“The body is a repository of marks”, we are told at one point in one of Carlos Motta‘s visual essays, Lágrimas (2017). Many of the works of this Colombian artist speak about colonial and postcolonial marks, metaphorical scars on flesh and desire, indelible despite the passing of centuries. Jacques Derrida, for whom the concept of cultural “sign” or “scar” was so important, said that it is not possible to escape the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even the death […]
Category: Interviews
Duen Sacchi, from my parts of the Indies
Duen Sacchi breaks down the old drawers of the colonial history file, reduces the computer furniture to splinters and sets them on fire. From the ashes comes something new because each document left its imprint on the brazier, and that which does not disappear even with fire is the repressed of history, which can not be redeemed. His writing is rhizomatic, it moves with its underground roots evading linear narratives. At the same time, it […]
Avelino Sala, living in strange days
The best utopias are those that fail because even the best of wishes has a double burden, beneficial and harmful, of unpredictable consequences. Fredric Jameson exemplifies it with the novel by Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven, where the desire to stop overpopulation condemns the humanity to extermination. Without recourse to science fiction, history of humankind is replete with perversions of collectivist ideals and neo-fascist distortions of the sense of belonging. By pointing out the […]
Frances Goodman, about the uncontrollable feminine
Perhaps it is due to a lack of historical perspective, but it seems that feminism, whose stages used to be defined in waves, does not know where to surf, where it is headed. Sucked into the neoliberal maelstrom, the girl power is advertised on the catwalks of Christian Dior, and young women dive like redeemed narcissus into a digital fluidity. The media sells us that the crux of the matter is to debate whether the […]
Creativity of healers, mediums and visionary women
… An interview to Pilar Bonet Perhaps because to a large extent the contemporary feeling is polarized between apocalyptic predictions and a profound disenchantment, nowadays we are especially attracted to those minds that had been touched by something sacred and that did not submit to anything that would hinder their revelations. The historiography has had to be revised, re-read the work of artists and Renaissance scholars under the dim light of their hermetic knowledge, or […]
Sükran Moral, demolishing rancid traditions
Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]
Yann Leto, sur un coup de tête
A bottle of Jack Daniels, a box of antidepressants showing its empty blister packs, rolling papers and cigarettes, all on the table as a kind of first aid kit, becomes a self-portrait of Yann Leto in the doldrums. This painting, Knock out, despite occupying a modest place in his current exhibit, The Round, gives some emotional intimacy to a set of works in which the quadrilateral is the leitmotiv of a confrontation between two bodies […]
Enrique Marty, when our everyday life is cracking up
Failed sculptures, false monuments, fallen idols, fanatics and misfits, big feet and delirious brains. Enrique Marty expresses over and over again the “sense of failure” (Sense of failure was the title of one of his latest shows), the absurdity and the misunderstanding that, far from jamming the gears of the world, lubricates them. But not all is lost. If there is one thing the Salamancan artist believes in, it is catharsis — that fear and […]