one, stretching from the times of the Conquest to the present-day. When the driving force be-hind the taking is, let us say, the zeal of a reckless curator, then the pil-ferage becomes an express pilferage. In 1992, in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the conquest and/or colonization of America, other landmarks were celebrated. “The meeting of cultures,” “the double dis-covery” —there were various euphemisms, various pretexts, various summonses. Nevertheless, thanks to the critical energies released by that milestone—and by the uncertainty of a universe in which even the “end of history” itself was being invoked—the position of latin Ameri-ca in the world ceased to resemble a contest between an uncritical “re-production” on the one hand and a hypercritical “confrontation” on the other. It was a healthy exercise, disposing of the old binary theses, the ones that reaffirmed latin American identity via a process of negation (“we are everything our enemy is not”), afflicted by the symptoms of what Nelly Richard defined as “complicated periphery syndrome” and what Robert Schwartz for his part called “nationalism by extraction.” even in regard to the United States, for all its history of conflicts and invasions, latin America was now no longer seen only from the per-spective of the North-South divide. Today it’s no longer possible to deny the fact that the latin American presence north of el Paso represents a re-conquest whose consequences are as yet impossible to predict. latin America thus brought different energies to the polemics sur-rounding identity and modernity, due to its position at the extreme edge of Western culture and its eccentric situation regarding it, its status as potential agent of peripheral vengeance, and the utopian possibilities it posed in opposition to the extreme rationalization of the modern world. At the highest point of euphoria, more than one observer predicted the end of Western culture, to be brought about by cultural eruptions from

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latin American—a kind of Francis Fukuyama in reverse (and with a taco in his hand). Not everything can be chalked up to the vicissitudes of history, thought, and the extraordinary lives of great men. In the construction of the paradigms that we labor under, we owe just as much to fictional characters who have also served as generators of the models that have made latin America recognizable. Here we have them: the sleeper who awakes next to a dinosaur, in the story by Augusto Monter-roso, and Beatriz Viterbo, in Jorge luis Borges’s “The Aleph”; the title character of Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and esteban the revolutionary in Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral; Alvaro Mutis’s Maqroll the lookout and Rómulo Gallegos’s doña Bár-bara; Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés and Ruben Blades’s Pedro Nava-jas; Quino’s Mafalda and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The dream and the misfortune of the continent have pooled together into these archetypes, which have at times turned into stereotypes. The confluence of all worlds and the forerunner of the internet. The eternal strongman so characteristic of these two hundred years and that narrative genre that is so uniquely latin American: the novel of the caudillo. The enchantment and disenchantment with revolution. The fugitive and the futurist. Mestizaje—the mixing of races—and vio-lence. The lumpen emigrant and the enlightened european who seeks utopia in America, though not precisely to save the continent—as is of-ten asserted—but rather to save himself. In any case, it’s not always a good idea to look at things as they are re-fracted through reading glasses. As edward Said held, “to literally apply what has been learned from books to reality is to run the risk of going crazy or ruining oneself.” This is so even in this europe from which I write, a europe where politics seems to be carried out not by war (Clausewitz), nor even by guerrilla activity (Che Guevara), but rather by aesthetics. let us step away then, for the moment. latin America is also the enclave of the primary legacy bequeathed by many of these: violence. It’s therefore advisable to be very careful when

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evaluating our state, economic, or political structures in light of facile theories. Consider for example the so-called “informal sector,” which is not as informal as its name would suggest (nor is the state entity to which it is contrasted particularly “formal”). The example of drug traf-ficking is a telling one. As we know, its effects fan out throughout poli-tics, culture, and the economy. We already speak of “narcopolitics” (traf-ficking engrained in the institutional establishment); “narcoterrorism” (in which the supposedly “collateral” population begin to suffer the brunt of the war); and “narcoculture” (affecting the fine arts, music, and literature, not to mention the considerable impact on Hollywood). Paramilitaries and urban settlements that don’t fit into any readily de-finable sociological category, invisible migrations, new forms of no-madism—through practices like these, latin America is redefining it-self, albeit through discourses that don’t aspire to the pulpit. Name-dropping tends to become boring and fallacious, to obscure more than it reveals. In the guise of clarification it merely bewilders. So I’ll mention just a few names —not random ones by any means but ones that could just as easily be replaced by others. I am thinking of recent work by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Teresa Margolles, Yuri Herrera, Carlos Ga-raicoa, Pedro Vizcaíno, or José Antonio Hernández-Díez. These authors touch on issues of unusual magnitude, but they filter those concerns through stories that take place on a small stage and generally in a man-ner unique to their own setting. Youth gangs and an absence of state structure. Colonialism and post-colonialism. Revolution and counter-revolution. Violence as an end in itself. They face the facts of urban life as they find them, and contend with the dregs of the contemporary world. They take on repression and the morbid obsession with ruins. They confront the clichés about what is latin American and, in conse-quence, reckon with the theme park to which the “great causes” have been reduced. They propose neither a “literary beyond” nor a “meta-phorical here-and-now” to invoke other and conceivably loftier histo-ries. They address, if you will, an amoral intensity that, nonetheless,

