Drying up the wells and letting the voice of the mountain be heard

After the biennials, what? Provoking and sustaining dialogue beyond the immediacy demanded by the search for false novelty is an exercise to which we have invited independent curator Andrea Bustillos. Seeing the conflict in its proper dimension without turning it into a white elephant that hides in the delirium of secrecy

From May 23 to August 25 of this year, the 15th edition of the FEMSA Biennial was held in the state of Guanajuato curated by Pamela Desjardins and Christian Gómez. Various agents of the artistic community expressed the contradiction implied by the fact that the FEMSA group, responsible for plundering the water of communities in Chiapas and other territories in Mexico through Coca-Cola, simultaneously presents a biennial whose curatorial approach invites us to think of the mountain as “an image, metaphor, memory and bodily experience that symbolizes a path of discovery to create relationships with the world.”

With a latent water crisis in the country ––and in the world–– and in the face of the extractionist brutalities imposed by the capitalist system and its neoliberal policies, it is urgent to make the relationships between art, society and a system that devours everything more complex. Is it possible to continue accepting, as has been done for decades, the financing of art and culture by companies whose business involves the devastation of the territory? This text begins at a time that feels like the end of this world: genocides broadcast live, wars, forced displacements, and the irreversible climate crisis, force us to constantly question the implication of our being, our presence and our actions on this earth. Is it then worth writing about art? Writing how and from where? How do we open spaces to reaffirm the power of artistic creation?

In 1992, the then-called Monterrey Biennial began as a painting and sculpture contest that took place at the Monterrey Museum, located on what was once the grounds of the Cuauhtémoc-Moctezuma Brewery (and the foundations of the business complex that is now FEMSA). The contest quickly became an avant-garde space in Mexico. It is worth noting that the economic opening and market liberalization promoted by NAFTA increased investment in the cultural sector by private initiatives. National companies, such as FEMSA, saw in culture and art an opportunity to improve their image, think about corporate social responsibility and attract new audiences, establishing themselves as a novel space for contemporary art in Mexico. As Daniel Garza Usabiaga, curator of the exhibition 30 años en el mundo del arte, una revisión de la Bienal [30 Years in the Art World, a review of the FEMSA Biennial], mentions: “FEMSA contributed to the effervescence of art in the nineties by beginning to collect installations at a time when no other institution in Mexico was doing so.”

Since 2010, curators began to be invited with proposals in which national artists were in dialogue with foreign artists. Thus, Osvaldo Sánchez and Anclado Farías curated an exhibition with Mexican and Brazilian artists; Sylvia Suárez invited Colombian artists to the exhibition Improntas del cuerpo: Acción, archivo e instalación [Imprints of the Body: Action, archive and installation]; and José Roca invited artists from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela. It was in 2016, with its twelfth edition, that the FEMSA Biennial changed its format and name to make way for a curated exhibition accompanied by an educational and editorial program. In 2018, the decision was made to abandon the contest permanently in favor of a travelling, decentralized exhibition. Thus, the following editions took place in Zacatecas and Michoacán, respectively. Something we can acknowledge about the Biennial, as Garza Usabiaga suggests, is that it has been an important boost for young artists from different parts of the country.

La Voz de la Montaña [The Voice of the Mountain] was presented in eight different venues between the cities of León and Guanajuato, showcasing the work of 29 artists whose artwork was commissioned for the exhibition. The curatorial cores “explored corporality, identity, territory and landscape, themes that run through the practices of the participating artists and that dialogue with the places that host the venues of this edition in the state of Guanajuato.” The program was complemented by the Desplazamientos [Displacements] section, which included a series of live performances and a travelling cycle of audiovisual and sound artworks. In Relieves [Reliefs], activities commonly known as public programs were set up, including talks, workshops, project presentations and the activation of performance pieces. Pie de Monte [At the Foot of the Mountain] was an editorial meeting that brought together 33 independent Mexican publishers during the opening days of the biennial.

Two of the cores were located at the People’s Museum in Guanajuato: Habitar las Identidades [Inhabiting Identities], with works by Irving de Jesús Segovia Pérez “Tuxamee”, Salvador Xaricatha and Arrogante Albino; and Sombras, sueños y noches [Shadows, Dreams and Nights], with works by Lucía Vidales, Magali Lara and Daniel Godínez Nivón. Vidales’s La piel de noche [Night Skin] was composed of a series of paintings on raw, unframed canvas, using transparency and the overlapping of materials, as well as the stitching of different scraps of linen and cotton, to allude to the layers of stories that inhabit the city of Guanajuato. A series of ceramic works that reinforce the idea of the hollow, the cavity, and the nook accompanied the paintings. With her work, Vidales follows the exercise proposed by the curatorial team on “thinking from and with the place” to give voice to unheard stories, as well as space to the dreamlike and the spectral.

