«The multi-site exhibition Naming Natures, co-curated by historian Tomás Bartoletti and artist-researcher Denise Bertschi in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in Neuchâtel (MHNN) and the Neuchâtel Centre d’Art (CAN), approaches the history of Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and his zoological collections allocated in Neuchâtel. This ‘Helvetian Humboldt’ hunted more than six hundred specimens in Peru between 1838 and 1842, still preserved at MHNN. He also brought back archaeological artefacts and human remains, now housed in Swiss and European institutions. The art-science exhibition shows Tschudi’s collection for the first time in its entirety, together with hundreds of documents and objects found in several museums and libraries in Switzerland, Austria and Peru.»*

NN1.0624 and NN2.0624 are center on the construction of scenic scale model panels based on lithographs from the book Antigüedades peruanas (1859) and Fauna peruana, both researchses of the Swiss naturalist Johann Jacob von Tschudi.

The use of scenography as a resource seeks to present the false and flat backdrop of a constructed reality, as a way of metaphorically thinking about how a specific organization of elements in the world (a context) is conveyed through a form of representation; drawing from the idea of scenography as fiction. On the reverse of these scenic panels are images referring to the aesthetic imagination behind the categorization and rationalization of this pre-Hispanic culture, using archival materials from the MHNN’s informational panels and graphics, together with critical approaches drawing from diverse textual references.

*Fragments taken from the curatorial text.

Production process credits:
Dextre Polo, Sofia Nakasone.

The literary word, as a unit, is unstable; it corresponds to a sociocultural structure that determines its meaning and transforms it. Following this, a text becomes a crossroads of textual surfaces: multiple writings where the meaning is given not only by its independent and contextual meaning, but by its use in history: its past meanings, its authors, its addressees. The intertext is just that: constituted by a set of multiple quotations, identifiable, connected in a non-linear way in the present and finally expressed in a circular way in time.

Under these conditions, I think about the possibilities that exist when applying the meaning of this concept (intertextuality) to an image from a nominal character. I was interested in reviewing the historical conditions that have produced certain types of images and how a look from the present changes their meaning.

.     .     .     .

“(…) the gods are not in nature, but beyond it” is a fragment taken from a text by architect Wiley Ludeña (Notas sobre el paisaje, paisajismo e identidad cultural en el Perú, 1997) where he paraphrases and recontextualizes Lynn White’s approach (in The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, 1967) on the process of evangelization and how it affected man-nature relationship. This slogan that erupts during the colonization process becomes an imperative that distances the indigenous people from the divine cult of nature, directing them to a position of domination and domestication of their natural environment. This will perhaps be a historical milestone to address a separation between countryside-city, nature-civilization and the socio-cultural changes and ideological divisions that occurred in later years in relation to the ideas of progress and modernity in the Peruvian context. In this project I seek to establish a tension between the imagination of the rural and the urban, traversed by the idea of progress and modernity from the use of the territory and its exploitation.

All the visual and textual information present in the exhibition has been produced from the transcription, recording and reproduction of physical and virtual archives; all of them reproduced to scale with a team of people, premeditatedly omitting certain visual or textual information.

All the images selected are representations associated with the Peruvian territory made from the 17th century to the present day.»*

*Fragments taken from the curatorial text.

Production process credits:
Diana Arteaga, Marysol Nanfuñay, Sofia Nakasone, Analuna Velarde, Dextre Polo, Olenka Macassi, Miguel Angel Polick.

The exhibition ¿Adónde irá el pájaro que vuele? ¿Adónde iré yo que no te lleve?, curated by Angel Calvo Ulloa and Julia Castelló, is accompanied by a parallel program taking place across various independent spaces in Madrid.

The project was presented at La Parcería. Over the course of five independent sessions, a performative reading was carried out, structured around three axes: the reading of a fictional testimony, the screening of a video, and the distribution of a publication. Developed from conversations with Spanish and Latin American technicians, the project proposes a connection between experiences of technical labor and the personal intersubjectivity tied to migration contexts and working conditions. The video also offers a contemplative view of manual and artisanal labor, highlighting the embodied knowledge and the systematization of gestures that make the continuity of the global network possible.

Acknowledgment:
VEGAP, Carolina Bustamante, Silvia Ramirez, Hector Vicente.

Mapa común is the title of the inaugural exhibition of Crisis Galería/Bombon Projects in Madrid. Created together with Agnes Essonti Luque, “it traces a shared map that makes visible bodies, materials, and narratives that are usually excluded from the dominant visual field. In this gesture, they open a space to collectively reflect on the visible and invisible forms that sustain and condition our realities, proposing new cartographies from the sensorial and the political.»

