"RELATIONAL ROUTES": THE LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION AT LUCÍA MENDOZA

The Niemeyer Center, in the Asturian city of Aviles, hosts Tokyo Blues hacia Gritos Sordos (From Tokyo Blues to Deaf Cries), an exhibition by Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1946) that traces a journey through his work of crossed images and pieces that were conceived from his personal experience on a trip to Japan, a country whose culture and names in cinema, art and architecture have always fascinated the artist.

Larivière Foundation opens two exhibitions: Ideas Fijas (Fixed Ideas), by Cecilia Szalkowicz, curated by Mariano Mayer; and Carrusel de melancolías (Carousel of Melancholy), by renowned Chilean photographer Leonora Vicuña, curated by Alexis Fabry.

Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) lands with her dancing tables at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A) in an exhibition curated by Verónica Rossi and Jimena Blázquez. A visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam, her artistic practice proposes in her multi-layered works a meeting place between the past and the present through her protagonists and their expressions, some physical -but not corporeal-, such as voices; others, material, such as forms and texts; and others of a more intangible nature such as memory and remembrance.

Zielinsky presents in its Barcelona space Gladiators of the future, a solo exhibition by Claudio Goulart (Brazil, 1954 - The Netherlands, 2005) that continues Fragmentos da Memória, the exhibition on Goulart held at the gallery's headquarters in São Paulo. The show addresses themes of politics, the body and time, the usual axes of the Brazilian's production, which relied on his life experience as the main source.

Pamen Pereira (Ferrol, Spain, 1963) unfolds her project Don't give up at Artizar gallery in Tenerife, a show made up of fourteen pieces that make up a total, but that must be seen from the prism of combination and language. However, the artist advocates for observing what is hidden behind the relationship of her works, the selection and the dialogue that the tour offers us.

Casa de América is hosting three interconnected exhibitions in Madrid until November 30 that investigate and show the influence of the arts and the roots of pre-Columbian cultures in contemporary art and architecture. 

The gallery Lorena Ruiz de Villa hosts the exhibition Casa Encontrada, where the artist Sol Calero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982) presents a new series of paintings that start from her previous work as a point of reference and in which she advocates the detachment of the most precise definition of her themes, with references to her origins. This proposal, however, leads us to a concept that walks on the line of the interrelation of the human and the natural, making his new production more fractionable.

Stefan Brüggemann (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) disembarks at Casa de México with Dos líneas (fe), a series that is understood as an installation and that starts from the impact and the apparent simplicity exposed to develop the concept of inheritance and its satellites. The Mexican conceptual artist uses the power reflected by symbols, religion and history, an element that he deploys, sometimes explicitly, in his large-format works.

From her different interdisciplinary perspectives, Cecilia Paredes (Lima, Peru, 1950) lands in Blanca Berlin with a collection of images that deal with imaginary cartographies, displacements and human relations in their conceptual part, materialized, above all, on canvas as the main exhibition material. In Historias errantes (Wandering Stories), the Peruvian artist bets on recovering graphic materials anchored in antiquity, such as astrological charts, engravings of discoveries and maps, which become, after the manipulation of the parts, absolute compositions of impossible -but also aesthetic- iconography.

The DA2 hosts the last stage of the itinerancy of the Luciano Méndez Sánchez Contemporary Cuban Art Collection, a cycle of exhibitions that the collection started in 2019 in Spain in this institution and that reflects, through different curatorial lines, the realities and attitudes around contemporary art in Cuba.

Travesía Cuatro hosts at its Madrid headquarters Surf and Turf, the fifth exhibition that the gallery dedicates to Milena Múzquiz (Tijuana, Mexico, 1972), that gathers, with about thirty works, the continuity of the production that began after the aesthetic and technical change produced by the end of Los Súper Elegantes, a musical group that he shared with the Argentine Martiniano López Crozet, and which represented a platform that brought together his purest expression through voice and body, as well as with the aesthetic possibilities of costumes and image.

“I imagine the museum as an archipelago. It is not a continent, but an archipelago (...) The idea today is to put the world in contact with the world, to put some parts of the world in contact with other parts of the world... We must multiply the number of worlds inside museums”. Édouard Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1929-Paris, France, 2011) expressed his vision of museum functionality in this metaphorical way in his work Poetics of Relationship (1990).

Siluetas sobre maleza [Silhouettes on grass] is a group exhibition at Museo Jumex that explores the ways in which bodies exist and inhabit territory. Spanning several generations, the exhibition features artists who explore the intertwined associations of body, land and identity in Latin America's history and present: Minia Biabiany (Guadalupe, 1988), Vivian Caccuri (Brazil, 1986), Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (Mexico, 1988), Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948 - USA, 1985), Nohemí Pérez (Colombia, 1962) and Vivian Suter (Argentina, 1949).

In an art industry that increasingly advocates following the lines established by cultural policies, it is always comforting to return to thesis themes, to environments that draw from social and historiographic sources, of course, but also from myths and a well-understood anthropology. You can go deeper in subtitles and lines or you can put together a skeleton, but the overview can also be a reward these days.