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Publication by Living Art Room Interchanges. Mexico-Colombia No011 路 apr may jun 2013
CONTENTS Catalina Restrepo Leong贸mez catalina@livingartroom.com DIRECTOR
Publication by Living Art Room Interchanges. Mexico-Colombia No011 路 apr may jun 2013
Daniel Vega serapiu@hotmail.com EDITOR
Judith Memun jmemun@gmail.com ART DIRECTOR
Contributors
Futuro Moncada Daniel Vega Salvador Alanis Plinio Villagr谩n G.
Aknowledgments Gonzalo Ortega Julia Ortega Yolanda Ceballos Clemencia Poveda Maria V谩squez
Photographs
Courtesy of the artists Sicardi Gallery Alejandro Cartagena, Between borders, 2009
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004 Editorial
Interchanges. Mexico-Colombia
092 Artist Portfolios Update
008 New Artist Portfolios
094 Alejandra Baltazares
010 Alejandro Cartagena That which cannot be seen in the pho- tography of Alejandro Cartagena by Salvador Alanis
104 Jimena Schlaepfer
022 Mateo Pizarro Statement
134 Pablo Cotama
034 Claudia López Terroso Under the eyelids by Plinio Villagrán G. 046 María Fernanda Barrero Statement
060 Article
The communicating vessels: Colombia and Mexico by Futuro Moncada
114 María García-Ibañez 124 Julio Pastor 144 Raúl Cerrillo
154 Recommended
Micrographia María García-Ibañez in Hong Kong
162 Special Guest
Mauricio Guillen Hotel Casa Delina
178 Music
Voices in your head
EDITORIAL Interchanges. Mexico-Colombia Those who have seen and know Living Art Room closely will know of my philosophy: “what I do not know, I learn”. That of course has resulted in many mistakes, but I think there have been more correct answers. From March 2009 when the LARmagazine experiment began we had never interrupted its publishing, until last trimester. I don’t know if the Mayans were right, but personally, 2012 was a year full of transcendental changes; there were so many of them that it was more vital than necessary to stop for a second and review everything so we could grow and reach higher. A token of that is our new editorial designer, the fully talented Judith Memun. In less than 2 weeks my daughter was born and I changed cities, left the capital city without many goodbyes and I’m now in Monterrey, a place 4
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where many giant things are about to happen in terms of art and culture; nothing gets me more excited than to save a place in first row to witness every step of that transformation. It is known – and I am sure that I’m not the only one who thinks it– that Mexico and Colombia, my homeland, are alike. Let’s say that I first was aware of how Colombia resembled Mexico, maybe because of the legacies left by the golden era of cinema, or for the liking of mariachis in Colombia. To me it was always more a relationship from Mexico to Colombia, until I got to Monterrey, where you can see cars with bumper stickers that read: “I love Barranquilla”, you can hear vallenatos and cumbias in the streets and many music groups such as Rayito Colombiano, or the well-known Celso Piña and his Ronda Bogotá. There are many other lines crossing besides music between Monterrey and Colombia. Being so far
from each other we share stories, not always at the best of times, but we share them. Sadly the war on drugs is one of them and even if there are battles that take place on the whole country, it feels stronger in Monterrey or in any Northern city. The Colombians are partly idols and examples for the drug traffickers, and also a hope for those that have been hit closely by the conflict. In this edition, Colombian researcher and artist Futuro Moncada (who has lived in Monterrey for several years) shows us how those connections are present between both countries, how the subject of violence has been treated in some cases and how art lets us see that history is repeating. Approaching the subject from the world of music, our editor Daniel Vega writes about a naturally violent genre, one that is feared and loathed by many. Playing as a sort of devil's adovcate, he explains us the landscape and some of the reasons that move fans of bands like Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus and Napalm Death. This issue we feature the portfolio of Alejandro Cartagena, who is one of the most important and promising photographers in Latin America, as
well as María Fernando Barrero’s, one of the most prominent young artists of Monterrey. We also feature Mateo Pizarro’s, a young Colombian artist living in Mexico City, and Claudia López Terroso’s, who was born and lives in Oaxaca. We also feature some updates from Alejandra Baltazares, Pablo Cotama, Raúl Cerrillo, Jimena Schlaepfer and Julio Pastor. Our special guest is an incredible designer and great friend, Mauricio Guillén Castellanos, with his Casa Delina hotel, without a doubt one of the most inspiring stories we have ever published in the pages of LARmagazine. To me personally, an example on how to adapt to unexpected changes and make the best of them. As usual, I hope you enjoy this issue very much.
Catalina Restrepo Director Living Art Room www.livingartroom.com www.LivingArtRoom.com
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NEW
ARTIST
PORTFOLIOS
Alejandro Cartagena
Dominican Republic That which cannot be seen in the photography of Alejandro Cartagena by Salvador Alanis
Mateo Pizarro Colombia
Statement
Claudia López Terroso Mexico
Under the eyelids by Plinio Villagrán G.
María Fernanda Barrero Mexico
Statement
Between borders, 2009
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Alejandro Cartagena
www.livingartroom.com/alejandro_cartagena
That which cannot be seen in the photography of Alejandro Cartagena by Salvador Alanis A common worry in contemporary expression is to reflect in a direct language what cannot be immediately seen. Against the evidence and obscenity of the media, the artist faces the choice of playing with the same values of a formal articulation that wants to show it all to refer to what lies beyond the image. Within the apparently quotidian, the artist showcases a subtext that transcends formality. Alejandro Cartagena (Dominican Republic, 1977) plays with the formal values of documentary photography to subvert the discourse and point out the discontinuity of what we see pictured.
To Cartagena, the so called photodocument is a worthy tool for personal expression, or as the Mexican photography critic José Antonio Rodríguez said, it means the work of “external circumstance as an individual urge”1. At first Cartagena, who lives in Mexico, takes part in that country’s photographic tradition that takes the landscape as a main objective to structure the discourse. Said tradition has been updated along the different generations, inte1 Rodríguez, José Antonio. “Los procesos de la fotografía contemporánea mexicana”, Huesca Imagen. Huesca: Huesca Imagen, 2004. 12-29. www.LivingArtRoom.com/alejandro_cartagena
grating the worries of each period. The obvious starting point in Cartagena’s work is the reflection of different landscape transformations, the marks left by the cities’ different stadiums, the scars of growth and human activity. That is why, on a first stage, the reading of his work shows a relationship with ecological responsibility, the wearing out of the environment, the almost absurd multiplying of the urban stain over tainted natural terrains. In his photographic series about the Mexican Suburbia, Cartagena displays different demon-
strations of the development of the great metropolis based on Monterrey’s growth, the third largest city in Mexico. Cartagena shots the insertion of the city from serial housings in the deserted periphery; he draws the passing of the fast roads over parafunctional spaces; he witnesses the disappearing of the rivers that bring water into the cities. Lost Rivers, a Cartagena series exhibited in Circuit Gallery, follows the documental premise that denounces the ecological damages the city infringes into the fluvial networks; a sample of dried creeks and rivers in a very fortunate way. However, beyond this
Between borders, 2009
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Between borders, 2009
notable worry about that phenomenon, the document evidences additional stages that may escape us if we only tend to the eminently anecdotic of his work. The photographs of Alejandro Cartagena focus in the registry of discontinuity from evidencing lost spaces of superposition mechanisms. What matters in Cartagena’s landscape/documentary work is what is not there: the missing element. The absence becomes a formal finding, but also violent expressions. The
discontinuity generates a subtext towards the anti-functional, that of which only traces remain and that, at the same time, makes us see what really is in the landscape. The city’s growth evidences what’s missing, the uninhabitable space: the lost. In another of his series titled Urban Holes, Cartagena registers pieces of land without construction that escape the streets continuum www.LivingArtRoom.com/alejandro_cartagena
one way or another. In Symbolic Layering, the artist displays layers and holes in sloped areas. It is what is not there that matters; what we see is simulation, artificiality, delirious form that forgets about much more important spaces. The visual efficiency of Cartagena’s work puts what is not in the photo in the same plane; although it could point to certain nostalgia from a documental perspective, in a deeper level it is not that nostalgia that operates, but the manifest presence of what cannot be seen, with all its power and mystery.
