In Transition

Tessler produced an impeccable installation connecting the book that introduced contemporaneity in literature James Joyce’s Ulysses, the city that inspired it Dublin , and the metonymic power of everyday objects such as bottles, which allude to the liquor that flows through pubs and to the waters of the Liffey River, the mirror of the collective memory. Tessler exhaustively photographed the stream and its banks. She printed and screened 4,311 postcards which corresponded to the number of verbs employed in the Present Continuous tense in the original English version of the book. Each appeared in turn in the installation Dubling, printed on the corks of the bottles that formed a river, which was at the same time that of memory: the famous stream of consciousness used by Joyce to illustrate how any man’s day June 16, 1904, the “Bloomsday”, or any other day contains the sublime and the banal that coexist in a lifetime.

Maggi presented Biografía de un dibujo, composed by three works. In Incubadora he used 98 reams of white paper. He manipulated the surface of the first page with slight incisions and reliefs that sufficed to create sophisticated architectonic monuments playing with the projections of their shadows; due to the subtlety of the material, the color and the scale, these works demanded from the eye an attentive slowness of the gaze. The viewer was fascinated by the thought process that originated each gesture and by the discovery that the simple combination of the light and an incision on a blank page sufficed for the imagination to create complex spatial constructions.

Runo Lagomarsino’s installation, A Conquest Means Not Only Taking Over, resorted to the diachronic to satirize the notions of progress juxtaposed in the continent. He transformed the signature used by the illiterate Francisco Pizarro to take possession of a world into a formal element, and reintroduced a model by Le Corbusier, incorporating a hand. Both elements reflected the way in which the meaning of progress or modernity had been deposited in particular men. Gabriel Sierra played with the alteration of the institutional space by suspending from the ceiling some unexpected wooden shelves. In Nature Morte with Monuments, Jorge Pedro Núñez playfully fused appropriations from modern and contemporary art history with objects from popular culture. Tatiana Blass silenced a set of drums by pouring white wax on them. The effect of this destruction was fascinating and it materialized the violence that alludes to what is silenced in any space. Eugenia Calvo projected in a dark room five videos featuring ordinary objects that started moving on their own and in so doing triggered the human fears hidden in everyday life. Gisela Motta/Leandro Lima projected two simultaneous videos featuring enemy (toy) tanks engaged in a tireless and useless mutual search. An image of the absurdity of humanity’s war stories.