Interferences in Latin America

Last Monday and Tuesday, we began the week with cultural critique and art criticism in Latin America. Statements that resounded with the hypothetical need that Graciela Carnevale talked about in a conversation at the ZKM in Karlsruhe: “art has nothing to do with representation, so much as with an action that can interfere in real life”.

Claudio Iglesias apuntaba pointed out how Latin-American art for a long time now has been confronting (not so much in the sense of a fight, as in the sense of dealing with) the ghosts that pursue it: the nature of being mestizo, the place of the foreigner, the influence of colonialism… Historical aspects that interfere in a complex cosmic vision. And that without negating their centrality, generate inescapable ballast, moored to a past that still monopolizes many discourses.

1968 was an effervescent year in various points of the planet. In a sort of global communion, many watched the ties that for decades had been overstretched finally break. In an experimental political and artistic explosion, Tucumán Arde, that Syd Krochmalny also talked about last Tuesday, were the spontaneous demonstration of an independent discourse, of conceptualism liberated from colonial “ballast”, projects projected at political projectiles.

And it’s just that when art moves, when it is agitated – in other terms – Daniela Ortiz and Xosé Quiroga in their project presented at La Capella, 15.518, the friction produces sparks and reconciles this interference in real life advocated by Graciela Carnevale.