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Salvador Alanis (Mexico, 1964) is a writer. He has developed his work in the literary and electronic media arenas. He has been awarded by the National Fund for the Arts in Mexico, and with an artist in residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He won the Multimedia Prize at the Video and Electronic Arts Biennial of Mexico, Vidarte, in 1999. He collaborates with major newspapers and magazines in Mexico, Spain and Canada. His published works include: Del Paralaje (Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1997), Reojo (Libros del Drag贸n, 1998), Tr谩nsito (Libros del Drag贸n, 1999), Fronteras, Borders (La mano izquierda press, 2005), De cuerpo presente (Artes de M茅xico, 2007), and Fragilidad de las Fronteras (K Editores, 2009). His visual work has been shown in several art spaces in solo and group exhibitions. He lives in Toronto.
Between borders, 2009 www.LivingArtRoom.com/alejandro_cartagena
Between borders, 2009
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Between borders, 2009
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Car poolers, 2011-2012
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Car poolers, 2011-2012
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No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere oir, 2012
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Mateo Pizarro
www.livingartroom.com/mateo_pizarro
Statement by Mateo Pizarro
Many of the works of art I´m fascinated with require a patient observation to unfold; I hope the same can be said about my own work. I hope the images I create are difficult, unsettling, and rewarding. I am interested in producing contradictions, or secrets of the experience, and I mean the physical experience of a revelation. My work follows two basic intermitting obsessions: light and image. I’d like to talk a little bit about both. There is this expression: "the willful suspension of disbelief", that denotes the willingness of an observer to believe a fabrication for his own
entertainment. Theatre and Film are made wonderful because of it. Sometimes, Art is capable of the opposite, something along the lines of unwilling suspension of belief, like the first time one encounters the aural hallucinations of Maryanne Amacher, or the light distortions of Jesus Soto or James Turrel. The highly logical, rational and realistic expectations one might have about what reality is like are summarily shattered, if only for a moment, by sensory truth. My obsession with light is due in no small part to this very experience of revelation; the “thingness of light” has allowed me to make invisible objects and warp time. There is this www.LivingArtRoom.com/mateo_pizarro
other expression: “informal merchant”; in moments of self-aggrandizement, I like to think of myself as an informal physicist. I’m also fascinated by the ability of images to be ambiguous, contradictory, their ability to inflame, and their destructibility; the way they can tell a tale and keep a secret at the same time. Also, there is this beauty that arises from a drawing that is incomplete. All of this is why drawing is so central to my creative output. And even though several different subjects populate my drawings, there are some things they all have in common. Technically speaking they are all figurative and, to a point, realistic. There is also a constant interplay between very solid figures, almost petrified by the amount of graphite, and areas of paper left blank. Subject-wise, they almost invariably depict either characters or scenes that contain a restrained darkness, which is partially hidden behind a façade of “prettiness”. And I usually choose subjects where opposites touch: the violent with the ridiculous; the painstaking with the destructive; the detailed with the anonymous; truth with fabrication. In addition to this, I can’t stop myself from hiding 24
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Ladrón roba ladrón, 2010-2011
secrets within the pictures I produce: little details that elaborate on the narrative that underlies the image; sometimes minute metaphors, or jokes. As I said earlier, I like images that demand meticulous observation.
Ladr贸n roba ladr贸n, 2010-2011
Untitled, 2012
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Uniformes, 2011-2013
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Uniformes, 2011-2013
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Ladr贸n roba ladr贸n, 2010-2011
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Ladr贸n roba ladr贸n, 2010-2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/mateo_pizarro
Uniformes, 2011-2013
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Uniformes, 2011-2013 www.LivingArtRoom.com/mateo_pizarro
Proyecto bajo los pรกrpados, 2012
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Claudia López Terroso www.livingartroom.com/claudia_lopezterroso
Under the eyelids by Plinio Villagrán G. “The wave stopped, only to rise again immediately, breathing like a sleeping creature whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves Parting from a creative process measured in the labyrinths and spaces of the oneiric and sensorial experiences, Claudia López Terroso retakes the home as a memory and begins a gestating and learning process, tracing a cartography that unfolds in the spaciousness of a landscape loaded with symbols and healing rites. The link with the shamanic and the ritualistic that comes from the existential turns said memory, and its visual evocation, in those dream spaces into the starting point of her work, as they become performatic and aesthetical codes about healing.
In the long history of magical-healing experiences from antiquity we find an endless amount of symbolic coverings of transience. Terroso turns to personal dream experiences and that magical-religious space that expresses itself from the path of visual creation: she materializes –through the photographic corpus– a visual cartography of something hard to stage and that mostly cannot be completed; that is, a total mimesis of the dream is impossible, but even so, there can be a faithful approach through photographic or cinematographic works. www.LivingArtRoom.com/claudia_lopezterroso
El viaje y la imposibilidad del regreso, 2011
Also, Terroso’s work has the effect of the cinematographic format and the theatrical strategy of spatial arrangement: sequence, movement, stillness and shots of a staging, in accordance to elements and actors: staged scenes. Light obviously has an important role in photographic and audiovisual works both as a natural and physical effect, and the transmutations of the mythical-oneiric code towards the 36
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photographic become –at least in the author’s case– staged scenes based on taking the most advantage of how clear and transparent natural light is. Not so with night scenes that, unto the theatrical sensationalism of artificial light, become violent contrasts taken from the “tenebrism” of baroque painting, but whose intention is to give that notion of uncertain and disquieting weirdness.
Proyecto bajo los pรกrpados, 2012
Claudia Terroso takes us to the reclaimed spaces of her oneiric log book and into her experience process, to the comprehension and results of the cycle that closes with her dreams, the same dreams that renew gradually in that sleeping, dreaming, awakening and living, with the con-
ceptual complexity implied within. To approach our dreams may therefore be describing that strange world full of different dimensions that can be, just like Jung said, something more than simple warnings from the psyche.
