AWC Summer Camp: The Exhausted Land
July 20–August 24, 2019
The Americas, the exhausted land. The land that currently puts into question the idea of internationality of our polyglot street newspaper for art and society, wealth and poverty. How capable are we to be aware of other latitudes within our practice, working from Berlin?
The participating artists of this Summer Camp command universal change on a human scale against the backdrop of violent traditionalism, challeging conventions of identity such as race, ethnicity and gender throughout the continent.
For this, Arts of the Working Class stretches out the definition of curatorial, artistic and editorial capabilities, and expands the exhibition space of Klosterfelde Edition to the streets. The exhibition and the issue offe something similar to a psychedelic experience; a transcultural exploration of exploited Otherness.
Arts of the Working Class can thus be understood as an allegory. American societies manifest themselves here in hybrid language, largely Spanglish. The work of Jaime Nuñez del Arco reflects this essentialist use of vocabulary of empowerment in his mural, quoting everyday life and media generated longing: “The value meal you are looking for is not a deal anymore, just like this pristine petroleum green wall. Un recuerdo“.
A change of perspective is in the air, blowing through this static space. The air of the AWC Summer Camp comes from the Americas. It smells like sweat. Like Dancing Southward, a project by artist Santiago Reyes that started in Hanoi, and continues in other cities of the world. He has crossed the streets of cities to soak several T-shirts in sweat, with which he built a Cadavre Exquis.
From the same material is the work of Quisqueya Henriquez and Pepe Mar. In this collaboration, Henriquez and Mar oppose the surface and the material of the image plane to reissue it. The visual vocabulary of an endless fabric becomes a catalyst for new ways to experience the two-dimensional surface of a painting. The fabric deals with the accumulation of tropical gestures, phantoms of modernism, cultural clichés, folclores and eruptions of the convulsive social texture, an imaginary solution to deep-seated frustrations that language can not bring into the world, but art.
Luiza Prado de O’Martins faces, through art and academic research, topographies of excesses. In All Directions at Once she looks at practices of herbal contraception and the transmission of Aboriginal and local knowledge as radical decolonizing measures. It begins with the call of Ayoowiri, a plant that grows abundantly in the tropical areas of the Americas. During the European occupation of the continent, it was used as a contraceptive (and in higher doses as an abortifacient) by enslaved indigenous and African peoples as a strategy of resistance.
Teresa Burga and Giorgia Volpe follow similar collective feminist visions in different times and spaces, while Vicente Manssur’s photographs illuminate the geographies that Adrián Balseca sublimes with a transparent record. From the museal installation Phantom Recorder, a collaboration with Kara Solar (initiative of the Latin American Association for Alternative Development in collaboration with the Ecuadorian Achuar community), Balseca takes the sound recording from the Amazonian route that Fitzcarraldo took with his gramophone to listen to opera. This symbolic twist resembles a postcolonial surveillance critique that lets many contradictory feelings about this cacophonic narration of the Americas to merged into a single soothing moment.
This exhibition is an extension of the 7th issue of the Arts of the Working Class, called “The Exhaused Land,” which revolves around a certain obliviousness towards our vital connection to nature, inflicted in the Americas through centuries of colonialism, currently only graspable through affects and the artificial.
Dedicated to the Americas and its many defenders like Thelma Cabrera, this 7th issue is made of contributions by Antonia Alampi, Josephine Bacon, Adrián Balseca, Renata Cervetto, Fred Dewey, Hallie Frost, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Felippe Galuppo, Ana María Garzón, iLiana Fokianaki, Lisette Lagnado, Filipe Lippe, Vicente Manssur, Romina Muñoz, Charles Norton, Elisabeth Otto, Mikhel Proulx, Pablo José Ramirez, Santiago Reyes, Tálata Rodriguez, Oscar Santillán, Luke Savage, Liv Schulman, The Winter Office, Gabriela Valarezo & Giorgia Volpe.
The talk “Intersecting Perspectives” with Elisabeth Otto & Giorgia Volpe is kindly supported by the Embassy of Canada, Berlin
