Iván Argote

An artist who plays with the everyday, with the day-to-day, without trying to provide an answer or impart a lesson; in any case, he offers a chance to make questions. His works are the fruit of an inquiry into the world, social bonds, history, on the basis of his personal history and experience. With the city as his theatrical scenery, he infuses a touch of mockery into each work he presents, partaking of the tradition of artists such as Claude Closky and Guillaume Paris (his former teachers), who know how to use the humor and the smile of the spectators.

Distinguished with the SAM Art Project 2011, the artist is presenting at the Palais de Tokyo his most recent work, “The Strategy”. A project based on the anecdotes and stories of a group of people who participated in the 1970s in Colombia in rebellious groups that opposed the government and assembled in communities in Bogotá to prepare for an eventual revolution. With a group of young Colombians, Iván Argote re-created one of those communities. Together they plunged into the past to rekindle the spirit and the passion, as much as the foolishness, of the preceding generation. The strategy mentioned as the exhibition’s title refers to the way of treating history and the human being. In “The Strategy”, Argote tries to create audiovisual archives of that time which have never existed, and he attempts to reenact many of those situations.

The idea is to create a document to bring that story back to life. It is a human experience, an experience of memory rooted in action; an action carried out with affection, courage and joy.

The recordings are accompanied by other videos which comment on these archives through the testimonies of the participants; the project itself gives rise to a sort of “making of” that narrates the whole process from its origins to its participants. The ensemble is presented in an environment composed of objects present in the film with the aim of creating a communication between past and present and history and fiction.

The installation offers to the public a historical context and a spatial ambit to think the present world: videos, photographs, installations and sculptural objects, which are the traces of this experience and suggest the construction of a history or a legend, are gathered together in the exhibition space to create a huge mass, imbued with metaphorical and political potency.