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Traslados, 2010 www.LivingArtRoom.com/claudia_lopezterroso
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Proyecto bajo los pรกrpados, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/claudia_lopezterroso
El viaje y la imposibilidad del regreso, 2011
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El viaje y la imposibilidad del regreso, 2011
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Proyecto bajo los pรกrpados, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/claudia_lopezterroso
El amanecer, un jardín, 2010
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MarĂa Fernanda Barrero www.livingartroom.com/mariafernanda_barrero
Statement by MarĂa Fernanda Barrero The central aim of my practice is to investigate the spatial sense of self as a means to observe that everything in life is interconnected and interdependent: there is no gap between the world and us. My practice is based on two axioms: (1) everything is part of a whole and is a whole itself, and (2) life is not a fragmented mechanism, but rather a multifaceted organism where boundaries are illusory. Therefore, life in my work is understood as a web of relationships and experiences contained within a space. I use sculpture to examine how our perceptual experiences and our spatial sense of self connect
us to the network of life. My tools are the monochrome, color, silence, light, and the containment of space. My motifs are everyday objects such as books or chairs, enclosed spaces, everyday observations, plants, landscapes, stars, the earth and the sky, dawn and dusk. My fundamental actions consist of replicating, containing, folding, constructing, wrapping, tracing, mapping, weaving, cutting, joining, and embracing.With these tools, motifs, and actions, I seek to elaborate a full poetics of paradise, to achieve symbiosis, to draw interdisciplinary elements from botany, literature, geography, and astronomy into life continuums, running through what is up and down, miniature and massive. Indeed, these are www.LivingArtRoom.com/mariafernanda_barrero
all latent metaphors and potential symbols for the interconnected and interdependent network that is life. The predominant material used in my work is white paper, as featured in Paper Environments. This exploration began with Paper House, built at the Slade Research Centre at Woburn Square in March 2007. In order to formulate the idea of the mind as a dynamic and sensible container of space, I constructed a white paper house based on the shape of my former studio. Spectators shared extraordinary experiences of light, whiteness, and spatial containment, which led me to continue exploring the monochrome, self-contained, vulnerable, replicating, and unified possibilities of paper as both surface and structure. I constructed several large format paper installations containing life-size paper objects and flora that may be transited by visitors including: Paper Bedroom (2008) for the Slade Degree Show in London and Paper Garden (2009) for the Recent Estrellas de la hierba, 2013
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Graduate Show at the Affordable Art Fair in London; Water Lily Pond (2010) for the Zona Maco Monterrey Art Fair and a garden at dawn (2010) for the Alternativa Once Gallery in Monterrey, Mexico. These Paper Environments motivate a very unique perceptual experience that is bodily and spatial, peaceful and enjoyable. More recently, I began to develop smaller installations and pieces building on former elements and introducing new resources such as detailed cutouts, mapped, and embossed images or text. My most recent project, Leaves of stars/Estrellas de la hierba, bonds miniature oblivious elements, mainly grass, with massive yet easily forgotten celestial bodies. For example, I overlapped the exact location of the stars beneath the grass beneath my feet as I stood in my studio, all on the same sheet of paper. Star mapping was achieved with the use of the Starwalk App, as well as other astronomical sky maps and photographs. I combined geography and literature alluding to human links with the Earth and sky:
bringing in fragments of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of grass or Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. This last project widened the scope of my sculpture practice by introducing interdisciplinary elements capable of broadening the spatial sense of self that can be achieved through sculpture, and with it, the perceptual experience of life interdependence. At this point I attempt to further develop the use of such resources introducing a wider range of scientific information and poetics.
Estrellas de la hierba, 2013 www.LivingArtRoom.com/mariafernanda_barrero
Estrellas de la hierba, 2013
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Estrellas de la hierba, 2013 www.LivingArtRoom.com/mariafernanda_barrero
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El amanecer, un jardĂn, 2010 www.LivingArtRoom.com/mariafernanda_barrero
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Celebrating 2 years. Success stories
Political art. Now and before
THE
Communicat
COLOMBIA AND ME
“War is the continuation of politics through different means.”
ting Vessels:
EXICO
by Futuro Moncada
” Carl von Clausewitz
Lecture presented in “Body-Eros and politics”, Transatlántica PHE 2012, Critics and Investigators Meeting, Forum for Photography and Visual Arts for Latin America. MiamiFlorida, December, 2012
“There is no worse moment for human relations that when peace talks begin.”
Lao Tse I. A never ending story Few photographs stay fixed in our memory. When they do, they are powerful symbols, sometimes by imposition and others, spontaneously, by communion. That may be the yearned place a photographer wants for his images, a photographer that has a hard time sending into oblivion what he considers memorable for everyone else. But how to leave a mark on the collective conscience of societies that have been exceeded not only by images of brutality, but by the same facts that cause them, and that look to be overcome by the victims to survive their circumstances? That is the subject of this text. II. There used to be truths here The war on drugs in Colombia was declared by 62
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Belisario Betancur’s government in 1984, as an answer to the killing of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Secretary of Justice, who denounced the participation of drug lords in politics. This time determined the way the media, artistic manifestations, and of course, the public, had to learn to document, communicate, symbolize and sublimate the armed conflict. Something similar is happening in Mexico since the presidency of Felipe Calderón, beginning 2006. The origins of drug trafficking, multiform and complex, have determined the recent stories of these two countries. They are explained, however, as a result of unequal societies in a constant process of consolidating a democracy that never comes. Their Colonial pasts have been reaffirm-
ed with the passing of centuries, even beyond the independent movements of the 19th Century, through alliances that keep certain minorities in power and confirm a relationship between race and class, which favors the whiter.
ing signings made on legal documents, and in agreements between government officers and faction members that do not recognize the law. This silent –and seemingly harmless- violence precedes and reproduces the other type, almost always under the embrace of impunity.
Drug trafficking thus reveals itself as the answer of a part III. Seeing hurts, lulls But how to leave a of the population that looks Significance of the body in art to ascend socially through ilevidences the peculiarities of on the collective legality, against the ever a society, ways of conjuring growing obstacles placed by their urges, and the ways to of the legal ways. We are talkrepresent them. Said solilothat have ing about a revolution that quies equal a particular landoes not pretend to imitate guage that allows, among othbeen the democratic structures or er matters, to approach the take the place of those in complex taboo of violence. power, but to make agreements with different levels of the establishment without questionPhotojournalists (and artists too) debate the ing it, and to corrupt it to eliminate constitutiolimits between insinuation or sensationalism nal1 restrictions. against the factual reality that wrecked bodies, mass graves and smoked pueblos signify. There It has been thought that violence is only about is a visceral look that leaves nothing to imaginthe immediate physical aggression. However, it ation; it is condemned with the adjective “moris clear that its buried roots can be usually found bid�. There is also another, more differed look in agreements of respected people, in easy-gothat teaches without teaching and seeks the
mark conscience societies exceeded
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Actually, violence starts when the possibility of dialogue ends and an attempt to eliminate the new opponent begins, or at least an attempt to avoid or a failure to acknowledge it. spectator’s associations; that look is disqualified, since it’s considered far from reality.
through the media or in the exclusive stage of galleries, exhibition rooms and museums3.
We can talk about three elements through which violence representation may be interpreted: distance from the example, the author’s authority, and the perspective from where a work is seen. Distance from the example, meaning, from the violent or auratic2 event, generates different aesthetical approaches that go from stark reality to a conceptual refinement, and that suppose too, in the spectator, a larger or shorter time to make contact with the aforementioned event; author’s authority, which means the pretended investiture some people have to treat complex subjects of the conflict, according to the way they experienced the causes and/or consequences of violence; and the interpretation perspective, which means the “setting” where photographs are observed:
IV. One on top of the other We will assume violence as a negation of the other’s body. Actually, violence starts when the possibility of dialogue ends and an attempt to eliminate the new opponent begins, or at least an attempt to avoid or a failure to acknowledge it. To reflect upon violence is to bore about the animal origins that constitute us, and of course, to enquire about the complex setting-up of the human mind. Bataille, leaning on Sade, evidences the relationship between murder and sexual arousal: the primitive party constituted by the first death encounters between human groups.
