Unlikely Savages

AC
Institute
Project
presented by Carla Macchiavello, Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism Stony Brook
March
24-April 30, 2011
 
Unlikely Savages
 
Project
description
 
Unlikely
Savages presents works by seven artists that question the continuity of
the savage paradigm in relation to Latin America and the ideologies of dominion
and violence that support it. Through a dialogue of related themes (technology,
archives, violence) and mediums (video, installation, text), the exhibition
attempts to put in tension and intertwine a variety of positions regarding the
images of the uncivilized that Latin America still evokes, both from within and
without. Though savagery seems to have changed forms, leaving the colonial
world behind to reemerge as extreme violence often associated in Latin America
with political questions, oppressive regimes, revolutionaries, and more
recently drugs, the term is still deeply enmeshed with battles of dominion and
representation involving many actors. The works in this exhibition address in
either direct or veiled ways some of the convoluted relations between the
so-called first and third worlds, alluding to everyday realities and imaginary
ones through an extended notion of savagery.
 
The
works
 
The exhibition opens with a wall text by Elkin Calderón, which
introduces the contradictions of being a successful Latin American artist
dealing with themes such as violence, as in the case of the renown Colombian
artist Doris Salcedo. Through a first person narration, badly translated and
copied, Calderón plays with stereotypes regarding artistic civilized behavior.
The work enters in dialogue with the video installation by Manuela Viera-Gallo
(Chile, 1975), who posits the existence of a third world in every first world
through shards and glimpses of savage behavior. In works like “Undercover”,
ceramic black crows watch through white sacks the gallery’s visitors,
establishing an ambience of suspicion regarding others. Violence reemerges in two
video works of Alejandro Moreno (Chile), which re-conceptualize aggressive
ritual and its connection to Western fantasy and gender identity through hybrid
myths and the crude violence of sexual stereotypes (“La Chata”). Imaginary
violence is also evoked in a double video projection by Diego Lama (Peru, 1980),
where oneiric images organized in chapters explore the architecture of power influencing
the construction of a savage Latin America. This dream-like quality is
countered by the documentary works of Wilson Díaz (Colombia) that delve on the
entangled ways in which tradition, popular culture, violence, and warfare
continually displace notions of primitive and civilized behaviors. In his
drawings with a type of pencil made out of coke leaves and video “Rebeldes del
sur”, nature, resources, music, and war are joined to question the roles of
those involved in the drug conflict. The relationship between the primitive,
violence, and otherness has been central to the revisions of the archive as a
system of knowledge and the reproduction of power relations in the works of
Ernesto Salmerón (Nicaragua, 1977). Opening up the limits of knowledge neatly
classified in the archive, Salmerón brings disparate sources of external
visions concerning the Americas and some of its most complicated agents in the
video “El Danto”. In between clips, projections, and images coming from
archival interviews with the son of guerrilla leaders from Nicaragua and U.S.
supported propaganda material, a different picture of the Americas may be
glimpsed. The exhibition closes with a video and text installation by Andrés
Burbano (Colombia) in which the artist’s own expectations regarding his home
country uncivilized others clash full front with the native’s realities. Coming
full circle and joining Calderón’s initial text through its reference to language
and translation, Burbano’s installation leaves an open question regarding the
present and future relations between technology, power, minorities, and
dominant cultures in an interconnected world.
 
 
List of artists
 
Andrés Burbano
(Colombia)
Elkin Calderón
(Colombia)
Wilson Díaz
(Colombia)
Diego Lama
(Peru)
Alejandro Moreno
(Chile)
Ernesto Salmerón
(Nicaragua)
Manuela
Viera-Gallo (Chile)