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CHAPTER V
URBAN SIGNS
Upone the dethronement of statues of slavers and genocides of the colonial period produced in the heat of the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded internationally before racism in the contemporary world, in different cities of the United States and Europe, is back in the Discussion forum the relationship between figures in political history, their heroism, and the public arena. Jürgen Habermas proposed the notion of "public sphere" to name these arenas of discussion that are outside the exclusive influence of market and political forces, and that configure socially articulated critical forces. In this chapter images of Argentina and Chile are crossed. It is a record marked by the photograph of the sculpture of the decapitated Eva, by a symbol of the city of Buenos Aires, the obelisk, in this case toppled, and by the archive of the intervention of the monuments of the city of Santiago during the movement of massive urban protests produced in the heat of the slogan "Chile woke up" that began on October 18, 2019. Given these two cases the questions are lit, what do we do with the monuments and urban sculptures that a sector of the citizenship rejects? Who is arguing, who has the authority to decide on them?
Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.
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The obelisk has been frequently evoked as a phallic sign that is activated in different contexts. Just as the dictatorship made it a support for the slogan that "silence is health", inscribed in a circle that surrounded the monument, in 2005 it appeared covered in an immense fuchsia condom to make him part of the campaigns to fight AIDS. Marta Minujín turned it around and placed it on the sacred stage of the Ibirapuera pavilion, where the biennial of San Pablo is held every two years.
Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.
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Press release & room sheet | 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil, 1978
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The Obelisco acostado is presented as a photographic record of the installation made by Marta Minujin at the São Paulo Biennial 1978. 4 photographs, 1 drawing and 2 videos, show a fallen obelisk, originally a symbol of the sun's rays, which acquires a meaning -in Buenos Aires- that goes back to its Eurasian origin related to the ascension myths. Sunlight and light as a penetrating spirit, a double myth based on the idea of a goal or destination "for people who come from inside of the country and want to reach the center of Argentina". In this way, visitors find themselves inhabiting an oblique space of altered verticality, where even the law of gravity is affected, engaging with the point of view assumed by the artist, highlighting a metaphysical position.
María Carolina Baulo, Rethink Everything notes.
Catalogue | 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil, 1978
Video racoord | The Obelisk Laid Down by Marta Minujin at the 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil, 1978
Santiago Porter's photographic record of the decapitated sculpture of Eva Perón (today on the country villa, October 17 in San Vicente) is one of the many possible archives to document the iconoclastic fury against Peronist imagery during the self-proclaimed Liberating Revolution. The mausoleum project approved in 1952, to be built by the Italian Leone Tommasi, was left unfinished. During the 1955 coup, a military command mutilated the images in the sculptor's workshop and then threw them into the Riachuelo. From there they were recovered during the Menem government and placed on the October 17 country villa, where Perón's remains are as well. Decapitated, the statue of Eva clearly supports the Justicialist shield.
Andrea Giunta, All parts of the world, in Verboamérica, MALBA Museum, 2016, pp. 81-82
(...) Objects, victims and witnesses of what happened to them, have an extraordinary capacity to evoke their history. And there they were, in the images of Crónica, the boys destroying the country villa on the day of loyalty, rendering accounts to each other at shooting guns. With the Evita as a witness. I knew the history of sculpture, but I did not imagine that its image could live up to this history. And the image was installed as an obsession. I imagined the misty forest, the trees accentuating the absence of the head, Evita as a kind of gothic princess. I had to take this picture in order to continue. But I needed to do it under very specific conditions. At dawn on a gray day and with the fog still to dissipate. It had to be that way, or nothing. After the incidents, the fifth one closed and it took me more than a year to get the authorization to take the photograph. At that time I couldn't do any other.
(...) It seems that the images renew their validity based on the cyclical nature of our political events. The coup of '55 followed by the prohibition of Peronism, the execution of civilians and the military, and the kidnapping of Evita's body, are the main arguments that motivated her kidnapping and her death. It is the birth of Montoneros. Aramburu is probably the clearest exponent of the anti-Peronist fury and its history the true reflection of our contemporary political history. A story crossed by death, revenge and irreconcilable perspectives.
Santiago Porter
Santiago Porter, Work notebook (Evita), 2015
The monuments have reversed their sacred and protected character in the urban space of Chile. Since the eruption of the crowds on the streets, crossed by police, in confrontations in which space was disputed every day, the representations of the heroes were scratched, painted, intervened, deposed and replaced. Signs of a nation that questions its foundations from contemporary exclusion. Celeste Rojas Mugica builds an image archive by intercepting them in their transit on the social media. A file that was created from the urgency of the mobilization to which only the pandemic stopped. Chile is waiting, waiting for the times that follow the isolation.
Andrea Giunta, Rethink Everything notes.
The process of inventorying and filing that Celeste Rojas Mugica proposes in web format with respect to the images of the social outbreak in Chile and iconoclasm, opens new readings of meanings about the destruction and rupture of images. New codes linked to the force of the revolt itself and to the medium of the interface as a language.