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War legitimizes the forbidden act of killing, and perhaps also its registry. Contradictions come once these two taboos are surpassed: the ritual,
documentary and expiatothe Colombian fields; drugViolence born from ry senses of the photograrelated terrorism (1984phic act. From its incep1993), defined by assassihas tion, photography has been nations and attacks to the linked to the act of killing produced civil population in Colom–it is not a coincidence works that assume the bia, showed urban spaces that the sound made by shaken by bombs; the conas a sign, symptom frontation between guerillas, the camera is called “a shot”–, making place to a paramilitary movements and and of great amount of possible order forces (1964 to date) associations. Thus, the phoreveals sides with similar social turbulence tographic suspension of uniforms, and destroyed time represents a double death, concerning the towns and ecosystems; war between Mexican images of murdered people. cartels and enforcers (2006 to date) shows detained and executed state armies. The photojournalistic precedents of violence in Colombia and Mexico have transformed their Violence born from drug-trafficking has proaesthetics and the appearance of their protaduced photographic works that assume the body gonists. The War of A Thousand Days (1899as a sign, symptom and manifestation of social 1901) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) turbulence, a metaphor of power, an exposed displayed organized contenders posing for the territory to the unfortunate shock actions. camera in the middle of mostly rural landscapes; the Bogotazo (1948) showed angry mobs that Foucalt says that the relationships of power act battered the capital city with their clubs and upon the body, transforming it; we will speak machetes; the bipartisan Violence (1946-1966) then, majorly, of a body deformed, displaced revealed the horror produced by both sides in and disappeared.
drug-trafficking photographic
body
manifestation
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V. Photographing the still: Colombia There is no worse violence than the one we personally experience, none so complex, so apparently unsolvable. However, states of paroxysm towards the crumbling of the minimum principles of coexistence give birth to works that wouldn’t be possible in any other way. The fully uniformed bodies of men and women who grew up with the language of weapons are one of the symptoms of a never ending war where hunter and killer seldom exchange their roles. Colombian art, and of course, photography in the context of art, have pretty clear lessons about it, to such degree that violence becomes a common place, a matter that, upon being so explored, demands different approaches, each time more refined. Some artists have approached the manner with more or less profoundness, to understand it by themselves. Something similar happens with some graphic journalists who have been added to contemporary art, since usually almost no artist reaches that level of contact with the people and places that are part of the war. 66
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One of these photojournalists is Jesús Abad Colorado (Medellín, 1967), who has documented the last two decades of the armed conflict, almost half of this time independently. To understand the difficulty that the work of Abad Colorado carries would seem to take arguments away from anyone who analyzes his images; there is, however, a formal bet in his way of portraying the subject, a way of narrating that must be interpreted. His photos offer visual formulas: exposition of the victim, an expressive tone –the armies in the middle–, an aesthetic that has made the usual spectator more impervious, used to the eternal funerary parade that happens in the screens and printed media. No one knows what exactly is going on in Colombia. So many tensions happen at once that in a moment violence becomes a natural part of daily life, and then it disappears. Abad Colorado proposes a war didactic, which means,
he photographs the certainty that murder exists, and that some get rich with the pain of others. But he leaves one of those angles empty to visually expose only the victims, creating a nonreflecting vision of the tearing that poses that every register will be incomplete. Small populations bombarded, bodies tormented with the force of weapons, men and women in uniform, and many children crying. Such is the grammar, the discourse that reinforces itself
in a country where the naturalization of violence borders with ignorance towards history. So what kind of memory is established through photography? A memory for whom and told in what manner? The thinkers will answer if they are not betrayed by a sectary position, more so if we think that anyone who takes a part in war is wrong, even though his causes may be just. Art can liberate the barrier of immediacy JesĂşs Abad Colorado
between reality and “reality”. His work, of auratic origin, with physical evidence of violent events, has such a grade of loyalty to objects and persons that it gives them a process of dignity and beauty, so the manifestation of horror comes later. Echevarría’s aesthetical strategy is the synthesis with which he extracts evidences of reality, putting them under a scientific analysis that unchains powerful images, hardly solvable, and that integrate history, anthropology, sociology, botany.
Jesús Abad Colorado, Comuna trece
through a mental and physical development of the work. This is properly the first distinction between photojournalism and art, between urgency and delay, between evidence and concealing. Juan Manuel Echavarría (Medellín, 1947) is a case worthy to celebrate the dialogue 68
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The question is if beauty can do it all, if it can even show us its terrible face –maybe our own reflection–, and if we are able to see it. The social situation in Colombia is a hard paradox: if you hear what’s going on you will rise up, and if you rise up you are in danger of being terminated, or of falling in the same violent logic. Echeverría leaves a hard work for the spectator: to continue expectant, caught in the beauty of its pieces, or become an interactor, an individual responsible for his and everyone else’s existence. Bandeja de Bolívar (1999) is an extraordinary photo sequence that tells the frustrated illusion
Juan Manuel Echavarría, La bandeja de Bolívar
of liberty through the violent metamorphosis of a piece of crockery, a replica of the one received by the liberator at the foundation of the Republic, a white and fine debris that manifests the destiny of a country where the devastating boomerang of drug-trafficking blossomed. Echevarría’s subject is war, the violent disappearance of bodies. He finds the symbolic relationships formulated by his work through the representation of bordering circumstances, the same border that separates a country from its normality and recovers a glimpse of the abyss
for the spectator, embellished, complex, and hard to define. This way he evidences the amazing transformation processes of people who live through violent processes, occasional testimonies for future life, as a result of traumatic fixes that mark them, just like murder: the drama implied by leaving the world by a foreign hand. Probably one of his more moving pieces, the Bocas de Ceniza (2003-2004) video –which really is a photographic portrait with movement– depicts singing as a resistance act, an aesthetical act that appears where everything crumbles, www.LivingArtRoom.com
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like a thread leading unto life again. Seven survivors of killings tell their stories singing, their faces in a close-up seeing the spectator, singing for him. These people created their own songs. They dwell in places far from the main urban centers, places where the population is majorly black and mulatto, where the most emblematic musical genres of the country are usually originated. Echavarría binds these personal fragments of destruction in a way the media has never tried.You could say that reality told this way hurts, but it also moves, for its desolating beauty. Juan Fernando Herrán (Bogotá, 1963) is a pho-
tographer who seeks to familiarize with the object, a photographic sculptor that seeks objects and, through them, the complexities of collective life about which he likes to talk. The author shoots objects that already have a history and that embodied profound mental processes in the subjects that elaborated them. The power of his images rests, then, in the stories told silently by those objects, in the ways that evidence the actions that happen through them. In Campo Santo (2006), Herrán registers violence through a minimal fixed gesture: crosses made spontaneously by the grieving in a communion
Juan Manuel Echavarría, Bocas de Ceniza
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with natural space, no names, like a fertilizer for memory, like a ritual way of expressing the horror of what happened. Herrรกn is witness of an intimate event that happens in a rural zone next to the capital, where combats between paramilitary and guerilla groups once happened. That way, through the registry of the spontaneous action of painting a cross over a rock, or to integrate it with a pair of sticks found in the same terrain, discovers a universe of meanings that rises from these manifestations of anonymous pain, enunciating a major conflict that is present in all levels of society in Colombia. Herrรกn is a patient thinker: he knows how to listen. The people whose objects he photographs are co-authors of his work; he gives them that category without letting them know. Herrรกn also has the ability of finding an occult side in objects that appear as obvious or insignificant, but that little by little unleash a wide range of possible interpretations. Juan Fernando Herrรกn, s.n. (Romero) de la serie Campo Santo www.LivingArtRoom.com
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Juan Fernando Herrรกn, s.n. (Hortus 1) de la serie Campo Santo
This way, the author reflexes upon power and its strategies to point specific groups of population as guilty, criminals or victims, but questioning such decisions. A soft but accurate stone throw. We go deeper into the books now, into referen72