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entails the existence of a kind of ethic. When Pedro Vizcaíno addresses youth gang violence, and the rituals and gestures that govern that underworld, he is referring in large part to a system of communication and consumption, of kinship and of signs. A system that has its own market, fashion, cartography, its own set of signals that have taken on the dimensions of language. More than just a narrative about youth violence, his graffiti and paintings can be understood as the archive of a tool kit, the record of a war party with all the gear that a gang mem-ber employs: cell phone, gun, sneakers, everything he needs to be ready for action. This closeness does not entail a celebration of the gang mem-ber. on the contrary, there is much discomfort in the way this “joyful” banality of evil is regarded. When Carlos Garaicoa tallies the physical consequences of utopias, he brings us face to face us with the devastating consequences that have befallen some of our dreams. He establishes a contrast between the “no such place” of our projects and the places that really exist—the ruins of those projects. Ruins whose unfolding has transformed them into ritual sites, ceremonies of honor. What we are left with is not the utopias—so costly for latin America—that stand wreathed under a re-demptive halo; instead we have the decay products of the spaces that those utopias occupied. The more they are portrayed as paradigms for the future, Garaicoa warns, the more rooted they in the present. What we have is no longer Camanella’s La ciudad del sol (The City of the Sun), nor Tatlin’s spiral, nor those Italian futurist works that were intended for tomorrow. What we have instead, to put it bluntly, are places where torture has not been absent. The language of Yuri Herrera’s novels isn’t always comprehensible to the reader. The documents that Rodrigo Rey Rosa employs in El material humano (The Human Material), in an effort to try fathom violence, aren’t always comprehensible either. The fact is that some evidence is difficult to translate into other cultures. For all of that, some of them do manage to remain “legible,” and in that lies their greatness.

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In the end, we’re talking about the artists and writers of a “civil war.” But in contrast, for example, to the situation in which Spanish authors find themselves, our civil war isn’t rooted somewhere safely in a past era. The “civil war” that is rocking latin America today—often under the guise of ordinary crime—is literally a war between civilians. In Posdata (The other Mexico), octavio Paz employed the metaphor of the pyramid to address the sacrificial Mexico that underlay the modern nation. The manner in which he explained the massacre of Tlatelolco, in that distant “beyond” of 1968, needs to be borne carefully in mind. Sometimes I wonder whether we aren’t living in the era of that inverted pyramid, and whether this sacrificial violence hasn’t buried our modern aspirations, leaving them, perhaps, as only an encumbrance to the ex-treme experience of the latin America that we want to conceive, define, and —why not?— even improve on. It’s out of this inverted pyramid that different tales spring, from other authors, ones who manage to illuminate the questions I have posed pre-cisely by refusing to spin out luminous theories. Authors who, under the territory of the la Mancha of Don Quixote, succeed in exposing la man-cha—the stain—of the territory, without holding anything back.

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FERNANDA GOMESSIN TÍTUlo, 2010

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PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRADe lA SeRIe De PAISAJe INÚTIl, 2010

Santiago de León de Caracas

Santa Fé de Bogotá

México Tenochtiflan

Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula

Rio de Janeiro

São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga

São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos

Recife.Ribeira do mar dos Arrecifes dos Navios, Mauritsstad, Mauritiópolis, Mauricéi, Cidade Maurícia

San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico

Puerto de Acapulco

Villa de San Cristóbal de La Habana

Ciudad de Panamá

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ARMANDO ANDRADE TuDELA4 MANeRAS De eSTAR CoN UNA PIeDRA, 2010

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JHAFIS QuINTERO GONZALESSÓlo CoMUNICÁNDoNoS eXISTIMoS, 2010

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

...solo comunicandonos existimos...

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97CoNTRIBUToRS

Artist Armando Andrade Tudela was born in lima, Peru and lives and works in Berlin. In 2008 he received a Berliner Künstlerprogramm DAAD grant. He has participated in various group exhibitions, including the 27th São Paulo Biennial and Yellow and Green at the MMK, Frankfurt, in addition to solo shows, such as Ahir, Dema at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), and Gamblers Die Broke at the Kunsthalle Basel.

