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)
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.
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The myth of the Hispanic image has been violently pierced by a cultural historiography riddled with wounds. In the name of glory, heroism and progress, a homogenizing symbol of colonialism acts as a mass grave mark to level what it is considered to be “the Spanish” and a great part of “the Latin”: the Hispanicness (la Hispanidad). It is, in fact, a prosthetic symbol, full of political devices for the normalization and administration of a selected but still collective memory, which operates in the same way in which abject bodies are confronted across the border in many bureaucratic and institutional levels.
The conflict inserted at the very core of the “Hispanicness” term is an act of administrative and institutional erasure that has not only looked the other way, but also it has burned all the papers inside the filing cabinet. With this exhibition, we propose a critical decolonial cartography that starts (and now it is even much more evident because of the COVID crisis) with the collapse of institutions in the midst of another pandemic that has been with us for a much longer period: the crisis of experience and truth that calls into question the legitimacy of cultural institutions. The international (re)presentation which the so-called “Spanish-speaking cultures” perform outside their frontiers as well as their epistemological and political soil, is falling apart. The impostor veil of culture that used to hide the real face of the political failure has dropped.
Now we can talk about both politics of the Hispanic image and politics of the Hispanic gaze, composing new visual devices that did not yet exist for certain realities that have been resisting for a long time. Why, then, do these organizations continue, even with greater force than ever, the strategies for promoting the “authentic” culture of Spain and many Latin American countries, while speaking of “hybridization, “multiculturalism” and “brotherhood”? But what does the “Hispanic culture” really mean? Can the “Hispanic” be thought of? Does it even exist?
These fictional foundations of the image of the Hispanic correspond to a precise process of political acculturation, closely coupled with a concrete visual construction, all with the objective of camouflaging itself and eluding its moral problems and duties. In fact, Hispania in Latin, rather than referring to an idea of a nation, was a geographical term used to relate to the entire Iberian Peninsula territory. After its indiscriminate use by all of the imaginable political factions, it is now used to bring together what is considered “a community with common linguistic and cultural characteristics.” Thus, the abstract image of the Hispanic is manipulated against its will, kidnapped by those who champion it and use it as a device to normalize a process of violence and colonization that, even if regenerated, reaches our days. There is something very seductive in this nationalist idea that aims to “unify” Hispanicness by inviting a society plunged into labor precariousness, social loneliness, discrimination, or that failure to comply with the ideal beauty standards, to not be ashamed of their country’s past. The rise of national cultural identities in Spain and perhaps Europe’s writ large is a response to a political crisis that, along with the aesthetics of fascism and necropolitical logics, provides the optimal breeding ground for a lack of a rigorous decolonial reflection in these latitudes of the globe. Society does not need more shame than the one it already feels when it looks in the mirror every morning, but rather pride. If the past were glorious it means the future could also be. And who chooses shame over hope?
Or, on the contrary, blame. There are those who engage in witch-hunts, pointing an accusing finger from the only possible place to do so: the elite. There is a paralyzing guilt, an identity categorization that tightly binds an apparently leftist morality. Revealed in reality as a bourgeois perversion (have not identities also been deformed by the capital?), they lead to a corralling from which the devices of racial, gender, sexual discrimination… are in danger of being deactivated. Identity fields are shut down from class considerations and become part of the market of marginalities and intersectional oppressions in a mise en abyme where all struggle is diluted in favor of an identitarian essentialism.
Within what we can call the “revisiting of historical memory”, international bodies of representation operate as techniques for modifying subjectivities. In this sense, culture is territorialized to turn it into yet another object of patriarchal control that instead of uniting, as it apparently claims, it isolates those inside cages that separate the otherness and discipline and punish. The purpose, in reality, is to create an imagined community of “us versus them”, where only the subaltern is asked ontologically for its being.
Meanwhile, the art institution has always reinforced the sense of belonging in some people and exclusion in others, since that hegemonic subjectivity is still influenced by the inheritance from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic-monarchical modes of the construction of truth, which in turn, it has been crucial for the developing of the artistic modernity story. In this sense, both cultural and representative institutions, in Foucauldian terms, are performative machines (self-presented as constates) that produce the subject they say they represent; and at the same time, they are also apparatuses of verification and legitimation at the service of a racialized, sexualized and minorities excluding hegemonic discourse. It is, therefore, the logic of “exclusionary inclusion” that constitutes such institutions; and the History of Art an attempt to deny the heterogeneous character of what the exhibition space by definition is beyond the categories of Western historiography: a plural, polyphonic and political place.
The proposal here is to reopen history and create a symbolic space for reparation, a way of dealing with the damage in the face of institutional blindness and the silence of others. Within a broken world, in the face of the experiences of harm and the fragility of memory, we propose concern, active listening, and the exhibition space as a possible place of curing through images. Spain works with colonial guilt, or with its opposite, the excuse.
The aim is to establish a provisional and plastic proposal, which neither constitutes nor pretends to constitute a truth. In order to ensure that there is always a process of collective activation through a multiplicity of discourses, an appeal is made to public consciousness in an attempt to avoid a unique language. It is not an act of activism, but of mediation so that others can be activated and transformed, rhizomatically.