(…) “The works in this exhibition are primarily paintings, drawing on workers’ manuals, construction progress photographs, and graphic advertisements sourced from the archive of the Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España over the past century. This body of work engages with archival reproduction, approaching painting as a technical exercise of repetition. The selected images range from views of the subterranean foundations of Telefónica’s Gran Vía building to scenes of coaxial cable inspections carried out in public spaces. The exhibition also includes two graphic elements and a video. The floor-mounted posters reproduce drywall (pladur) advertisements, developed through research into printed publicity from various construction companies in the second half of the twentieth century. Alongside them is an illustration taken from an installation manual for concealed wall wiring. These two systems evoke almost contradictory conditions: the aseptic order of interior architecture set against the hidden technical infrastructure behind its surfaces.”*

*Fragments taken from the exhibition wall text.

Production process credits:
Fernando Dextre, Carmen Ojeda.

«If the present we see and the future we imagine are regulated by the economic interests of the system, then speculating about the past can be a legitimate exercise for challenging the construction of the present. In recent months, I have been reviewing archives from telecommunications companies that have operated in Spain over the last century. From the telegraph to fiber optics, each communication system has been accompanied by its own specific advertising paradigm. From vestiges of the imperialist colonial expansion project of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century invocation of time acceleration, advertising has, effectively, directed our gaze and our desire towards globalization. This led me to ask: What would advertising have looked like if it had been true to the role of material infrastructure as the backbone of global interconnectivity?

To answer this question, I set out to create three different advertising posters, drawing from the aesthetics and content of communication archives that circulated in Spain up until the second half of the nineteenth century. I produced three sketches, which I manually intervened until arriving at a somewhat more concrete idea, later finalized in digital format. What you see in the exhibition space are the three preliminary sketches, each of which has been manually reproduced four additional times.

Hand reproduction may seem like an almost obsolete gesture—less rational and more operative. You quickly realize that the work must be systematized in order to reduce the time it takes. At times it was tedious, but it gathered momentum as I reached the satisfaction of standing before multiple repetitions. It becomes inevitable to think that the unique object suddenly divides its value into multiple identical ones, and to recognize that the value of the aesthetic and the artistic—often attributed to immaterial or even mystical forces—can, in fact, be copied, because in the end it is a physical material, a tangible presence laid upon a surface.

*Fragments taken from the exhibition wall text.

Production process credits:
Adela Angulo Portugal, Carmen Ojeda, Tabata Pardo.

Group exhibition curated by María Íñigo Clavo and Christian Alonso. «The 13th Art Biennale Leandre Cristòfol focuses on the processes of resource extraction: on its implications, its contestations and its alternatives. With a prominent presence of Latin American artists, the exhibition responds to ecosocial crises with works that offer an antidote to the utilitarian vision of nature. The projects alert us to the consequences of a development based on intensive extraction and the commodification of resources in the service of unlimited growth and excessive consumption. Based on situated, critical and affirmative methodologies, the works situate life at the centre of ethical, political and economic issues; they reconsider the ways of valorising human and non-human life, and promote practices based on the common well-being.

Extractivism is a mode of production based on the privatization, extraction and commercialization of natural resources. This dynamic originates in European colonization, and in the exploitation of goods, bodies and knowledge this process entails. Today, extractivism is the operating logic of neoliberal capitalism, and is practiced by companies and governments everywhere. The argument that legitimizes extractivism is that it generates jobs and contributes to economic growth. However, it has profound impacts on people and ecosystems: it generates social inequalities and territorial conflicts; it contributes to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution; it produces large amounts of waste, and it strips local communities of their resources and territories.

The projects included in the Biennial demonstrate that contemporary extractivism is not only feeds on natural resources, but also by social, cultural and digital resources. Focusing on Spain’s colonial history with North Africa and Latin America, the works highlight the link between extractivism, colonialism and environmental degradation; they warn us of the pitfalls of green marketing; they speak of the extractive function of mass tourism, urban gentrification and information and communication technologies; they question the biopolitical function of landscape painting and the sculptural monument; they speak of the capacity for resistance of local communities; they show the restorative function of ancestral rituals based on respect and interdependence with nature; they carry out healing actions from popular culture, spirituality and the feminization of struggles.»*

*Fragment taken from the curatorial text.

