Carlos Amorales: Life in the folds

Curated by Pablo León De La Barra

We are witnesses to how the world advances towards self-destruction, towards an existential crisis in which new far-right-wing fascisms—characterized by ignorance, racism, xenophobia, violence against difference, machismo, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, as well as the violation of the rights of individuals and of society—seems to be becoming the norm. It is at times like this, when reality outdoes any kind of fiction or nightmare and surpasses any artistic endeavor to represent it, that one wonders about the function of art. Can we influence reality or are we condemned to live within the bubble of art, in the hope that, through it, we can change the world? 

With a trajectory of more than 20 years, Carlos Amorales represents the Pavilion of Mexico with the work Life in the folds. For this project, Amorales’ contribution to the 57th Venice Biennale, takes its name from a book by the poet Henri Michaux, published in 1949, in which a narrative voice explores different ways of confronting the suffering that surrounds it. 

Amorales raises the question on how to express the unheard complex causes and consequences of today’s crisis. To answer this, he creates an installation that unfolds into a total work of art where the different disciplines that converge in his the artistic practice—visual arts, graphic design, animation, cinema, music, literature, poetry, and performance—intersect consequently with one another.

In Life in the folds, the artist cyphers language and then opens it up to narrate the story of a lynching of a migrant family. Blurring any clear moral understanding of the practice of justice, Amorales is able to speak out and express freely through an artistic strategy his explorations: the dark side of humanity and the coexistence of good and evil, not as moral dogmas but as conditions of vital intensity. By generating friction and by creating tensions, he modifies language and its parameters, creating an anarchy from which a new understanding of life can emerge. 

At a Biennale with the title VIVA ARTE VIVA, which celebrates the ability of art to embrace life and confront the circumstances of a world full of conflicts, Carlos Amorales’ Life in the folds creates new vocabularies, languages, settings, and sounds through which life can reinvent itself.