Ambactia Memoria

Group Exhibition

07.09.2021  -  19.09.2021

Developed by Vanesa Peña Alarcón (ES) in the context of a Curatorial Residency, the international group show Ambactia Memoria, presents a wide selection of works across disciplines featuring sculpture, painting, installation, textile art, video, and performance, dealing with the legacy of Hispanicness on a global scale.

Participating Artists:
Andrés Argüelles Vigo (PE), Silvana Solivella (CH), Constanza Camila (CL), Ricardo Candía (CL), Adriana Bickel (GT), Carlos Gárate (ES), Virginia Lázaro (ES), Abel Azcona (ES), Maria Amparo Gomar Vidal (ES), Homo Velamine (ES), Miguel Buenrostro (MX)


Ambactia Memoria Panorama

Scroll horizontally to view the panorama.

Curator’s Statement by Vanesa Peña Alarcón:

AMBACTIA* MEMORIA

Embassy*. Noun. /ˈɛmbəsi/: From Old Provençal amaissada ‘office of ambassador’, from Latin ambactia, from Gaulish ambactus ‘vassal’.

Ambactia Memoria is an international visual arts group exhibition that offers artists, critics, and activists an open framework to articulate non-normative artistic positions and peripheral perspectives regarding tradition, memory, and identities in relation to “the Hispanic.” By exploring the intersection between feminism, transculturalism, and (post)migrant approaches on the representations, practices, and diverse forms of identity in contemporary society, the selected works deconstruct the idea of Hispanicness and collectively imagine its future transformation.


Exhibited Works:

Abel Azcona – España os Pide Perdón

Ambactia Memoria
Abel Azcona – España os Pide Perdón, 2018 – ongoing
Printed sign
29.7 x 42 cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

España os Pide Perdón (Spain asks for forgiveness) is an installation and conceptual work created by Abel Azcona to be installed in twenty-two art spaces and contemporary art museums in cities such as Havana, Mexico City, Bogotá, Lima, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Guatemala City, Montevideo, La Paz, Panama City, Tegucigalpa, Santo Domingo, Quito or Cuenca, among others. From 2018 to 2022, in different stages, Azcona creates this political work in which he presents to us a direct reflection on the current position of his country of origin towards colonialism.

Through posters in several of the colonized cities and installations, banners, advertisements, performances and paintings on the facades of the most important museums in each Latin American capital, he makes this event remain for months at the epicenter of each city, creating a critique and opening a social debate. The work has been criticized by conservative Spanish circles that oppose its positioning and political discourse.


Adriana Bickel – En el Mar no hay Líneas Rectas

Ambactia Memoria
Adriana Bickel – En el Mar no hay Líneas Rectas, 2020
Plaster sculpture, wooden mechanism, steel cable and video installation
Photo courtesy of the artist

En el Mar no hay Líneas Rectas (There are no Straight Lines in the Sea) explores the idea of limits or borders, using the ocean as an image of that potential state that is both crisis and possibility; a liquid mass rebels against any attempt to draw dividing lines over it. What if we think of the border as an ocean, opaque and alive? The potential of the ambiguous is revealed, like the Hispanic or the Cuir, to redefine the relationships between things; necessarily linked to the painful experience of inhabiting between definitions and hierarchies that order the world into subject-object, reason-feeling, western-non-western, etc. Thinking about Hispanity in an oceanic way: as a horizon line that is constantly redrawn and which we can only approach in vain, a Utopia.

The work’s texts and video salvage part of the artist’s personal history, divided between national identities and conflicting histories, and seek to reclaim ambiguity as a strength, a basis for weaving relationships with other beings. The sculptural piece explores the repetition of a pattern as a materialization of the rigid order and the possibility that arises when the whole is not a mere sum of the parts. Through the use of plaster, it fixes the body in a rigid position; a fragile copy of a material that lacks one of the main elements that defines it: movement. However, movement is returned to it when it is assembled with the other pieces, in a way that resembles waves.


Constanza Camila – Hyperism

Ambactia Memoria
Constanza Camila – Hyperism, 2019
Polyester
210 x 145 cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

In 1860, Orélie Antoine de Tounens, in a decree drafted by himself, proclaimed his sovereignty over the Kingdom of Araucania, in which he affirmed that the regions of “Araucania and eastern Patagonia” did not depend on any other state. Hyperism reflects on the flag that accompanied the self-proclamation of this French nobleman as sovereign of the Mapuche people, designed, as it could not be otherwise, by himself. The project represents a textile examination of the aesthetic language of Tounens’ flag, which has remained unaltered for more than 150 years and has been reappropriated by the Mapuche people. The result is a series of jacquard weavings that use digital manipulation to deconstruct the original flag, translated into a hand-loomed work that also rips this tradition in order to question the object per se, its aesthetics, its function and its durability as a symbol. Constanza Camila intensively examines her roots and the development of textile projects from postcolonialism through this series of weavings, produced in collaboration with the weaving mill Tessitura Serrica Taborelli in Como (Italy) and the historic Textile Museum “Textiles Zentrum” in Haslach (Upper Austria).