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ces that not everyone has. In short, the discourse starts to become civilized. Few works as David Quiebramales (2005) can express the Colombian armed conflict. It is an icon, but not a trophy from sensationalism, nor an emblem that works printed on a shirt; it is an icon that dwells in the
mind, even though it can’t be understood in a conscious way, though there is no way of fully understanding it. Miguel Ángel Rojas (Bogotá, 1946) is the author of this piece, which is made up of six natural size photographs of a young soldier of the Colombian army naked over a piece of ivory, mimicking the position of Michelangelo’s David. The image is disturbing because the man lost his left leg to a landmine. The word “quiebramales” (harmbreaker) is written down in the floor with pieces of pencil. The strange thing about this game of mirrors is that, in order to get close to its possible meanings one has to make a long detour, even if the photographs seem to explain themselves, and probably do so. We talk about the perfect image, one that keeps the capacity of surprise in the spectator, because it is slippery as it is attractive. This David speaks of the beauty destroyed by war, of a country’s disability to move incomplete. Rojas expresses the violence by abusing one of the icons from Western art; he outlines the anti-Renaissance of a society that has fallen unto important degrees
of madness because of war. His work shows us violence in an insolent way, through a soldier of the army, naked and amputated, but neutralizes his audacity by turning the image in a sculpture that can be admired, but is incomplete. Rojas is that kind of photographer and many more, forcing photography to do something that it is not used to: work as a text. He actually makes some of his pieces with small circular photographic fragments that organize to form phrases, references to art history or real characters, always with a touch of poison. It’s no coincidence: we talk of an artist from the rebellion, a marginal –sometimes autobiographic– that redefines national identities and its contradictions. There is an underlying sense of ethic in Roja’s work, and also a game of social oppositions – unsolvable, actually– that define a great deal of the dynamics experienced by Colombia for the last 30 years. Rojas generates the unpleasant in a way that he questions the spectator’s comfort by giving him the active role that any interpreter deserves. www.LivingArtRoom.com
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Miguel ﾃ］gel Rojas, David quie
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Óscar Muñoz (Popayán, 1951) is the least auratic author of this first group, which ends with him. And he is the less auratic, even if his work includes many portraits of people4. The reason for this paradox is that these people are anonymous; their stories don’t matter, the ideas they bring forth do. What does Muñoz talks about? His work refuses the abbreviated definition of a subject. In it lies the impulse that moves living beings, the mystery that inspires them. It also has to do with a sensitive meta-language that generates rifts between techniques, and seeks a visual inventive that makes it possible to allude to life in an unexpected way, and to its forced antithesis, death. Muñoz makes grafts with photography, eliminates its connatural grimace through amazing strategies, exquisite at the same time, to set out the idea of image as a course, and the course of images as an analogy of existence.The reflection, refraction, the poetry of the vital process and the ways it may be interrupted.
ebramales, 2008, installation view, Sicardi Gallery www.sicardi.com www.LivingArtRoom.com
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Photography itself is an allusion to the passing character of life, whichever way the representation of an instant is treated in the course of a flux. Muñoz alludes to every death and is universal in that sense, even if the word “universal” sounds flamboyant. Muñoz is the man referred by Heraclitus, who takes us by the hand to feel the passing of the river water. In Impresiones Débiles he shows washed, blurry images made, as often is the case with Muñoz, through techniques developed by him, a serigraphic print with powdercoat, in this case. In each image, a subject is more defined than the rest, appealing to the spectator’s memory for completion. History is made problematic this way, but also the processes that constitute it: the struggle between official and marginal versions, and the mental production of the individuals toward the facts that make them vulnerable. In a context where violent death is a common, it may be consistent to refer to death as a loss, equal to all, common to all. Óscar Muñoz, Impresiones débiles, 2011, Sicardi Gallery www.sicardi.com
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VI. Things turned this way: Mexico The recurring subjects in Mexican photography fluctuated between pretended representations of the identity, similar to other countries in Latin America: the social struggle, nature’s excesses, the exotic look to original cultures, the post-modern contradictions of our societies5. This tone has made a gradual turn almost a century after the beginning of the Revolution. Although not a peaceful country, as its history clearly testifies, the process of violence that affects Mexican population today is a new subject, at least since the solidification of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), monolithic power party that continuously ruled the country from 1929 to 2000, the year when PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) rose to power with Vicente Fox, when problems began to unleash6. One could say that the depiction of armed violence during this lapse of time –save sporadic but strong events on a media level such as the student’s movement in ’68, or the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional)– is
something new for photojournalism and Mexican contemporary art. Fernando Brito (Culiacán, 1975) is a paradigmatic case in the national photography circles, having obtained achievements in the last 2 years that no fellow countryman had before, in such different events as Centro de la Imagen’s Biennale7 (2010), PhotoEspaña8 (2011) and Word Press Photo9 (2011). The reasons: the fragile division the author touches with his work, between photojournalism and contemporary photography, in addition to the state of violence brought up by the confrontation between the drug cartels and the State’s armed forces. Brito works in a newspaper in Culiacán, Sinaloa, city close to Badiraguato, land that from the 19th Century has poppy plantations and where the most powerful drug lords of the last decades originated. In this context where images can be assumed as a red note, they acquire through Brito a peaceful but not less impressive character. The author establishes a lonesome and meticulous relationship with the bodies of the executed and the landscape that contains them through formal strategies of contemporary www.LivingArtRoom.com
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Fernando Brito, Tus pasos se perdieron con el paisaje
photography: the notion of a serial and registry of a motionless subject, a dead nature. Images of photojournalism are urgent, their tracks are instant. Nothing seems to be left to reflection except the wound they generate, 78
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their fast turn in conscience. Tus pasos se perdieron con el paisaje (2010) configures a series of neuralgic photographs that talk about a new social up-rising in Mexico, and opens, with its language, an unexpected terrain where amazement and repudiation come together. Despite
Fernando Brito, Tus pasos se perdieron con el paisaje
all, this work conveys the risk of actual images being erased upon the coming ones, that disturbing photographs cease to be so and documenting the victim may take us to ignore the causes of war.
Carlos Álvarez Montero (México, 1974) is part of a group of young photographers that, from different formal origins, have gradually become close to the country’s actual circumstances: the start of the armed conflict10. His work is an www.LivingArtRoom.com
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illegal saw millers, supposedly protected by the most important criminal group in the country, “Los Zetas”, who pillage the natural resources of the community upon the lazy look of the State forces. The dwellers of Cherán have raised in arms to defend themselves, winning the priCarlos Álvarez Montero, Cherán ze of many deaths, evidencing dynamics that take place today in othinteresting document about different agents er parts of the country, labyrinths generated that will become harder to decipher in this story by a land with no law. with the passing of time. The images of Álvarez Montero show us a body There are different graphic works about Cherán dressed with hybrid clothes, a traditional, urban (2012), but Álvarez Montero’s camera has the and military suit in the middle of a divided singularity of registering different factions of territory. This reading of the body’s migrathe armed conflict that takes place in this inditions, its marks and signs11, could constitute a genous town, located in the state of Michoacán. very important chapter in the country’s recent Said town has been continuously attacked by history. It requires, however, a more consistent 80
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Carlos Álvarez Montero, Cherán
work generated from perseverance and the risk of documenting the facts. Despite everything, the union of this social mosaic approaches possible perspectives of the future country in a social context that photographers will learn to assume with time.
The subject of death is an ancient constant in representations of the Mexican popular culture. But due to recent circumstances, it takes a different tone. Humberto Ríos (México, 1983) neutralizes the references in today’s collective unconscious through photographs taken in vigwww.LivingArtRoom.com
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il rooms through different places in the Mexican republic, the suppression of human drama. His gaze is not body-oriented, but enounces it, lets it be seen in objects composed with stillness and severity, objects that are the residues and tracks of the living.
