The Idea of Latin America
Curated by Berta Sichel and Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
19 April– 24 June 2012
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville
Cartuja de Santa María de Las Cuevass
Seville, Spain
Artists:
Michel Auder, Milena Bonilla, Adriana Bustos, Mariana Castillo Deball, Raimond Chaves and Gilda Mantilla, Chema Cobo, Minerva Cuevas, Juan Downey, Anna Bella Geiger, Federico Guzmán, Alfredo Jaar, Leandro Katz, Marta Minujín, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Joaquín Torres García.
Taking its title from the book by Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America is an exhibition which sets out to inquire into a geographical and mental concept based on Europe’s colonial expansion, in accordance with the ideas rehearsed in that essay. The main reason for organizing this show has to do with the place from which we conceived the exhibition project, from both the Monastery of the Cartuja—where Christopher Columbus was buried and where he prepared his second voyage to America—and from Seville, a city fundamental to the beginnings of European colonialism in the early modern period and which established strong links of commercial and cultural domination with that “New World.”
The voyage as a form of union and knowledge, the precolonial past revisited and reinterpreted, reactions to more recent colonialisms from the North, and the conception of the whole continent and its partition in two as the result of different European imperial legacies are some of the motivations that the artists included in this project have come up with.
If Mignolo attempts “to rewrite history from another kind of logic, another language, another intellectual framework,” this exhibition tries to chart the progress of some of the artists from different countries and generations who from the 1970s until now have had preoccupations akin to those of the essayist. And so the map as the representation of a territory both mental and political, economic and emotional, is the starting point of a show that, seen from the other side, also means “understanding how the Western world was born and how the modern world order was founded,” since the colonial wound indicates the absences with which history has been narrated.
The exhibition is part on the current exhibition session called Accumulations of Memory, which includes the following exhibitions:
Fiona Tan – Point of Departure
Catarina Simão – Off Screen: The Mozambique Film Archive
Maryam Jafri - Colonial Shadows
Rafael Agredano - Prólogos (Prologues)
Contact:
www.caac.es
actividades.caac@juntadeandalucia.es
*Image above:
Courtesy of the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York.