What we are addressing as a cornerstone to deconstruct the idea of hispanicness, is the concept of memory, or post-memory, as performative structures of intra-, inter- and trans- generational transmission, where the key concept is trauma. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, trauma leads to the creation of different performative attitudes, usually related to dissociation, the hybrid, creativity, the fictitious, the imagination, the self-reflective, the irony … never ordered, always polyhedral, as it is in- tended to capture in the space for this exhibition. The defense of post-memory as an analytical category means challenging the meta-stories that have always dominated what we have commonly called (Western) History.
There is no uniqueness or truth of the memory, and therefore, there is no single truthful method to represent that past. The only thing we do intend to reflect is the presence (and absence) of a multiplicity of discourses, which are indeed those that guarantee memory, however fragmented they might be. Thus, it is not a matter of remembering or forgetting – well, on the other hand, how do you remember that you have forgotten? – but rather how to remember and how to handle representations of the past, and consequently, those of the present. On the other hand, the gradual death of the survivors and their testimonies becomes the impetus for new generations to assume a collective political-moral responsibility with them, with whom they feel a bond, and even discover, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, themselves as others. The demands of reparation are inextricably intertwined with the subsequent generations, and it must be through their voices from where the possibilities of transitional justice and collective memory must be (re)conducted.
In the pursuit of alternative transnational alliances be- tween the Spanish State and its more contemporary connection with Latin America, it is also necessary to map the transition process in which they continue to be immersed after the dictatorships. Along with countries like Argentina or Chile, Spain went directly from dictatorship to the free market, and they called it democracy. In this process, the large neo-colonial corporations have established new and subversive coalitions of control that were already present in the colonial period: racial, gender, sexual and class oligarchies. In addition, the neoliberal system rapidly phagocytes the “new” identities (re)baptizing them with less un- comfortable pseudo-democratic profiles for their own interest.
Thus, it is proposed to treat coloniality in this sense not as a mere racial classification, but as a mechanism of domination that permeates all aspects of social existence, knowledge production and identities. The relationships between them are more than intersectional, they are mutual. In this way, the gender system of modernity would not exist without coloniality, indeed, it is constitutive of it, and vice versa.
Among the violence of the European colonial expansion, all forms of sexual or gender dissidence were persecuted for being against the Judeo-Christian vision of the body, sexuality or pleasure. The first pathologizations, regulations and prohibitions of homosexuality or the diversity of gender and sex that already existed in pre-Columbian cultures were established with the aim of categorizing colonized subjects. The conquerors considered the indigenous men as savage and effeminate because of their ornamentation, and women as libertines because of the nakedness of a body that was since then fiercely sexualized. That is why we must think of coloniality of gender as a two-way relational base, just as it is unthinkable to “de-colonize without de-patriarchalizing” (no es posible descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar), in the words of María Galindo.
Once the motives that encourage the decolonization of the “Hispanic” (which seem so closely linked to feminisms) have been understood, and in order to invite a counter-genealogy of total resistance, it is necessary to question the position of race within Queer Theories. The concerns about the epistemic limitations of this theory, and its “Westernist” worldview, make us wonder if it is not necessary, in addition to de-colonize and de-patriarchalize, also, in a sense, de-queerize. Is it possible for subaltern communities to express their experiences, their bodies, and their erotic imagination in the same terms that Queer Theory does through Western visual realism? The problem of sexual dissidence approaches from Eurocentric and white theoretical-political frameworks does not fully include the polyhedral reality of the colonial subject and the effects of such coloniality on their bodies and desires. The institutionalization of this theory, and its discreet introduction into the university curricula, is easily digested by the system as an advertising formula and deactivated in its proclamations (even more so in the absence of a translation of the term into other languages). As we can see from protests banners around the world “lo queer no te quita lo racista” (the queerness doesn’t take away your racism). The decolonial inflection requires finding new scriptural forms that continue challenging the hegemonic methods of enunciation and that recode and reflect these collective interests. By creating new codes through acts of re-existence, decolonial subjects critically appropriate pre-existing concepts.
Therefore, we consider in this text a geopolitical, epistemic, and post-identitarian displacement from queer to cuir in order to weave transnational networks of identification and communication that make visible the vulnerability of “the Hispanic” and the processes of historical subalternization since colonization. Cuir, as the theorist Sayak Valencia argues, is also a critical position that reflects the interest in the migration of ideas and concepts, so that they are always active and the process of (self) questioning continues. It is a decolonial turn based on a rereading of the trans* feminist imaginary and sexual dissidence as peaceful practices of organized civil disobedience, where functional diversity, age, class, race… are intertwined in alliance with ecofeminisms, cyberfeminisms and indigenous feminisms.
With all these questions in mind, the exhibition space is proposed as a vehicle to articulate new artistic forms that explore non-normative artistic practices around the concept of tradition, memory and identities on/from/with/against/through the “hispanic.” In the words of Paul B. Preciado, it is an invitation to constitute a “parliament of the (hispanicized) bodies.” In this way, it is a call to jointly create alternative epistemologies that confront these forms of oppression through the re-articulation of experience and the work of art. To subvert this Euro-centrism and challenge imperial narratives, artists, critics and activists are invited to explore languages and practices of decolonization and desexualization in order to open a discussion and collectively imagine a transformation of the Hispanic.
Exhibited Works:
Abel Azcona – España os Pide Perdón
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
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
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
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
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
“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)
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
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
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
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