The series Transito (2012) takes place in a veiled level of auratic contact, without even alluding to specific circumstances of death; it is about silent, solitary and peaceful images; images of waiting and absorption, where it is not possible for us to know anything about the dead, even
Humberto RĂos, TrĂĄnsito
Humberto RĂos, TrĂĄnsito
if death is real and all encompassing, through the almost sculptural existence of furniture and objects in the darkness.
teaches us their internal dynamics, but in absence, subtly, as a statement of the abandonment represented by this last meeting place.
That is how an unusual perception about this scenery of tensions is originated. We know that funerary homes are often associated with grief, absorption and reflection; however, the series
In a very different circle from other works is Livia Corona (Ensenada, 1975). Her inclusion may seem out of place or risky because it does not seem representative of the images of viowww.LivingArtRoom.com
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lence or of the body in such circumstances. However, her series Dos millones de casas para MĂŠxico (2009-2010) establishes a perspective needed to understand a large part of the conflicts faced by the country today. Corona shoots the sinister mechanisms of massive confinement happening in Mexico through public policies established by PAN from its ascendancy to presidency in the year 2000: the radical separation of the least favored through the euphemism of building popular housings, in housing complexes that skip the minimal principles of urbanism, ethic and aesthetic, and that postulate the rigor of a class apartheid that must be paid through a large credit by their own victims. These serialized and somber landscapes are the future of Mexican cities prefigured from power with the sarcasm of offering a pretended benefit to the citizen that covers personal privileges, while less spaces, materials and plans are being made, in detriment of millions of people. We speak of a meticulously planned social exclusion to trace a clear frontier, at least for the next 30 years, between social classes. Prison, cemetery, training field or ghetto, these are the associations that happen in the mind when watch-
Livia Corona, D
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Dos millones de casas para MĂŠxico
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ing the images of Livia Corona who expresses, through the slowing of the individuals, the way of playing with the will of the average citizen who aspires –call it a generational tradition– to acquire land. So this chance of belonging to the urban circle through housing becomes a tricked acquisition that assigns them a marginalized condition, inoperative labyrinths and uniforms, planned for social control. We see bodies stuck in the absurdness of a geometrical nightmare, that have been imposed a language that is not that far from the corrective penances and the mechanical exercise of industries where surely many of them work. Livia Corona is worried to know what types of people can be spawned by these urban spaces. I am too. On a different note is the series María Elvia de Hank (2006-2009), different for all that its photographic approach represents, as well as the social circle where it happens. Yvonne Venegas (Long Beach/Tijuana, 1970) is an observer of uncontrolled angles of personality. Her work reflexes upon the ideal image followed through 86
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posing, and how this is constructed through a tension between individual and society. In this series, Venegas enunciates some of the outlandishness caused by the ethics generated because of México’s current illegality, a faithful imitation of those that have been regularly shown by the illegal part of the aristocracy that governs. Only that, surprisingly, Venegas pictures them from inside, looking for images that are neither part of the decisive moment of photojournalism nor of the suspended reality of the new documentary. They are images of the anticlimax, paradoxical because they depict, in their protagonists, traces of the human beat to access power. The most interesting part of the work of Venegas is the way she enters totally constituted universes where it is very easy to access, to take pictures of ambiguities through images that many would find without substance, and that
Yvonne Venegas, MarĂa Elvia de Hank / Muchachos www.LivingArtRoom.com
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Yvonne Venegas, MarĂa Elvia de Hank /
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look for that which happens before or after the images we always see in the media. That is how the camera of Venegas operates in those cracks where public persons are not able to control their media identities, picturing the involuntary gesture that is almost always covered by pose.
Closing This journey through authors that represent the regent looks in art and photojournalism in art (Colombia and Mexico) evidences two possible risks in the use of images: that of making direct photographs of violence (an immediate, visceral look), or that of symbolizing it (a reflective, metaphorical look). Both decisions carry a high level of difficulty, both because of the strategies needed to do it, and the ethical and political implications in every piece. Such is the challenge of manifesting about the so cial irregularities present today in both countries.
/ Velas www.LivingArtRoom.com
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1. Colombian guerrilla groups entered the drug traffic business since the 1990s, a fact that generates different readings: one that consents this circumstance as a fighting strategy and another one that disqualifies it, assuring us that these groups cannot be considered insurgents anymore, but terrorists and criminals. 2. The auratic event, in this case, is the violent one, or its traces: evidences in place, objects, testimonies of people involved, etc. 3. This variation has interesting socio-economical and politic implications. 4. The artist includes his own image in many of his pieces. 5. The photographic icons of the Mexican Revolution, fully consolidated with the passing of
time, should be included here. 6. The PRI has won the latest elections with Enrique Peña Nieto as elected president for the period 2012-2018. 7. This is the most important photography event in Mexico, established by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) in 1980. 8. Brito won the Discoveries Award, originated in 1988, given to the best photographic project presented in the Festival’s portfolio review, 9. Two of the three winning images for the general news category in World Press Photo 2011 were taken in Mexico, as a result of the drug wars. These kinds of contests, driven by the spectacular nature of the images, usually generate controversies towards the
Photography credits Courtesy of the artists
photojournalist’s job. Its existence may be due to a symptom of political repression limiting the informational voices. There are, however, some ethical dilemmas for the photographers, who have to move among very debated ideas: opportunism and activism. 10. Other authors with similar processes: Rodrigo Cruz, Federico Gama and Mauricio Palos. 11. The author has other series showing different perspectives of the Mexican reality linked with the country life, migration and criminal processes.
Jesús Abad Colorado • Juan Manuel Echavarría http://jmechavarria. com/ • Juan Fernando Herrán • Fernando Brito • Carlos Álvarez Montero http://www.alvarezmontero.com/ • Humberto Ríos www. humbertoriosfotografo.blogspot.com.es • Livia Corona http://www.liviacorona.com/ • Yvonne Venegas http://www.yvonnevenegas.com/ Sicardi Gallery http://www.sicardi.com/ Miguel Ángel Rojas • Óscar Muñoz
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ARTIST
PORTFOLIOS UPDATE
Alejandra Baltazares
Jimena Schlaepfer
Mexico
Mexico
María García-Ibañez
Julio Pastor
Spain
Mexico
Pablo Cotama
Raúl Cerrillo
Mexico
Mexico
Alejandra Baltazares
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The Carpet, 2012. In co-autorship with Philip Metz www.LivingArtRoom.com/alejandra_baltazares
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Luyolo, 2012
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Luyolo, 2012
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Luyolo, 2012
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Luyolo, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/alejandra_baltazares
Jimena Schlaepfer
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Serpiente de papel, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/jimena_schlaepfer
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Piesderaiz, 2011
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Bailarinas, 2011
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Serie mutantes marin
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nos, 2011
Piesderaiz, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/jimena_schlaepfer
María García-Ibañez www.livingartroom.com/maria_garciaibanez
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Apuntes para una madriguera (drawings), 2011
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Apuntes para una madriguera (drawings), 2011
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Apuntes para una madriguera (installation), 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/maria_garciaibanez
Apuntes para una madriguera (drawings), 2011
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MIcrographia, 2013
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MIcrographia, 2013
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MIcrographia, 2013 www.LivingArtRoom.com/maria_garciaibanez
Julio Pastor
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Berlin: under construction, 2012
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Urban findings, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/julio_pastor
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Urban findings, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/julio_pastor
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Urban findings, 2012
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Berlin: under construction, 2012
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Pablo Cotama
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SĂşbito es el colapso, 2012
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SĂşbito es el colapso, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/pablo_cotama
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Preamble of the moment, 2012 www.LivingArtRoom.com/pablo_cotama
Abiogénesis mound, 2012
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Colapsus Panda, 2012
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Perpetuum mobile, 2012
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Continuous synopsis record, 2012
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Light of the mind, light of the world, 2011
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RaĂşl Cerrillo
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Cruz, 2011
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Infinito, 2011
Untitled, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/raul_cerrillo
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Untitled, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/raul_cerrillo
Sue単os, 2011
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No face, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/raul_cerrillo
Fรกbrica de corazones, 2012
El profeta, 2012
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Electro Bull, 2011 www.LivingArtRoom.com/raul_cerrillo
"LIFE DOESN'T IMITATE ART, IT IMITATES BAD TELEVISION." WOODY ALLEN
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NEW VIDEOS Micrographia / María García-Ibañez Hong Kong, China
Pablo Cotama / Aquello que fue ya es y lo que ha de ser, fue ya Monterrey, Mexico
Registro 03 Espejo reflejo Monterrey, Mexico
La Biblioteca de la Tierra / Marianna Dellekamp Monterrey, Mexico
Art Basel Miami Beach 2012 Florida, USA
Futbol. Arte y Pasión Monterrey, Mexico
LAR
tv
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RECOMMENDED María García-Ibañez
Mic
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The Cat Street Gallery & Puerta Roja Wednesday 20 february 6-9 pm Hong Kong, China
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SPECIAL GUEST
MAURICIO GUILLEN 162
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“From our birth to our death we are busy with artificial stuff that has no importance.”