Production process credits:
Carmen Ojeda.

Presented as part of Generación 2024 at La Casa Encendida, the two-channel video Catch the Living Manners as They Rise is shown.

«Graphical vectors seem to have become the ideal medium for disseminating a universal mandate of the visuality of the globalised world, with corporate images, the graphical identity of major franchises and the construction of commercial networks all at our fingertips and all drawn from the outline of a perfect synthesised graphical form. Meanwhile, behind all this, exploitation and inequality uphold that same economic model through transnational under-development. To extract guano in the mid-nineteenth century, nearly six hundred coolies arrived from China in the capacity of semi-slaves, and the guano quarries that promised prosperity and constant extraction for more than a thousand years dried up in less than sixty. A postage stamp commemorating the centenary of Peru’s first port illustrates this apparently contradictory relationship between nature and technology. It shows a railway line decorated on both sides with guano birds. Catch the living manners as they rise consists of the vectorization of this postage stamp to make a dual-channel video. The first video reproduces a macro tour of the vectorized digital image, while the second one makes the exact same tour but this time printed on paper. The proposal aims to present an opposition between the digital and the material with the extractive imagery of guano. The notion of the graphical vector as the ideal model collapses when it is materialized in printed form, as the possibility of infinite extension vanishes in contact with the material reality.»*

*Fragments taken from the curatorial text.

Acknowledgments:
Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero, Andrea Muniain

In 1865, photographer Alexander Gardner published the photo album Rays of Sunlight from South America, a selection of photographs of Peru taken by American photographer Henry De Witt Moulton around 1863. This album features images of the city of Lima and the Chincha Islands, known for their large guano deposits. One photograph stands out: a giant mountain of substrate, nearly 30 meters high, imposing in contrast with the diminished workers, semi-slaves digging into the already fossilized surface under the sun. The overall selection highlights the contrast between civilization and nature, and between culture and resource extraction.

Since I first saw this album, I have wondered why it was given that name: “Rays of Sunlight from South America.” The most obvious answer seems linked to the new technological medium that produced it —other albums from that era also had titles referencing light or the sun as a way to evoke the genesis of the photographic image— but I can’t stop thinking that there is a deeper connection, perhaps related to the idea of hope and progress. It is as if Gardner wanted to point to the existence of a ray of light as an ideal of progress emerging from the shadow of a young Peru, independent for only four decades; and still seemingly unready to embrace the industrial transformations that were accelerating the world.

This project is divided into two rooms and is based on that strange relationship contained in the guano context: local nature–global industry, interconnectivity, and progress; all situated in a key historical moment—the second English industrial revolution and the beginning of Peru’s slow transition into the capitalist economic system.

Acknowledgment:
Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero, La Casa Encendida, Centro Huarte, Imaginary Z.

In 2016, a fire in the Church of San Sebastian in Cuzco destroyed, among many works, six large-format diptychs made by the indigenous painter Diego Quispe Tito. These immense paintings in the form of lunettes that decorated the walls of the temple, were commissioned in the middle of the 17th century with the objective of serving for the evangelization of the indigenous population. Engravings sent from Europe had been distributed among the new continent to be used as models of paintings that disseminated the new model of the world and the new way of understanding history for the indigenous people. The natural world was no longer a divine space, but a pagan polytheism that had to be condemned in order to point to a god that was not in nature, but beyond it. The aforementioned series by Diego Quispe Tito was set in this context and told in images the life of St. John the Baptist, a religious preacher of the first century B.C. who used the sacrament of baptism as the center of his religious movement to initiate people into Christianity.

The interesting thing about this series of paintings was that the painted flora and fauna correspond, not to the European natural imaginary represented in the original engravings, but to the local indigenous imaginary. Animal species, wild flora or even their chromatic palette respond to another way of understanding the world. However, this process of syncretism, which could be understood as a form of resistance to the mandate of representation brought from Europe, can also be understood as a domination of the local traditional imaginary that places the story of the Christian god at the center. That is to say: what finally condenses the image is cultural domination. And this occurs because these new images anticipate the European architectural and cultural infrastructure over the indigenous ecosystem now represented.

These religious images maintain in the background a tension between civilization and nature, a marked distinction that materially anticipates a transformation of the new continent and the progressive disappearance, now total, of the indigenous culture. The failure of the Spanish viceroyalty as a political project in the 19th century did little to prevent what was already naturalized and inevitable: the introduction of the American continent into the logics of the modern world. Also with that, its geopolitical location in the stratification of the globalized world. This is another layer of a larger dispute for the progressive transformation of the world and the homogenization of the imagination; this time subject to the growth of late capitalism. What Quispe Tito’s series represents is now nothing more than a specific moment of tension suspended in history.