An architect and artist, Raúl Cárdenas was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and lives and works in San Diego and Tijuana. In 1995, he founded Torolab, an experimental laboratory for research into habitat, intended to find specific solutions for urban problems in order to improve the quality of life. His work focuses on the particular context of a region undergoing continual mutation and interaction, largely shaped by its condition as a border with its northern neighbour, the United States. Torolab’s activities received international recognition through a solo show held at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2001.

Art critic and freelance curator Rosina Cazali was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala and lives and works in Guatemala City. For more than twenty years she has participated in the shaping of Guatemala’s contemporary art scene by curating exhibitions in her country and at international events throughout latin America. She has participated as a speaker at various meetings for the purposes of scholarly and cultural exchange, organized by institutions such as Bard College in New York, Documenta Kassel, and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. She recently received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation grant, with which she is conducting research on the formation of ideas of contemporaneity in Guatemalan visual arts.

An architect, researcher, and partner in the design firm estudio A0, Ana María Durán Calisto was born in Quito, ecuador and lives and works in Boston. She has been a visiting professor at institutions such as the GSD of Harvard University, the GSAPP of Columbia University, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ ), the Universidad de las Américas, Mexico, and the Universidad Technólogica equinoccial, ecuador. She graduated from the liberal Arts College of the USFQ with a major in anthropology and minors in comparative literature and art history. In 2005 and 2006, she conceived and directed the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito, entitled Invisible Cities. She recently received a loeb research grant from Harvard University to build an open research network devoted to rethinking the planning of urban infrastructures and strategies of intervention of the IIRSA (Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure).

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An essayist, art critic, and exhibition curator, Iván de la Nuez was born in Havana, Cuba and lives and works in Barcelona. He is currently head of the Department of Cultural Activities at the Centre de Cultura Cotemporànea de Barcelona. From 2000 to 2009 he was the director of exhibitions at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. His most noteworthy books include: La balsa perpetua: Soledad y conexiones de la cultura cubana (1998), El Mapa de sal: Un poscomunista en el paisaje global (2001) and Fantasía roja: Los intelectuales de izquierdas y la revolución cubana (2006). He has curated the following exhibitions: La isla posible (1995), Inundaciones (1999), Parque Humano (2001), Banket: Metabolismo y comunicación (2002) and Poscapital (2005). He is a regular contributor to El País, La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Catalunya, Postmodern Notes, Der Tagespiegel, and Nouvelle Revue Française.

Andrea Giunta, professor of latin American art at the University of Texas and researcher at the CoNICeT (National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives and work in Texas. The holder of a doctorate in art history from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, she is the author of numerous books and essays about contemporary Argentine and latin American art. Her most recent publications are: Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política: Arte argentino en los años sesenta (2008), Postcrisis: Arte argentino después del 2001 (2009), Objetos Mutantes: Sobre arte contemporáneo (2010). She is the editor of El Guernica de Picasso: el poder de la representación: Europa, Estados Unidos y América Latina (2009). She was curator of the león Ferrari retrospective at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, 2004, and of the Pinacoteca do estado de São Paulo, 2006.

An artist, Fernanda Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. For more than twenty years she has exhibited at renowned cultural institutions including the Museo de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, the Künstmuseum in Bonn, and the Fundación Serralves in Portugal. Her work has been presented at the most significant biennials on the international art circuit, such as the Venice Biennale (2003), the Istanbul Biennial (1995), the Sydney Biennial (1998), and the São Paulo Biennial (1994).

An artist and professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, Nicolás Guagnini was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives and works in New York. He is the founder of the experimental film company Union Gaucha Productions and orchard, a cooperative artists’ gallery that he ran from 2005 to 2008 in New York. His work has been shown and collected in european institutions, such as CGAC in Santiago de Compostela and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and latin American spaces, such as the Centro Cultural Chacao in Caracas, the Biblioteca luis Ángel Arango in Bogota, and the Museo del Barrio in New York. His collaborative films have been shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Portikus in Frankfurt, and the MADC in Costa Rica, among other centers. He has written in publications such as October, Ramona, Texte zur Kunst, and Parkett.