Tom Ford
Go back and live in the town? Never. That was the first thing I thought when I was fired, with many other employees, during the financial crisis of 2010 in the United States. I was working for Chrysler, one of the most affected companies. As an ace under my sleeve and for mere passion, I had secured and extended my stay in the first world working for the editorial industry, a job I had been doing for quite a while. And I did it well.
Some time passed and I started to locate myself again in my native city; there were great benefits like an excellent quality of life, and the rediscovering of grandma’s great house opened the window of possibility for a new project. “A hotel; I will make a hotel, but I want something that, being my personal space, can motivate me daily: a place where I would love to stay.”
I will make a hotel, but I want something that can motivate me daily: a place where I would love to stay
This overwhelming crisis reached every circle, including the magazine I was working for. Before its death I made a decision that I thought, one way or another, would change the course of my professional life.
This hard labor started with a series of bureaucratic paperwork that can destroy anyone’s patience. Id’s, ground use, property registry, etc. All this was not enough for the process of modifying an 1851 home in front of the eyes of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Houses so old that are categorized as unwww.LivingArtRoom.com
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touchable. But a good argument and some tries later, the project was accepted. A general law of design (that separates us from scientists) says that ANYTHING CAN BE DONE, premise under which I started planning the “transformation” of a comiteca house into an installation with contemporary amenities. For anyone else who would have tried to make this
That unforgettable trip ov the cloth for the tortillas… eve have a real infl project, the most common comfort zone is one that invites to use the classic cultural resources and the geographical clichés. That is where I placed my first limit: even if the space was from Chiapas and screamed Jaguar and Marimba, I always envisioned the hotel as a display of styles. TV Series, cartoons, soap operas, the house of aunt a-go-go, grandma’s, a childhood’s photo frame, the horrible bathroom rug, the building and the view in front of your house, that unforgettable trip overseas, a trendy blog, toys, 164
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the cloth for the tortillas‌ everything that surrounds you will have a real influence in you; it stays in the subconscious and, when you least expect it, appears on your projects. Today, the project finished, I still encounter with situations, works and objects that served as references for the hotel. It is a common thing for me to see my geometrical obsessions when I walk through it every day.
verseas, a trendy blog, toys, erything that surrounds you will fluence in you; Have you really asked yourself, why do gyms have mirrors? Why does mama sleeps better at night when you go out with childhood friends? Why are the Spice Girls famous? These types of questions always take us to the well-known and to the easy assimilation of information, and that is another very important point: it was never my intention to do something complicated; people don’t do that anymore. The search for balance that the design of a specific place may ask from you involves findwww.LivingArtRoom.com
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ing the harmony and pregnancy, without ever putting aside the fact that you create for different looks, different kinds of guests. Harmony and pregnancy are conditions that are not easy to work with; they are special gifts like being creative, knowing how to draw or attracting a girl. Genetics don’t help very much in these cases. But I have proved that sons with
place where people can feel fantastic and can exude a part of their personality That is how eight rooms saw the light, each one different to the others. The selection of images that would coexist with each room’s concept was not an easy task, on the contrary: it took me months of indecision and, on the other side, a whole life’s teaching. Said curatorship showed
Ego, indifference and uneasiness ghosts were challenged to death. Life in providence, as it is called, is an excellent therapist that corrects many of our shadows. special tastes come from equally special parents. The hotel guest would have to be special. Creating something convincing today is very easy. The TV generation already had limited information, but today’s digital and blog era has limited the aesthetical taste of humans even more. To avoid this cancer, and as a great benefit of an interior decorator, I went back to basics: to give a psychological and emotional focus to the spaces in design itself, trying to create a 166
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me that many times it’s not about you not wanting to do stuff or to take part in some project, but, it is said, sometimes you can and sometimes you don’t. And it’s in the NO where creativity explodes and all those creators forcefully resurge, those that usually live in a constant YES. You know what? I’m one of them: living in the YES opens channels and new experiences, new projects; everything flows faster than expected
and, above all, you receive the same thing you have been giving and working along all your life. During its construction, the hotel project solidified creativity margins, expenses, times and a lot of patience. On a different note and under the same time lapse, ego, indifference and uneasiness ghosts were challenged to death. Life in providence, as it is called, is an excellent therapist that corrects many of our shadows.
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ART IN CASA DELINA The eight rooms, garden and hallways were always planned as displays for the exhibition of design and contemporary art proposals. For months I gathered local materials, timeless plants and vintage furniture to decorate the interiors and establish the style.
ROOM 1 was the most ABSTRACT of them all, without a doubt, and with reminiscences to the eighties, shows the work of the Mexican illustrator Alex Arizmendi. The lobby has a guest of honor: there is a phrase from Anna Carnick, specialized editor in design and arts form New York. The bathrooms of the common areas have been defined as a mix between Paris and Istanbul. I made a game of mirrors and traditional Comiteco tile, including original pieces. 168
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ROOM 2 is ROMANTIC: three colorful and giant circles at the bottom of the room are a piece of polish artist Marta Gliwinska. The art of Gliwinska depicts couples acting suggestively. In her work, women don’t see the beloved subject, and not only because they have no face, but because they, the protagonists, are blinded with flowers over their eyes. It’s an interesting piece since Gliwinska locates our country as a generator of TV Dramas and passioned inhabitants.
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ROOM 3 is actually a Project room. The mouths that Brian Anderson puts freely in line cover the main wall of the room, giving this room the name SEXY. It is of notice that said room is quite controversial: there is no middle ground, the guest either loves or hates it. This room will always be open to future interventions.
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ROOM 4 is the more CHIC one. Its interior includes the work of British artist Tony Easley. His work describes an eye inside a partridge’s feather. Kitsch, right? Well it isn’t; its technique, style and color transform the piece in a clear example of neo-reality. Easley’s eye is in a somber ambiance that is full of “ornaments” that are always taking me to eternal discussions with the investors. www.LivingArtRoom.com
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ROOM 5 is the most LOCAL one and is known as the Comiteca Room. Itis an answer to room 4, since it’s a clear example of simplicity. The room displays a headboard and hall with colorful tiles made by Los Chacales, artisans from Chacaljocom, Chiapas. Los Chacales have been doing traditional tile work, which is slowly disappearing, from the seventies to current day. I was never pleased with talks about “no more ornaments in this hotel” and, as a proposal, I added the text: “You are not doing anything wrong” to the wall of room 5. The sexual connotations of the phrase almost always define the user of this room.
