CHAPTER IV

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MEMORIES THAT ARE PRESENT

Contemporary art has made memory a recurring topic (topos). Memory is linked to recollection, and the word memory comes from re, again, and cordis, heart: going back through the heart, through the affections. The past that is present when we summon it, which repeats itself from the meditative distance that produces knowing that a fact has happened, but we need to feel it again. A past that does not close. Quotes and pleats of images unfold when interrogated from the present. And they can be urgent archives, which summon violence against bodies exerted at different moments in history (annihilation, exploitation, slavery). They can also be archives of taste, of the consumption of a near past whose consequences are deepened in the exhausted state of the world.

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Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.

Cristina Piffer returns to the photographic archive of La Plata museum to reactivate the photographs taken by Carlos Bruch in 1906. She does this through the means of the Collodion process, wet plates, and acrylic support. Procedures of the second half of the XIX century. anthropological portraits of suspended men and women. Extracting texts that come from archives of oppression. Indigenous people of the Mapuche community captured prisoners, during the advance of Roca´s army in the so called Desert Campaign. Locked up, separated from their families, forced to work in extreme conditions. At this moment when we see with astonishment the press recording the demonstrations against racist killings, these files, their own, on which the ‘Republic’ was founded, cease to belong only to the past. They are aming  towards the backpacks of poverty in the slums where the pandemic is concentrated today in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

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Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.

[...]Archives constitutes a crucial dimension in Piffer's work. The Photographic Archive of the Museum of La Plata also serves as a source for the artist in the Argento series, Braceros (2018), in which indigenous portraits are revealed on glass plates, using a photographic technique, the wet collodion, used in the second half of the 19th century. Throbbing files: the text suspended in the delayed readability of white-on-white fat on paper. The stain that is spilled on the clear form of the archival text and blurs the disciplinary productivity of their orders of authority. The anthropological portrait as a presence-absence, also in suspense, as a disembodied, weightless, spectral image, sensitized in silver nitrate on the surface of the glass. Dormant state of the repressed, of what strives to become visible, of what calls our gaze and claims to be named. [...]

[...] In Inventory (2018), Piffer transcribes with fat using the technic of serigraphy on paper, data taken from the registry of indigenous human remains that integrate the Catalogue of the Anthropological Section of La Plata Museum, compiled in 1911 by the German physician and ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche. The Mapuche lonko Inacayal, one of the last indigenous chiefs to resist Roca’smilitary advance on Patagonia, was taken prisoner in 1885 by the Army and later assigned, along with eleven other people, to the Museum of La Plata, by management of his first director, the expert Francisco P. Moreno. There, they were locked up and forced to work as ordinances and pawns. After his death in 1887, the body of Inacayal was dissected and exhibited in the museum. [...]

Fernando Davis

Extract from the curatorial text Cristina Piffer. Argento. Buenos Aires, 2018.

The first case of Covid-19 in Rio de Janeiro was that of a domestic worker infected by her employer, a resident of Leblon: she had returned from Italy and did not allow paid isolation for the woman who worked in her home. In Brazil there is an unofficial, social and political apartheid. The poorest, who are indigenous black women and men, are the ones who die the most from the pandemic.

Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.

In (Outros) Fundamentos, Aline Motta brings together the visual archive she made in Nigeria and the one that comes from slavery in Brazil. The strangeness of the journey interrupted in her a sense of belonging. It replicated the distance, the disruption and the wound that slavery imprinted on the Brazilian social and political experience.

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Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.

Click on the images for more information

Elba Bairon made an absent portrait in the 1990s. The fruits in cardboard are mounted determining the shape that surrounds the mirror. A lustful excess that becomes extreme when juxtaposed with Marcos López's portrait of the artist two years earlier, in 1992. A colored black and white portrait. The critical artificiality of the artistic languages of that decade was associated with the market transformations that occurred with neo-liberal policies during the years of Menemism: cheap and colorful objects run through the works of many artists of the 1990s (from Cristina Schiavi and León Ferrari, Marcelo Pombo, Gumier Maier, Liliana Maresca or Fernanda Laguna). The frame and the photo evoke the folds of a language of quotes and reference to a decade to which we return with questions that are activated in the present.

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Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.

We did the portrait in 1992, the studio that we shared with the photographer RES, on Caseros Avenue, near the corner of Bolivar, where he currently lives.

I bought many flowers and leaves and asked Liliana Maresca to help us in the session.

Liliana acted as a kind of makeup artist, comber, art director.

We actually did everything amongst the 3. There were no assistants. Elba, Liliana and I were there.Liliana helped me arrange the flowers on Elba's head and the plants to cover her body.

