CONTENIDO

CONTENTS

SPIS TREŚCI

Prefacio

RECUPERACIÓN DE RELATOS MARGINALIZADOS Y PERSPECTIVAS DECOLONIALES EN EL ARTE Y TEATRO EN ARGENTINA DESDE PRINCIPIOS DEL SIGLO XX HASTA LA ACTUALIDAD

Foreword

THE RECUPERATION OF MARGINALIZED PLOTS AND DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES OF ART AND THEATRE IN ARGENTINA FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH TO 21ST CENTURIES

Przedmowa

ODZYSKIWANIE MARGINALIZOWANYCH NARRACJI I PERSPEKTYWY DEKOLONIALNE W SZTUCE I TEATRZE W ARGENTYNIE OD POCZĄTKU XX DO XXI WIEKU

Fabian Gandini and the est(ethics) of the fissure

During 2015, I collaborated with the Argentine choreographer Fabian Gandini in the production of his last work “En la boca de la tormenta [In the mouth of the storm]”. Gandini is among the first artists to develop the “non-dance” choreographic movement in Buenos Aires, the city where he has lived and worked since 2004. My purpose in this paper will be to describe and analyze Gandini’s artistic practice in terms of a “Aesth-ethics of Fissure” linked not only to a poetical singularity but also to a critic of local dance productive practices. By using the temporal perception and the stilling of movement as dramaturgical resources, Gandini tends to subvert a strong legacy of expressionism. I would like to argue that his choreographic work embodies a political statement in the institutional context of Buenos Aires’ contemporary dance by exposing a specific form of “performative fragility” that establishes itself at the frontier of theatrical fiction.

To ritualize death. Latin American identities in the conceptual practices of Alfredo Portillos

How to reinterpret Latin American identity discourses which were present in the artistic and political practices of the 1970s? How to revaluate their achievements and reinterpret them in the neo-liberal and globalized world of the 1990s, based on selected aesthetic propositions of an Argentinian artist, Alfredo Portillos? How are the emancipatory powers of such practices reactivating and functioning in the contemporary context? The proposed theoretical reflection on the artistic activity of Alfredo Portillos aims at reinterpreting the processes of circulation, valorisation and reception of some works which were omitted during creation of a historiographic account of “Grupo de los Trece” and then CAyC (Buenos Aires). The proposed reflections refer to different scopes of regional aesthetics in search for identity in Latin America and their connections with various political contexts. The narrative identity was accepted by the artist for the first time in 1973, when during the fourth edition of “Salón Premio Paolini”, he presented a work showing an acrylic hermitage. A title of the work, which appeared in the catalogue of “Funerary urn of those who died for liberation of Latin America” (Urna funeraria de los caídos por la Liberación Latinoamericana), was very meaningful. This first semantic and conceptual proposition, including curiosity of matter characteristic of folk religiosity has become an element present in all the rituals presented by Alfredo Portillos (also in the latest one).

Between funeral rituals and protest mobilizations. Methods of engaging in art and politics during the last civilian-military Argentinian dictatorship

Within my research on activism and theatre experiments in the latest Argentine history, I wonder about ways of engaging in art and politics during the last civil-military dictatorship in 1976–1983. For this purpose, I focused on the aesthetic and political activity of Tit (Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales) and Cucaño: two artistic groups formed during this period in Buenos Aires and Rosario respectively. Their undertook activities in the repressive conditions that marked everyday life in the times of state terrorism. However, members of both groups, who conducted bold street actions, organized theatre gatherings and festivals and published the fanzine, which referred to a specific form or rhetorical discourse, not always aimed at direct confrontation with the regime. The article discusses funeral rituals that were present in the artistic activities of both groups. It also allowed for reflection on changes in the relationship between art and politics that arose in the process of democratic change.

Theater and post-dictatorship: La Organizació n Negra (The Black Organization) and its ways of intervening in public space (performative key)

This article investigates about two temporal space coordinates: Buenos Aires in the Postdictatorship. It dates from the Argentine democratic oncoming of December 1983, when that socio-cultural landscape of the city warned against changes and modifications respect to its previous period. Expanding into a multiplicity of artistic micropoetics, several theatre groups and collectives emerged in unconventional and peripheral areas of the city, attempting to reclaim the acceptance of stifled expression that existed during the previous years of the military dictatorship (1976-1983). The Organización Negra is one of these groups. In this article, we intend to address some aspects of its centripetal trajectory (1984-1992), which began in the margins of the theatrical field and culminated with the group’s admission into a space belonging to the official theatrical circuit. At each stage, we intend to investigate the different modes of production, circulation and consumption of their practices. In other words, we observe the procedural aspects that –in pursuit of strengthening and generating their own poetics– were kept (or not) even when the spaces of action have been modified; and we analyze the intersections between art, politics, and the city that were established depending upon each historical moment. Thus, this study aims to record The Organización Negra’s theatrical work, but also to establish its connections with contemporary poetics.