The project consists of producing a series of pictorial works based on the series of paintings whose photographic record is archived in PESSCA (Project on the Engraves Sources of Spanish Colonial Art). For the elaboration of the paintings, I have decided to make manual reproductions in oil on wood of the six diptychs that make up the missing series. However, this reproduction process will be carried out with the application of some instructions according to the type of image to be presented. My first guideline will be to erase all information that is not landscape or architecture; with the intention of representing images that only contemplate the tension that exists between these elements. The second slogan is to eliminate the elements of flora and fauna added by Diego Quispe Tito to the European visual model. And, the third slogan, consists of eliminating all reference to the European imaginary placed in the paintings.

The project was presented in Liste Art Fair 2022 together with Javier Bravo de Rueda. The title Weak Universalism comes from the homonymous text made by Boris Groys and published in 2010. In this text, Groys reflects on the visual imaginary produced by the avant-garde as a reduction of the sign that reaches an image so simple, timeless and weak in formal terms, that it adopts the sufficient conditions to survive the timeless transformations of the modern world. This is a type of universal image accessible to anyone who can observe it.

This project approaches this idea of universalization as a tension built from the conflict to which every act of domination or interculturality is subjected. Historically, war or continental conquest —whatever its horizon— has not only become a dispute for economic and political domination, but also for the domination of the imagination. The consensuses or impositions that result from these conflicts go through a dispute for the consolidation of a new visuality. Many times, these results can be progressive, organic syncretisms of two or more forms of visual tradition; but many times they are also aggressive processes that imply a cultural eradication and extermination.

The common sense about the differences between rural and urban areas in Peru has been built from a tension between the idea of backwardness and progress, from the paradigms of modernity and in a context of strong social and economic inequality. These relations have been historically produced since colonization, and have become more complex since the second half of the twentieth century through migratory flows from rural areas to the country’s capital. However, their relationship has also been traversed by a political class struggle with important milestones such as the agrarian reform and the internal armed conflict in the 1980s.

Por el bien futuro proposes a series of exercises in testimonial writing and fiction that have materialized in drawings, performance and video-performance. The textual proposal narrates the migration of my parents, their relationship with commerce and their will to progress. These testimonies are contrasted with reflections that view with skepticism certain ideas of progress inherent in me. In the course of the performance, I compare these reflections with my own artistic practice and with the exercise of automatic drawing.

Curated by Alejandra Monteverde and Alexandra Romy. «Circular time, or endless recurrences, suggest that all things iterate eternally. Circular time has no end, it is perpetually in motion. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche develops the idea of the circle of time or eternal return under the name of amor fati – the love of fate – expressing that since everything recurs infinitely in life, we shall love and embrace our fate, our infinite ways of becoming and chaos. Circular time is by definition the contrary of progress, which belongs in the realm of linear time. Progress cannot be drawn as a circle, but rather takes the shape of a line. In Western societies, progress is a way to reach a result: an obsession with perfection, forcing us on a path of advancement. We have no choice but to continuously upgrade ourselves, we must move forward, fast. It is a fashionable human aim to – ultimately – reach Paradise, and the neoliberal capitalist economies trigger us no differently. As our bodies become commodities, we are pressured to grow, consume and waste. But what if rather than categorizing time in three distinctive and extraneous units – past, present, future— we would situate ourselves, with our bodies, inside time. For the people living in the Andes, time is built differently. The past is what we can see in front of us, and the future is something that is situated behind our backs. Andean thinking literally embodies the time, using the word „eyes“ to translate the past and „back“ to translate the future. Now the perspective has changed, we are still moving, but walking backwards, observing the past and recognizing the future as something we can’t possibly see, unless we turn our head over our shoulder and have a quick glance at it. In the Andean thinking, time – alike space – is a house, a place we inhabit. It is a heartbeat, the breathing of air, the constant back and forth of the sea or the perpetual alternating between day and night, a cyclic repetition that corresponds to the order of the cosmos. Time is not a quantum that can be expressed in mathematical term or possessed, but rather is considered in its physicality, either according to its quantitative characteristics, like density, weight, or to its relational aspect, for example in connection with the importance of an event or celebration.»

*Fragments taken from the curatorial text.