Ricardo Candía – Silencio en el fin del mundo

Ambactia Memoria
Ricardo Candía – Silencio en el fin del mundo, 2019
skull plaster sculptures printed with archive photographs
17 x 11 x 14cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

Silencio en el fin del mundo (Silence at the end of the world) is a critical reflection on the use and circulation of the Selknam people’s images. For this purpose, Ricardo Candía uses photographs and sculptures intervened through complex photographic processes. He works with the portraits made by the ethnologist Martin Gusinde, who, in 1923, fearing the possible disappearance of the Selk’nam, photographed them with attention to the Hain rite. By disassociating photography from paper to turn it into a sculpture, Candía re-links the anthropological object of archival research that Gusinde’s testimony represents. As such, he revisits the anthropological object per se: the human skull; the only remaining trace that endures and bears witness to the genocide, and at the same time a symbol of the European Baroque (which accompanied so many colonizing enterprises in its historical period) in the genre of still-life painting: vanitas. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, it seems to whisper in an act that concentrates its criticism on the disappearance of these communities due to the conquest of their original estates and territories. Hundreds of families were caged in European zoos, so trendy in the 19th century. Nowadays the reflection on the loss of the memory of the Selknam people is reduced to a souvenir, to a morbid object of consumption that Ricardo denounces.


Carlos Gárate, Virginia Lázaro – ESPAÑLOL

Ambactia Memoria
Carlos Gárate, Virginia Lázaro – ESPAÑLOL, 2021
Photo and video installation
Photo courtesy of the artist

ESPAÑLOL (Spain-LOL) is a multidisciplinary project where music, literature and audiovisuals are intertwined in an attempt to understand the Spanish identity. To get closer to that formula that, despite trying to be unitary, constantly fails. ESPAÑLOL is a search towards nowhere, and from nowhere. This work, in any of its forms, does not pursue objects of faith or devotion. Nor is it a search made from anthropology, or intended to construct a historical account or a sociological analysis. ESPAÑLOL is another kind of search: it is a way of questioning the Spanishess that constitutes us, in order to, in a way, get rid of it and be able to activate new ways of being. It is a desire to find other ways of being part of it, beyond what is wrong and right.

The artists begin by creating a network of questions around that which has become the Spanish, which later allowed them to name a series of vectors of symbolic force that are contained within it. Now, those vectors interweave words, images and music and produce a conversation between them. ESPAÑLOL analyzes Spanish identity through a constellation of concepts such as migration, Spain’s colonial past, language or food.


Homo Velamine – Viva España Feminista

Ambactia Memoria
Homo Velamine – Viva España Feminista, 2018
Plastic (used-bended)
1000 x 500 cm
Photo courtesy of the artists

“Long live feminist Spain”. Under this slogan, a large Spanish flag has crowned the march for Women’s Day (2018) as it passes through the Gran Vía in Madrid, according to the Madrid and some National media. Thus culminates a day of claims for gender equality throughout all Spanish territory. The flag, ten meters long, was unfurled by the self-described “ultrarationalist” collective Homo Velamine. For them, it is not about silencing or boycotting this movement, but about spreading its message and doing so through the everlasting conversation about the Spanish flag, traditionally associated with right-wing ideologies after the monarchic flag was reinstated as a national symbol during Franco’s regime.

The reappropriation of derogatory or traditionally questionable symbols (such as the term queer by the LGBTIQ+ community), is installed in the interstices of irony as a political device for social activation. Similarly, the purpose of Viva España Feminista, is to add to the hegemonic feminist discourse, which would therefore reject such a banner, a more transversal one. “Spain will be feminist or it won’t be,” member García states bluntly, “and for that we need all the means at our disposal. The flag is one of them, why not. We have to take it out of the hands of the right wing, which has appropriated it in a dastardly way and uses it for populist and exclusionary political purposes, as Franco did”. The proposal ended up with the performers who hung it up being beaten by an ultra-right-wing group.


Silvana Solivella – Nusquam (Various works)

Ambactia Memoria
Silvana Solivella – Nusquam – Tears, Boys don’t Cry, 2020
Netted reed structure petrified by sea salinisation
2 pieces, 60 x 24cm each
Photo courtesy of the artist

Silvana Solivella’s work denotes an interest in territory and time, delving into the question of roots, nomadism and multiple identities. In this current project, she concentrates mainly on the idea of Flow-Reflux (exiles, returns, the coming and going, or the going and not returning, the fixed, the mobile, the fragile, the ephemeral, the deterritorialization…), starting from the tension generated between memory and the present, the visible and the invisible.