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An artist and freelance curator, Pablo León de la Barra was born in Mexico City, Mexico and lives and works in london. He holds a doctorate in history and theory of art and architecture from the Architecture Association of london. He is a regular contributor to publications such as Frog, Spike, PinUp, Purple, Wallpaper, and Celeste. From 2002 to 2005 he was co-director of 24-7, a curatorial group based in london, and from 2005 to 2008 he was art director of the Blow de la Barra gallery in the same city. He is editor of Pablo Internacional Magazine, co-curator of the White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, london, blogger for the Centre for Aesthetic Revolution, and a member of the art co-op Cooperativa Internacional Tropical. He is currently developing the Novo Museo Tropical project, which questions the politics of museums, exhibitions, and collections. He has curated important exhibitions in europe and latin America.

Natalia Majluf was born in lima, Peru and lives and works in lima. A graduate in art history from Boston College, she holds a master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and a doctorate from the University of Texas. She is currently director of the Museo de Arte de lima, where she was chief curator from 1995 to 2000. She has participated in the organization of numerous exhibitions and published extensively about Peruvian art of the 19th and 20th centuries in books and specialist journals. She is currently participating in the group research project José Gil de Castro Visual Culture and Representation: From the Ancien Régime to the South American Republics, which is being developed with the support of the Getty Foundation. She also participates in the editorial committee of the project Documents on 20th-century Latino and Latin American Art, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

An artist, Jhafis Quintero González was born Panama City, Panama and lives and works in Costa Rica. He belonged to the Taller al Margen, and taught in la Reforma correctional facility in Costa Rica. While in prison, he participated in national contests and exhibitions in San José, receiving several honourable mentions. When he regained his freedom in 2002 he began to combine art production with training in media production at the Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje and work as a restaurant waiter. Simultaneously, has worked at TeoR/éTica while participating in the vast project Estrecho dudoso. He is currently in Amsterdam thanks to a residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.

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JuNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓNCONSEJERÍA DE CuLTuRA Y TuRISMO

CouncillorDña. María José Salgueiro Cortiñas

General SecretaryD. José Rodríguez Sanz-Pastor

Vice-Councillor of CultureD. Alberto Gutiérrez Alberca

General Director of Cultural HeritageD. enrique Saiz Martín

General Director of Cultural Promotion and InstitutionsDña. luisa Herrero Cabrejas

General Director of Fundación Siglo para las Artes de Castilla y LeónD. José luis Fernández de Dios

MuSAC. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

DirectorAgustín Pérez Rubio

Chief CuratorMaría Inés Rodríguez

Curator at Largeoctavio Zaya

General CoordinatorAne Rodríguez Armendáriz

Coordinationeneas BernalCynthia González GarcíaHelena lópez CamachoCarlos ordás

Administration ManagerBruno Fernández Blanco

AdministrationAdriana Aguado García

RegistrarKoré escobar

RestorationAlbayalde S.l.

Press and Comunicationla Comunicateca

Library and Documentation CenterAraceli Corbo

Education and Cultural ActionBelén SolaANDo C.B.

MaintenanceMariano Javier RománeleCNoR S.A.

Supporting ServicesDAlSeR S.l.

Adquisition CommitteeD. Agustín Pérez RubioDña. María Inés RodríguezD. octavio ZayaDña. estrella de DiegoD. José Guirao CabreraD. Javier HernandoD. Víctor del Río

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, MuSAC’s Journal of Art and Thought

PublisherMUSAC

DirectorsAgustín Pérez RubioMaría Inés Rodríguezoctavio Zaya

Editorial Coordinatoreneas Bernal

English EditorChris Kearin

Design and productionActarBirhäuserPro

TranslationsPaula Kupfer Dena Cowan

Editorial CommitteeUte Meta BauerHamid Dabashiestrella de DiegoPatricia FalguièresAndrea GiuntaHou Hanru

AcknowledgementsIn addition to the team at MUSAC, who produced the magazine, we would like to express our gratitude to all the people who have made RADA R possible, in particular this issue # 0. First and foremost, it is only right to mention María José Salgueiro, Castilla y león Regional Minister for Culture and Tourism, and Nubia Macías, Director of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIl), for their support on the occasion of the RADA R’s launch at this significant event. We would like to mention Dolors Soriano, Rein Steger and Ulises Chamorro at ActarBirkhäuserPro for their design, and their suggestions. last but not least, our gratitude goes out to the editorial Board who, starting with issue # 1, will help us define and structure the contents and proposals put forth in this new MUSAC project.

Copyrights of the EditionMUSAC/ACTAR

of the images © MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y leon© Belén Santillán y Diego Arias, GUMo, ecuador. Cartography of the Ghettoizing of the Amazon Basin, in the essay by Ana María Durán© the works, the artists© of the texts, the authors

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ISBN: 978-84-92572-26-7 ISSN: 2172-668XDl: B-36385-2010

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