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ROOM NUMBER 6, EL RANCHO, is a contrast of materials. This room is in constant creation since the guest artist Egor Kraft, from Australia, proposes gradual changes to his actual piece, which for now is a black mare in full Kraft style. It is a luxury for House Delina to have the work of Egor, since his architectural work has been reviewed in the best media specialized in interior decoration and visual circles.
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ROOM 7 is RETRO Room. Original furniture and color take us to the golden age of the old house. To give it even more strength, Mexican photographer Toni Franรงois (famous for her strong rock images) surprised me with the sweet image of a young deer, contrasting with the antlers of an adult deer, over the bed area. 174
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Last but not less important is great ROOM NUMBER 8, THE PLANETS. Comitán was once known as Balún Canán, which in Mayan means “nine guardians”. Details in floor, wall and lamp form the count of the nine guardians, completed with pieces from Madrid-born artist Marina Molares. Two contempo collages with a planetary theme bring all the style of Morales, always strong, always pop. That the work of Morales is one of the most shared and liked visuals in social networks such as Pinterest is not the work of chance.
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With the floor in the halls I went for a disco effect, I learned the trade of floor tile and had a lot of fun generating new tones. For the garden, what I remember the most is planting each piece in the hotel. Most of them were gifts and many were stolen. Every day while driving towards the construction site I saw something I liked, I asked for it and that was it; but in many cases I had to jump a couple of fences to get what I wanted. One time I slipped into a pig breeding ground to take several types of cactus. That day my passion pulsated again and today I feel and live this project with great pride. Dear Tom Ford, isn’t it enough to be up to the knees in pig shit to be able to say that we worry for things that are not important? No, I do not think so.
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"ART IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE, BUT WHAT YOU MAKE OTHERS SEE." EDGAR DEGAS
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VOICES IN YOUR HEAD MUSIC, VIOLENCE, INTERPRETATION 178
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Music, when listened to correctly, can show us a reflection of our own personality. And by listening “correctly” I mean dedicating a fair amount of time and paying attention to it in a conscious way –as much as it lets you– preferably without exaggerating too much. This conscious job is parallel to the neural connections that activate in the brain upon the memory of certain melody or composition. How does music gets into our bodies? The answer I got the most was: through your ears, your brain, your heart. Why do we listen? The answer that surprised me the most was: and why do we eat? To
that I’ll have to say that I eat for pleasure more times than I do it for hunger since my appetite for something that I like is usually bigger than my need to feed myself and process nutrients. Listening to music may be a pleasure or a necessity, but never an obligation (there are also critics, who don’t always listen for pleasure but always have an opinion). Music –and generally speaking, people expressing themselves– has always raised controversies. The names of certain extreme bands or artists are always present in the news when reporting www.LivingArtRoom.com
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2013, it can´t be that hard.
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about multiple murders or school killings. Everybody saw Marilyn Manson defending himself of such accusations in Bowling for Columbine more than a decade ago, and some may have heard of the defamation CNN made about hardcore band Hatebreed, accusing them of promoting white supremacist ideas in the wake of the killings that took place in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, in 2012. How many people does CNN have in charge of fact-checking? This is 180
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THE ROAD OF M RESEMBLE SW RIVER FULL O
The issue will always be expression and the clash of ideas, pigheadedness, and fundamentalism. Music is a powerful form of expression that may sometimes be created for a particular group of people, but many others is just a completely unknown thing. How can a song’s message be “correctly” understood? While some melt at the idea of deciphering the lyrics and concepts of an album, many others rejoice in the ambiguity of what they think they understand. The total experience of a song may be disassembled in tone, style, composition, lyrics, ideology, duration, “ambiance”, hooks, etc., all of them at the service of our subconscious. Hundreds of mental and spiritual connections creating a meaning, a vignette of an artistic idea: an interpretation. We all get what we want out of a song, when we listen freely. Although it has different shades, the main problem of music with violent subjects is the lack
of responsibility, the exploitation of violence and morbidness, not the killings or the raising criminal rates in a city. Juarez and Irak do not have great music circuits with grindcore or deathcore bands, and on the other side, I have never heard of the massacres that happened in small nests of “musical violence” such as New Orleans or Birmingham –cities that have spawned such important extreme bands as Eyehategod, Soilent Green, Napalm
MUSIC COULD WIMMING IN A OF CREEPERS
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Death and Godflesh–, because they have never happened. Someone who listens responsibly doesn’t need a song to become a murderer or a criminal. Despite this I do believe that a song may function as a kind of psychopathic trigger, but it wouldn’t even have to have violent or satanic subjects. The expression of ideas and feelings is one thing, but a person’s mental circumstance is something very different. Music can be listened to individually or in groups, and the best way to enjoy it is to understand it. It is not sane for a 10 year old boy to go http://www.godflesh.com
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that has listened to soft FM radio all of his life may not be the best option to make a moral judgment about, say, Cannibal Corpse? Talking about ultra-specialized genres, things always have a meaning and/or reason, or at least a more or less logical derivation. Traditionally, rock has been a rebellious genre, sometimes aggressive and haughty, and extreme minor genres are nothing but an escalation of that attitude. Attitude. And, though it may sound funny,
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into a store and buy a Dying Fetus record just because of the morbid feeling the cover generates in him. I mean, I don’t think it sane for a 10 year old to listen to Dying Fetus (although, being realistic, the boy would not tell a verse of the band from the racket of a drill), but in any case, it will always be important for someone to explain or give the boy an idea of what those kinds of expression mean. Usually things require a certain experience to be deciphered. An adult 182
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THE ROAD TO THOSE PLA HAS BEEN SPLATTERED WIT THAT IS WHAT WE ARE MA sometimes the expression of a person with dark, depressive and bloody thoughts may not be the most suitable for an innocent, happy and positive one. The road of music could resemble swimming in a river full of creepers and malevolent arms. Sometimes you can get stuck deep down for years among the knots of different branches,
different genres, trying to decode or juice them as much as you can. And in a worst-case scenario, the strong current can drag you along. There are many ways in and many ways out of music (I know people who abandoned music for a relationship or a job). At least to me, music has been a strange highway that has taken me to unexpected places, but also to other ones I always imagined but never thought finding. The road to those places (mine, at least) has been
be by hitting the walls, and a song can help in releasing that desperation. And well, there are some violent-themed records with bloody covers in my collection, but that has not turned me into a killer or a criminal, at least not up to this day.
ACES (MINE, AT LEAST) TH BONES AND BLOOD, BUT ADE OF IN THE END, ISN’T IT? splattered with bones and blood, but that is what we are made of in the end, isn’t it? Music, when listened to correctly, can show us a reflection of our own personality. We are human beings with infinite feelings, fears and needs. There are times when a good romantic song can capture us, but regular people also has those episodes when the only way out seems to
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"I HAVE FORCED MYSELF TO CONTRADICT MYSELF IN ORDER TO AVOID CONFORMING TO MY OWN TASTE" MARCEL DUCHAMP
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"I DON’T THINK PEOPLE ARE BORN ARTISTS; I THINK IT COMES FROM A MIXTURE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS, THE PEOPLE YOU MEET, AND LUCK" FRANCIS BACON
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