Las bañistas of Raquel Forner: Modern Women

Argentine painter Raquel Forner (1902-1988) has an outstanding place in the national art historical literature, where her work appears regularly from the founding narrative of critic and art historian José León Pagano in the late 1930s. Her double description as heroine of the avant-garde and as weaver of the antifascist flag has kept partially veiled her active participation in the construction of the various variants of the icon ography of the modern woman, a relevant topic in the Argentine art of the 1920s and 1930s. Far from the mourning women that have sustained her entry into the histories of national art, her modern women have strong bodies and powerful gestures. From a series of works associated with the figure of the bather, painted in 1928 and 1929, we will explore the visual construction of a modern femininity, interested in new activities and new scenarios. Far from being a peculiarity of Raquel Forner, this subject permeated the production of other artists who, in various media, dedicated themselves to unfold the visual characteristics of the new feminine appearance and of the social places recently opened to the women. From the celebrated photographer Annemarie Heinrich to the very little known painter Lucrecia Moyano, the concern with this subject was commonplace for many women artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Institutional criticism from the ‘Third World’. Cultura: dentro y fuera del museo

During the sixties and seventies, a significant number of art projects pointed to cultural institutions as managers of conservative social representation. The Anglo-Saxon art history academy tends to study these art practices in terms of “institutional critique”. Coined in 1975 in relation to the New York scene, this notion seems now to be understood as a universal category. Through the analysis of Lea Lublin’s Culture: inside and outside the museum (1971) at the Fine Art Museum of Santiago, Chile, this paper proposes a situated reflection on institutional critique on the basis of this migrant artist’s work.

“Argentinians descend from ships”, but... from which ones? Notes on the (in)visibilisation of River Plate negritude in the contemporary artistic practices

If epistemic or knowledge colonization is the most difficult to displace from our subjectivities, one can understand that in Latin America –one of those “others close to the West”– a western thinking system still dominates, as being residual from the past colonization. This thinking, heir to European modernist reductionism, entails in itself a fundamental basis: racism –as the poet and politician Aimé Césaire stated in his Discourse on Negritude (1987) and other theoreticians picked up later on. If dominant Euroccidentalism begins with modernity – in the midst of Latin America colonisation– and then continues with its humanist school, the persistence of its influence as the prevailing system of thinking should not be surprising, notwithstanding the practical and intellectual efforts made to counteract it for decades. In the young Argentine Republic of the nineteenth century there was a clear political will to spread the idea of whitening and Europeanization. In fact, social imaginary had been formed, according to which there were no more “black” Argentinians, and this had only been an (extinguished) episode of the Spanish colony. From the hegemonic discourse of power, from education and intellectuality in general, black and autochthonous roots (of native peoples) were denied, with the exception of few patriotic folklorisms. Thus, the collective imaginary would say that the supposed “national identity” was composed of a “melting pot of races”, coming mostly from the great European migration. Realizing this, a Mexican writer ironically stated that “while Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Argentinians descend from ships”, echoing a common phrase that expresses an ingrained mythology, especially in Buenos Aires. Jorge Luis Borges would add to this that “Argentines are foreign-born Europeans”, shielding the myth against the idea that slave ships from Africa would also land in the port of Buenos Aires and that Africans and their descendants would leave their mark on the amalgam of Argentinian national identity. In recent years, however, a social turn seems to emerge calling for a historic and political adjustment in this regard. In this context, this paper proposes to investigate and reflect on the state of contemporary visual artistic practices regarding the presence and (in)visibilization of negritude, embarking in a brief tour of the fading of black representation in Argentinian visual culture. Despite the little evidence of Afro-descendants’ presence both in the overall visual culture and in the aesthetic scenario, negritude is anyway manifested in popular culture, in some audio-visuals and short films or in exhibitions distant from the contemporary art scene, where class perspectives seem to be added to those of race, intrinsic to the art system, through the (in)visibilization of negritude in these latitudes.