This 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the worker massacre recorded on November 15, 1922, as a result of the brutal repression of the public force in the central streets of Guayaquil against a massive march of workers who demanded for their rights and better wages.
The painful episode is framed as the baptism of blood of the workers’ struggle in Ecuador and in memory of the hundreds of deceased, multiple activities are carried out every year to analyze their contexts and areas. One of them is the exhibition The century, of the artists Ana Gabriela Rivadeneira Crespo Y Hugo Idrovowhich was inaugurated yesterday, at 5:00 p.m., on the ground floor of the patrimonial El Telégrafo building, where the old newspaper’s rotary press is located.
The exhibition The century consists of three pieces, parts or moments. Which is made up of a series of images taken from documents and national historical archives. Heterogeneous material, the result of an investigation on the 20th century from within its own development, through which the century declares, in images, forms and thoughts, its dramas, utopias, convulsions and contradictions.
It is also made up of a wall rewriting of the novel The crosses on the water by Joaquín Gallegos Lara, where the events of November 15, 1922 are portrayed. The intervention was made by Rivadeneira, who points out that “the rewriting action adds a temporal dimension to the architectural dimension of space intervention: writing time, but also the time of remembrance that is added to the historical time”.
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Note that this rewriting, word for word, of an already written novel, is reminiscent of various previous works and artistic gestures, such as spectacle society, by Guy Debord; Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote, by JL Borges; or the cut up by William Burroughs. Ambiguous and indeterminable gestures that displace writing towards other dimensions of meaning.
The third part of the expository proposal is future archeology, from the Futuro Perfecto series, made up of objects of variable dimensions. The name of the series refers to the grammatical tense (future perfect) that is particularly interesting if one stops to analyze it, since it presents a temporal convulsion that projects the past into the future: it introduces a past into the future, showing that verbs “They have dared to set out to conquer the unattainable.
Temporal relationship that functions as a trigger for the work future archeology, which presents a kind of archaeological discovery of future historical relics of local modernity. A series of scattered remains or material residues, which proposes the hypothesis of a fait accompli or of a still uncertain past.
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Regarding the exhibition, Lupe Álvarez, its curator, who is an art critic, researcher and teacher, indicates that The century revisits the proposal of Gabriela Rivadeneira and Hugo Idrovo in Maybe the sky will one day be silentan exhibition presented at the CAC (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo) in Quito, which gave historical relevance to the contribution of a group of artists who, in the 1990s, created conditions to foster the local contemporary art scene.
This time the installation has a special meaning, since the site intervenes that evokes, in the present, the historical-political connotations of one of the repositories of some of the fundamental sources that made up the project. The sample points to different morphologies that accentuate their relationship with space and context, highlighting the subjective mood that perhaps claims a link with the current circumstances of the country.
In general, the proposal is aimed at exorcising those teleological narratives that have shaped our collective unconscious: that of the nation, that of progress, that of the avant-garde. It is a poetics of delusion that, in the materiality of the signs and in their interaction with the subjects, gives rise to other drifts.
If a survey were opened in Ecuador to designate things that take the pulse of the 20th century, what would the result be? Will some consensus be possible on those emblematic ways in which the century is recognized? These would be questions about which The century, piece that required research in some of the main national archives.
As a whole, the work does not prioritize a specific material. He takes pleasure in going through diverse repertoires: facts, images whose connection is not ascribed to stories based on causal arguments or plausible perspectives of historicity. They seem to be residues devoid of connection that, in their becoming open to exegesis and commentary, could be activated in other possible stories.
future archeology is inscribed in the same position: a memory encrypted in scattered signs. In this case, the development narrative based on the notion of progress is removed as a master referent, questioning, in its residues, the authority of the senses that, at some point, represented advanced ideas.
Instead of reproducing truths, the archive in these works is to be interrogated, read from a present experience that reconfigures it, pointing out not only what is there, but rather what is missing, what is foreclosed in its representativeness, what is absent in its permanent presence.
crosses on the water de Rivadeneira is at the same time a remembrance and an invitation to reflectively return to the historical fact, the massacre of workers that will soon commemorate its centenary. The literary referent serves as a pretext to open the event to the present time, evoking it through the action of placing the body, completely rewriting the text in space: a temporalization that defies the very limited nature of expectation.
“What cannot be seen or said, art must show”, said Gerard Wajman. This sample that probes the display of the elusive allows us to see that there is no transcendent completeness, only fragments; indications whose selection criteria become elusive and allude to us obliquely, opening the way by letting oneself go. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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