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The Artist-Connector Manuel Borja-Villel Over the last few decades, there has been a proliferation of artistic practices based on the concept of community, the defense of the local, multidisciplinary creation, working with the archive, and activist assemblage. But in the tension between rupture and self-absorption that has taken hold in contemporary art since the middle of the twentieth century, these practices have often ended up functioning as preestablished positions stripped of their original critical power. One of our main reasons for presenting this retrospective exhibition—although as we shall see, this is not an entirely apt description of what we aspire to in Versifying Machines Machines—is precisely Pedro G. Romero’s ability to work with all these elements while maintaining a political, methodological, and discursive complexity that allows him to circumvent this loss of critical power. Active as an artist since the mid-s, Romero has developed a particular way of making/doing art that is radically “ex-centric” in its heterodoxy and its peripheral condition and intent, and that incorporates collective participation organically, in the sense that it accepts and integrates participatory dynamics and particularities. In his projects, collaborative work and an interdisciplinary approach are constituent elements rather than instrumental strategies or mere tools for (self-)legitimization. And he himself does not settle into a predefined position, but dialogues and openly negotiates with the very diverse agents with whose collaboration he carries them out. As such, Romero avoids falling into a sense of security, as sometimes happens with creators who work in the realm of community without bringing about any kind of real shift that would allow them to abandon and move beyond their role as artists. On the other hand, the vernacular also plays a key role in Pedro G. Romero’s practice, which absorbs and explores a certain popular tradition—“that of folk singers and flamenco”— which has a distinct, albeit flexible, territorial dimension and is inseparable from his own personal history. The growing trend in contemporary art of generating projects rooted in local contexts, which call for a sort of politics of proximity, all too often ends up giving rise to a certain reactionary logic. This is not the case in Romero’s work because his focus on the vernacular over considerations of identity is based on a defense of jargon (of the notion of jargon itself, not of a particular jargon), in other words, of a way of speaking that evades the normative and deliberately situates itself on the margins, in a position of voluntary clandestinity. Pedro G. Romero’s critical recovery of the vernacular entails a radical contestation of modernity itself. And thus also of the colonial machinery. It is a machinery that began to take shape with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in , the very year—and this is no coincidence—in which Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar of the Castilian language. Romero’s understanding of jargon could be