(...) Throughout the photographic archive, the mass appropriates space and urban architecture. In the interface, small photographic windows are opened showing heads of heroes, fathers of the homeland and male figures covered in cloth and bags, with their bodies transvestite and transfigured. This scheme creates multiple appearances of jubilant bodies, positioned and erect, mounted on the heights of the horses of nineteenth-century wars, flying flags of marginalized territories. The interface, as a visual configuration, groups the street corpo-politics, built around iconoclasm against history and monuments; an iconoclasm that counteracts with the heaviness of immobility and the monological discourse of statuary representation. This corpo-politics of dissident bodies rises on the fallen representations, transcending with new icons from popular, dissident-political and street affection. The image-body that emerges at the interface, like the social body of the outbreak, is a socialized, transversal and non-hierarchical body.
(...) Iconoclasm is transformed into a policy of self-determination, which attacks the symbols of heteronormativity, racism and segregation. Where there was a monument and solemnity, iconoclasm takes on the meaning of popular calligraphy; a palimpsest poetry, made of demands, times and renewed memories.
Iconoclasm and self-determination: the dispute of space and memory.
Links between iconoclasm and interface in relation to photographs of the social outbreak in Chile
By Mane Adaro. Article published in LUR
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BIOGRAPHIES | CHAPTER V
Marta Minujín (b.1943), Buenos Aires, Argentina .
One of Argentina’s most prominent contemporary artists, Marta Minujín is best known for producing conceptual and participatory events, performance art, soft sculpture, and video. She studied fine art in Buenos Aires, at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and art education at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes. Beginning her career in Paris, Minujín later moved to New York, where she befriended Andy Warhol, whose influence can be seen in her works that satirize consumer culture. In 1963 she made her first happening, La Destrucción. In 1966 she did Simultaneity in Simultaneity, part of Three Countries Happening, with A. Kaprow (New York) and W. Vostell (Berlin). Some ephemeral works of massive participation: The Book Parthenon (1983), C. Gardel de Fuego (1981), The Tower of Babel with books from around the world (2011). Make transpsychedelic racks, mattresses, performances, windows, etc. Her work is part of the world’s collections: Guggenheim Museum (New York), Art Museum of the Americas (Washington DC), Olympic Park (Seoul), National Museum of Fine Arts, MALBA (Buenos Aires) and private collections in France, Italy , Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, the United States and Canada. In 2011 she exhibited in New York and one of her mattresses is in the Center Pompidou permanent collection. She presented the Multidirectional Multifaceted Fluododecahedron for arteBA 2012. She prepares the Tower of Babel with books from all over the world in Paris for October 2013 and for the beginning of 2014 in New York along with a retrospective of her work at the Museo del Barrio in that city. Marta currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Santiago Porter (b.1971) Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He has been awarded numerous distinctions and accolades amongst them, the Guggenheim Scholarship (2002), the Antorchas Foundation Scholarship of Buenos Aires (2002), the First Award of Photography by the Central Society of Archi- tects of Buenos Aires (2007), the Petrobras – BA Photo Award (2008), the National Endowment for the Arts (2010) and was selected to participate in the Artists’ Program of the Di Tella University (2011). He is the author of the books Pieces (2003), The absence (2007) and Bruma (2017). His work has been cataloged in important national and international leading publications. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, the United States, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Egypt, to name the most prominent; Collection Photographes Argentines, Maison de L’Argentine, Paris, Francia, 2019; Contradiction and Continuity: Photographs from Ar- gentina, 1865-2015, J. P. Getty Museum, L.A.,USA, 2017; Bruma, Paris Photo LA, Los Ángeles, California, USA, 2015; Urbes mutantes. Latin American Photography 1941-2012, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, 2013; Argentine Photography, Pan American Art Projects, Miami, Estados Unidos, 2013; Colección Rabobank, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina, 2012; Colección del MAMBA II – Fotografía, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina., 2004; Photoquai 2009, Musée du quai Branly, Francia, 2009. His work is part of numerous collections, both public and private, such as Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, MALBA, Argentina; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, MNBA, Argentina; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, MAMBA, Argentina; The J. Paul Getty Museum, L.A., USA.; JP Morgan Chase,Collection, NY, USA;ColecciónFondationAntoinedeGalbert,France;ColecciónPetrobras,Argentina;ColecciónRabobank,Argentina. Heiscurrentlyaprofessor in the Department of Social Sciences of the University of San Andrés and in the Photography Degree of the National University of San Martín. Lives and works in Buenos Aires .
Celeste Rojas Mugica (b.1987), Santiago de Chile, Chile / Argentina.
Celeste Rojas Mugica (b. 1987) is a visual artist with a degree in Photography, a Diploma in Cinematography and a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Arts. In her work, she investigates about the ways in which memory is built, the Latin American recent history and the limits between fiction and documentary, elaborating works that think mainly about the photography and archive as a medium and materiality. She has exhibited and published her work in Latin America, Europe and Asia. During her career she has been supported by FONDART (Chile); BECAR Cultura and FNA (Argentina); Deutsch Art Council (Italy); among others. Her work has been recognized with the Rodrigo Rojas de Negri National Young Photography Prize (Chile, 2017); Buenos Aires Young Art Biennial Prize (Argentina, 2017) and Latin American Creation Prize of the Image in Movement Biennial-BIM (Argentina, 2018). During 2019 she presented her work in the exhibitions Visual Arts Prize of the National Arts Fund of Argentina, the Arte x Arte Prize, the Itaú Foundation Visual Arts Prize, the Klemm Foundation Visual Arts Prize and in UNSEEN Amsterdam, among others. Her recent short film was presented at the San Sebastian Film Festival – Spain, 2019. She lives and works between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Santiago, Chile