As Silvana points out, “salt petrification is key because it captures precisely this materiality of time, compressed in the crystallization process”. And it is in these conjunctions and disjunctions from where her artistic practice emerges; a work made with opposing forces, from uprooting and identity, from fragility and vulnerability. The saline ingredient marks a fundamental turning point both for its symbolic value and its plasticity and transmutation possibilities. The salt that turns into a solid state (the salt that heals wounds, that springs from the tears for so many reasons) but also the salt that comes from the Mediterranean, a deeply hybridized and conflicting area. In the southern part of the Levante is where she locates her “open-air workshop” and where she curdles her pieces, subtle and sober, following the variegated process of the traditional craftsmanship of Torrevieja. This praxis threatens to be lost due to two interrelated reasons. There are only two artisans left who know this technique, Miguel Pérez Muñoz (El Gavilán) and Manuel Sala Campos (El Pijote), and each season it is more difficult to set the sculptures due to the amount of sweet water that rains over the salt flats as a result of the climatic emergency.


Andrés Argüelles Vigo – La Resurrección de Atahualpa

Ambactia Memoria
Andrés Argüelles Vigo – La Resurrección de Atahualpa, 2019
Installation
Acrylic on canvas with perforated bible with red light
200 x 300 x 900 cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

This canvas, which belongs to a series of works titled after César Vallejo’s poem España, aparta de mí este cáliz (Spain, take this cup away from me), is a fictionalized approach to what Andrés refers to as the most traumatic event in the history of Peru: the conquest of Tahuantinsuyo by the Spanish Empire. Far from paralyzing feelings such as guilt, rancor or resentment, Andrés chooses the fable as an exhortation to rethink and reflect on the (re)interpretation of iconic paintings in Peru’s imagery. The wink to the painting The Funeral of Atahualpa (1867) by Luis Montero – one of the decisive works in the history of 19th century Peruvian art – is nothing but the starting point to configure a whole legend in which the dead are replaced by the living, the so-called “Inca Operatic” style (known for representing the Native Americans as Europeans) by an expressionist style, where the skin and the ethnic features are highlighted and stamped in a dripping paint that melts the historical fact: Atahualpa appears here levitating, resurrected. In opposition to historicism and European academicism, Andrés opposes the norm that both of them constitute and that Luis Montero so complacently portrayed in his painting. Far from reflection or pre-Columbian research, the nineteenth-century painter scrupulously applied principles intrinsic to the European painting of the time. A Bible accompanies the 3 meters-wide canvas, and pierced by a pink fluorescent tube, reveals the cause of death of the Inca monarch and also his consequent Christian resurrection: not having prostrated himself to Christianity.


Ambactia Memoria will take place in two parts, with the group exhibition presented at SomoS between September 7thand 19th2021; and a video-based selection presented at Kastanien Projektraum between October 11nd and 27th 2021.


About Curator Vanesa Peña Alarcón:

In her work, Spanish curator and cultural manager Vanesa Peña Alarcón aims to widen the margins of the Art History field by including diverse viewpoints and an interdisciplinary approach to discussing and presenting art. Alarcón earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master of Research in Cultural Theory and Criticism from Carlos III University, graduating with distinction and earning scholarships at both universities. In addition, she has been awarded fellowships from the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of the Government of Spain to develop her work internationally in China (Instituto Cervantes), the U.S (Embassy of Spain), and Germany (SomoS Arthouse). She also co-founded art history associations and has given public lectures in Spain and China.


AMBACTIA MEMORIA – Group Exhibition curated by Vanesa Peña Alarcón (ES)
September 7th-19th,2021, Tuesday – Saturday, 2 – 7 pm

Program:
Thursday, September 16, 6 pm:
Radical Mnemonics: Sonic Diaspora
Listening exercise by Miguel Buenrostro

Saturday, September 18, 7 – 9:30 pm at Andenbuch Library, Berlin:
Últimes Paraules (Last words)
Performative reading – María Amparo Gomar Vidal & The Association of Franco’s Victims of Paterna
Group reading of the victims letters

Sunday, September 19, 2 – 6pm:
Last day of exhibition and Open Studios NK 2021

Entry free
SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)


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Visiting Information

Distancing and hygiene rules continue to apply throughout SomoS. Visiting guidelines can be subject to change. View up-to-date visiting Information.


Realized with the kind support of the Comunidad de Madrid, Ville de Lausanne, and the Government of Peru / Bicentenario de la Independencia del Peru.


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