SALVAJES – DIGESTING EUROPE PIECE BY PIECE
Jonathas de Andrade, Alberto Borea, Nanna Debois Buhl, Luis Camnitzer, Gabriel Dawe, DETEXT, Jeannette Ehlers, Manuela Viera-Gallo, Ricardo Gonzales, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, Lui Mokrzycki, Carlos Motta, Túlio Pinto, Wilfredo Prieto, Miguel Angel Rios, Melanie Smith.
August 18 – October 13 2012
Opening Reception: August 18 from 1pm – 6 pm
Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space
Ahlmanns Allé 6
DK-2900 Hellerup
Copenhagen, Denmark
SALVAJES – Digesting Europe Piece by Piece is collaboration between Fortress to Solitude and Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space, exhibiting 17 artists from Latin America and Europe whose works revolve around inter-colonial relationships, cultural identity, and the dominant power structures rooted in Latin America.
SALVAJES – Digesting Europe Piece by Piece é uma colaboração entre Fortress to Solitude e Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space, exibindo 17 artistas da América Latina e Europa, cujos trabalhos giram em torno de relações inter-coloniais, identidade cultural e as estruturas dominantes de poder enraizadas na América Latina.
SALVAJES
Toda Latinoamérica está sembrada con los huesos de jóvenes olvidados.
— Roberto Bolaño, Rómulo Gallegos prize speech, 1999.
Inspired by the lyrical, political and metaphorical themes in the writing of Roberto Bolaño as well as by his imaginative virtuosity, this exhibition conceptually aligns the Chilean writer’s characters and motifs with the works of eight contemporary Latin American artists. Drawing parallels between these artists and Bolaño’s persona as a nomadic writer, “Salvajes” intends to be Latin American in its essence, and universal in its language.
The title of the exhibition, “Salvajes” (savages), refers to one of Bolaño’s most important novels, Los Detectives Salvajes, and to the stereotypical image of Latin Americans as the uncivilized. We are savages as a result of the long history of violence, deprivation, and exploitation that the continent has experienced since its origins, more perceptible through the recent dictatorships, and colonial, cultural and economic policies suffered right and left, north and south. “Salvajes” refers also to the perception of the role of the artist in society, regardless of their origin. The artist’s struggle against the imperative to create and the ever-gnawing and sometimes maddening demand to make art are some of Bolaño’s larger subjects.
As in much of Bolaño’s oeuvre, the works in this exhibition deal with a notion of emptiness and chaos, and indirectly reference the darkness of Latin-American youth and the wittiness that comes from their rebellious cultural history. Just as Bolaño found ways to make the political integral to his novels without ever making them into political novels, these artists, without being explicit, reference historical facts and characters and draw from personal memory to devise theories and practices which reference a general political stance, even if often these are nuances in the work’s overall concept. While many of the artists allude to their personal histories of permanent migration and cultural itinerancy, all either speak about or find inspiration in their place of “origin”.
“How do you recognize a work of art? How can it be kept apart, even if only for a moment, from its critics, commentators, its indefatigable plagiarists, its defacers and its final destiny in solitude?” Bolaño asks in an essay from the 2004 book Entre Paréntesis. He goes on to answer: “Simple – just translate it.” The artists in Salvajes bring to a New York audience a seamless translation of their Latin American origins into a universal, contemporary and experimental visual language.
— Guillermo Creus, 2011.
Guillermo Creus is an artist and curator, born in Argentina, raised in Brazil and based in New York. He is the founder of Fortress to Solitude, a multi-venue curatorial platform and online art space: www.fortresstosolitude.com
Exhibition Concept
“Tupi or not tupi, that is the question”
In 1928, the Brazilian modernist poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade wrote the Manifesto Antropófago – known in English as the Cannibalistic Manifesto. Andrade playfully transformed Shakespeare’s iconic line, “To be or not to be, that is the question”, into a celebration of the Tupi – one of the original ethnic Brazilian tribes that practiced forms of ritual cannibalism. But he also created an ironic and humorous metaphor for (post)-colonial cultural cannibalism. He used the concept of “cultural cannibalism” to argue the existence of a historical tradition of devouring, digesting and absorbing cultural impressions from settling cultures, adapting their strengths and incorporating them into the native self. When he wrote; “We eat Shakespeare and spit him out”, de Andrade aimed to challenge the dominant dualities between civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive, and original/derivative.
Extending the reach of the term for the purpose of this exhibition, cultural cannibalism describes how for decades Latin America has been absorbing the shifting culturally imposed discourse and spitting out its own re-interpreted cultural and artistic production. It also speaks of the paradigm, by artists from Latin America, for the creation of a culture that is universal, cosmopolitan and contemporary in its language, but still Latin American in its essence.
SALVAJES – meaning “the savages” – is an immediate reference to the stereotypical and derogative description of primitive societies in pre-colonial Latin America as uncivilized. As a result of the continent’s long history of violence, deprivation, oppression, exploitation, and poverty, the label of salvajes has been culturally embedded in this marginalizing representation of the continent. But the title also seeks to – as in the line of Oswald de Andrade – ironically challenge the audience.
SALVAJES – Digesting Europe Piece by Piece unfolds various intersections between Oswald de Andrade’s historic concept of cultural cannibalism and Latin America’s present and ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy. With more recent developments in the global economy – including the economic resurgence of many Latin American countries juxtaposed with the ongoing financial crisis in Europe – new discourses of social, economical, political and cultural content are being shaped and formed.
The exhibition is a collaboration between New York-based Argentinean curator Guillermo Creus – founder of the online platform Fortress to Solitude – and Aukje Lepoutre Ravn – art historian, curator and director of Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space.
Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space
Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space has been a significant exhibition space in Copenhagen since 1985 and focuses on showing primarily young and up-coming Danish and Nordic artists. Located within the Gentofte Main Library building – which has an annual attendance of 280,000 visitors – Traneudstillingen has the potential to reach out to a large audience. In order to extend its presence in both the local and international art community, the ambition of Traneudstillingen over the next years is to launch collaborative exhibition projects with international artists and curators.
Fortress to Solitude
Fortress to Solitude is an online and offline curatorial platform that collaborates with an ever-growing selected group of young international curators to conceptualize, organize and produce international exhibitions and projects in the field of contemporary arts and culture. Not narrowed to a single set of conceptual ideas, it collaborates on projects involving different media and works with international public and private art spaces and organizations