The exhibition Las capas de la historia [Layers of History] was presented at the Alhóndiga de Granaditas Regional Museum of Guanajuato, with works by Lorena Mal, Isa Carrillo, Ana Hernández and Néstor Jiménez. The latter presented Totentanz and La muerte arquera y la alegría de vivir [Death, the goalkeeper, and the joy of living], two artworks that allude to the certainty of death, an allegorical theme of European origin that was brought to New Spain in the 18th century. Carrillo, for his part, presented portraits of the animistic energy of the mountain in a series of tapestries entitled Resonancias de la montaña [Echoes of the Mountain]. The artists thus presented the different ways of understanding how history is constructed, whether from the material culture of the city or from the symbolic implication of the landscape.

The Museum of Art and History of Guanajuato was occupied by the larger core: Cuerpo Híbrido [Hybrid Body], with artworks by Felipe Baeza, Javier Barrios, Cosa Rapozo, Tahanny Lee Betancourt, Josué Mejía —who also presented a dialogue with a painting by José Chavéz Morado—, Galia Eibenschutz, Karla Kaplun, Miriam Salado, Tania Ximena and Alan Sierra. By the way, the works shown here enjoyed a visual privilege with respect to the other venues, due to the large rooms of the venue, the museography and the lighting, issues that contradict the curatorial proposal presented as “an appeal to the different senses in contrast to the centrality of sight and its rationalization in the West.”

This core addressed the constant transformation of the body and how it is affected by natural processes, as well as motherhood in the work by Tahanny Lee Betancourt, and other sociocultural processes, such as border violence in the artwork by Miriam Salado. Wildlife Insights or Avistamiento de un encuentro salvaje, by Cosa Rapozo provided a precise commentary on the culture of domination of nature and the wild, transforming the body of the traditional male hunter into a new female archetype that appropriates these elements of domination for her emancipation. All of this was placed within a museum setting: an immense diorama that reminds us that we are inside a museum of art and history and whose mission is to “disseminate the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity.”

In downtown León, three more cores were distributed: territorio-lengua-cuerpo [territory-language-body] with works by Ana Hernández, Miguel Fernández de Castro and Francisca Benítez; Escucha atenta [Listen attentively], with works by Ana Gallardo, Nina Fiocco, Ana Paula Santana and Taniel Morales; and Procesos colectivos [Collective processes], with works by Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba and Jaime Ruíz Martínez. The artworks displayed here reflected situated collaborative processes and most were activated at different times throughout the three-month duration of the biennial; however, they felt isolated from the rest of the venues, giving the impression that the “artistic value” for the art system of these proposals that are more focused on community participation was less compared to the works of authorship. Why does the art system continue to devalue works-processes and their collectivities while maintaining the centrality of works-objects with individual support?

In making this brief account of the history of the biennial and analyzing the structural changes it has undergone, I wonder: What is the role of curatorship in this fiftieth edition? While I acknowledge the efforts of the curators to showcase a wide range of works by artists of different generations or with varied formal interests, there is a perceived lack of curatorial narrative. The exercise of incorporating the works into themes that are broad enough for everything to have its place, reduces the artists’ practice to mere clichés removed from the political-conceptual context of their creation. I think of Miriam Salado’s artwork, whose caption makes no reference to the problem of violence inflicted on the body, the territory, and the dynamics of power beyond the human. On the other hand, it seems to me that there were artists who managed to create a timely and interesting dialogue with the context, as is the case with the work of Xaricatha and the interaction with the building, or in the case of Josué Mejía with the work of Chávez Morado, or like the aforementioned Lucía Vidales and Cosa Rapozo putting a strain on the city and the museum, respectively.

I said above that the Biennial generated a significant controversy prior to its inauguration. I think it is essential to think about and discuss criticisms and questions with an expanded vision in order to address the problems that are raised. First of all, it is necessary to understand that the most specific questions regarding the forms of subsidy of the artistic system, and specifically the Biennial, are not individual. The statement about the role that the Biennial occupies in this sense cannot be reduced to those who have participated in this or other editions thereof, but it would be worth reconsidering the ways in which we seek and access financing, or the ways in which we seek and create spaces to raise these and other reflections that we identify as urgent.

The idea of a supposed boycott of FEMSA, although attractive, is short-sighted. It is well known that the Biennial has been maintained thanks to the initiative of a few people within the FEMSA Foundation, since, for corporate —as it happens in many other cases—, the symbolic value generated by supporting the arts is minimal. Are we really ready to sustain ourselves as a guild and face the worsening precariousness, giving up the scarce financing that comes from companies like FEMSA?

This controversy is sustaining fundamental criticisms to continue thinking and delving deeper into what is cornering us. We need more institutional criticism. We need to be able to break down all the ethical, political and cultural implications interwoven not only in the FEMSA Biennial, but in the artistic apparatus in its entirety. We need to confront the epistemic crisis that we are experiencing, which becomes an aesthetic, poetic and cultural crisis. We need to be able to face criticism not as a personal attack, but as a space for building contrast.