Reports - Venecia - Italy

Andrei Fernández

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07.05.2022

Redimensions of the Presence

Argentina Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale

I get up and ask my mother if she has money to go to the cyber, I want to see if someone writes to me. She tells me she has a few spare change, that’s enough for me.
I get there, smile and I say: computer, and gives me the number four, where everyone can see me.
I sit down, lean my back, move the mouse and enter.
I search, I search. Art, artists, scholarships, contests, etc.
I type my name into the google search engine and it says:
“Your search did not match any document.”
(Gabriel Chaile, 2008)

Dressed as if I were going to a party, I am in front of the sculptural ensemble presented by Gabriel Chaile as part of the exhibition The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 59th Venice Biennale. Here, in front of these giant works surrounded by columns and paintings, I remember Alice (in Wonderland) saying that it was much nicer to be at home without  growing and shrinking in size all the time, and taking orders from mice and rabbits, but that she found it so exciting the amazement in which she had immersed herself in this adventure where all the time she had to ask herself what has happened to her. I hear someone passing through this room at the Arsenal say, “now you can really tell they are huge pots”. I smile at this exclamation, but I keep thinking that yes, it seems that what was small became as gigantic as the great distance it took to get to this place: it disappeared. Here are Chaile’s works made with his friends. Here is his mother Irene Durán, as a sculpture and also posing for the photos while Gabriel looks at her with emotion and Carlos, the son who accompanied her from Tucumán, holds her and holds himself in her.

We are here. We met in Venice with members of NVS, a collaborative project founded by a group of artists affectionately linked to Chaile: Matías Ercole, Laura Ojeda Bär, Ramiro Quesada Pons, Sonia Ruiz, Santiago Delfino, Federico Lanzi, Joaquín Biglione and Juan Perdiguero Trillo. We traveled from different places to meet in this ritual of passage. NVS is a network that is thought as a platform for the international circulation of artistic productions in a collaborative way. “Argentine art grows out of self-managed processes driven by creative cooperation”, says the press release of Sed de éxito, a work by the collective Geometría Pueblo Nuevo, made up of Paula Castro, Cotelito, Ariel Cusnir, Clara Esborraz, María Guerrieri, Marcelo Galindo, Constanza Giuliani, Mariana López and Mónica Heller, made in collaboration with writers Pablo Katchadjian and Bárbara Wapnarsky, which is part (and at the same time autonomous) of Heller’s exhibition El origen de la substancia importará la importancia del origen at the Argentine Pavilion of this Biennial. The artist says that Thirst for Success is a novela resulting from a choral drawing that exposes the importance of teamwork for the Argentine artistic communities and is also a wink, from its title, to that excessive expectation that is generated in Argentina in relation to the Biennial as a space of consecration and success. 

What happens when the dimension and meaning of our own presence changes dramatically? 

Alejo Ponce de León, in his text “Días de oficina” that accompanies Mónica’s installation, proposes to think the concept of sur-realism in dialogue with Alemani’s curatorial proposal that is a tribute to the work of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) in which, in a magical world, life is constantly reimagined to transform itself, brimming with possibilities and redefinitions of the human. Ponce de Leon points to a local realism in which magic finds its material place among affective dynamics and refractory practices. The Argentine curator affirms that in this exhibition format, the Biennial, what changes is the scale and the conditions under which the works are developed: everything must be bigger, done faster, sent farther, paid for more expensively. This sur-realist gaze points to the reformulation of expectations about the narrative, morphological, semantic, about the individual and the collective that can be found in both Heller’s and Chaile’s work, as both take images made by (and with) others and re-signify them, but without erasing the presence of the collective and the timeless.

Five anthropomorphic beings covered with abobe, turning their “backs” to each other, where they have hollows to house fire and food, seem to be in an attitude of defense, one growls fiercely. It is a family, immense portraits of a particular genealogy, that of Gabriel Chaile. They do not try to be like the bodies of the people they name but show what they can and what makes up those people, an exploration that Gabriel makes of himself, to understand himself. These figures are also familiar to me; in them there are forms that I knew in the graphics of the books of the Argentine archaeologist Rex Gonzalez, they have features of centenary ceramics of the Candelaria, Condorhuasi, Alamito, Santa Maria cultures, which I admired trying not to tarnish museum showcases. They also refer to peoples imagined in the collective memory, they are an ancestral cry and also a language developed by this artist in his research of a formal genealogy in which he proposed to inscribe himself individually, although not alone. They are also familiar to those of us who lived near sugar plantations and had cement pots with legs in our gardens. 

Are they aware of why they are where they are and why they do everything they do? asks a voice that invades the dark, blue space, cut out with curved, rectangular, round screens, on which different animated beings move. This fold of reality in which you are immersed when you enter the Argentine Pavilion makes it difficult to perceive how far from the floor the ceiling is and if there are walls. The voice in the room is that of a pigeon that moves with a certain fright in one of the projections of Heller’s installation, in its monologue the words punctuate at certain moments: I like to wait, to decide, to simulate/ I don’t know if you can find something more macho than what I am, but as for the female that I am, there is nothing else to do but make a film, a documentary/ Did you know that in South America a real revolution is rising, and that Europe is not that it is about to enter decadence but that Europe is decadence itself? Do we trust in art because it allows us to integrate into the world or do we love it because it is precisely what will free us from it? is the question that Alejo leaves at the end of his text, without specifying which world he is referring to.

Although the works of the artists from Argentina present in this Biennial at first sight do not seem to belong to the same time and territory, they expose facets of an identity with archeological gaps, unanswered questions and superlative contradictions that are indisputably part of the poetics of this country and its region. In the clay figures, in the digital beings and in the collective narrative, forms are condensed and repeated that reactivate that which seemed absent or distant but which is a latent part of the present, in which the attempt to understand the dimension (and effects) of our presence, the search for lightning flashes of the future and forms towards which to mutate is imposed.

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