Elba especially carried a stereo with boleros and other types of romantic music. I made just one or two rolls of 12, 6 x 6 frames in black and white. At that time I used to color some copies with transparent inks, as photographers used to in the 40s and 50s.

I made the copying and coloring by hand myself.

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Marcos López

BIOGRAPHIES | CHAPTER IV

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Cristina Piffer (b. 1953). Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Cristina Piffer graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the National University of Buenos Aires. She has been awarded numerous awards and recognitions, such as the preselection of the La Cruz del Sur project, with Hugo Vidal and Claudia Contreras, for the Parque de la Memoria de Bue- nos Aires (1998). Mention of the jury of the Banco de la Nación Argentina Award for Visual Arts 2000, Scholarship of the National Endowment for the Arts 2001, Artist of the year of the Association of Art Critics of Buenos Aires (2002), Honor Diploma of the Konex Awards ( 2002); She was selected as a guest artist to participate in the Puerto Rico Public Art Project (2003); The following year, she was summoned by First View for the Berlin-Buenos Aires Dialogues cultural exchange program, to carry out an urban intervention in that city (2004), among others. She was part of numerous individual and group exhibitions, among them, “La herencia indócil de los espectros”, Fundación OSDE (2019); “Democracy at work” CCK, Buenos Aires, 2018; “La mirada que separa de los brazos”, CCM Haroldo Conti, BIENALSUR (2017); “The victors and the vanquished”, Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Argentina (2014); “Neocolonial”, MALBA - Latin American Museum of Buenos Aires, Argentina, (2011); “Radical Change”, Morsbroich Museum, Germany (2011); “The bowels of art”, Imago, Fundación OSDE (2008); “30 years, 30 artists”, Centro Cultural Recoleta (2006); “Como carne y uña”, Centro Cultural Borges (1998). She participated in the II Biennial of Bahía Blanca (1997), in the III Iberoamerican Biennial of Peru (2002) and in the San Pablo-Valencia Biennial, Valencia, Spain (2007). Her work is part of the following private and institutional collections: National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), Argentina; Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Argentina; Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario (MACRO), Argentina; Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Argentina; Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca, Argentina; ArteBA Foundation, Argentina; Bodegas Lavis, Italy. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Aline Motta (b. 1974). Niteroí, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Aline earned a bachelor degree in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Certificate in Film Production at the New School University/New York. She combines different techniques and artistic practices, merging photography, video, installation, performance, sound art, collage, and textile materials. Her research seeks to reveal other corporalities, create meaning, resignify memories and elaborate other forms of existence. She has received the Rumos Itaú Cultural 2015/2016 grant, earned the ZUM Photography Scholarship of Instituto Moreira Salles in 2018 and the prestigious “Marcantonio Vilaça Award for the Arts” in 2019. She recently participated in groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Feminist Histories” - São Paulo Art Museum/MASP, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” - MASP / Tomie Ohtake and “The River of the Navigators”- Rio Art Museum/MAR.

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Elba Bairon (b. 1947). La Paz, Bolivia. In 1967 she settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

She is considered one of the main artists of her generation working in sculpture in Argentina. She has been exhibiting her works since the Eighties. She has participated in shows at Centro Cultural Rojas, Fundación Telefónica, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Museo de Arte de Bahía Blanca, Argentina; Instituto Italo Latinoamericano Rome, Italy, Centro Cultural Cándido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Art Basel, ARCO Madrid, Art Frankfurt. En 2015 presented a seminal solo exhibition at MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She has been awarded the Fisrt Prize from Klemm Fouindation and the Grand Prize at Salón Nacional Nuevos Soportes. Her works integrate the collections of all major museums in Argentina and in numerous private collections.

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Marcos López (b. 1958). Santa Fe, Argentina.

He has represented Argentina in various international biennials, in the 1st Photoquai World Images Biennial in Paris, France, and in the tenth Plastic Arts Biennial in Havana, Cuba. He has been awarded numerous awards and recognitions, such as the Pilar Citoler International Photography Prize (2008) and the Platinum Konex for his career (2012), among others. He has published numerous books such as Portraits (1993 and reissued in 2006), Latin Pop (2000), Creole Sub-realism (2003), The Player (2007), Latin Pop Plus (2007) and Marcos López Photographs 1978 - 2010 (2010 ). His work has been cataloged in important national and international leading publications such and he has made numerous individual and group exhibitions in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Cuba, Spain, France, Italy , Finland, Estonia, Belgium and the Netherlands, among others. Today, his work integrates the collections of the Reina Sofía National Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León in Spain, the Daros-Latin America Foundation in Switzerland, Quai Branly, among other public and private collections. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina..

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