Art is witnessing the past, and therefore fundamental tool to preserve memory. Good account of this gives the exhibition that hosts the San Telmo Museum of San Sebastián until May 11. «Memory forests », curated by Mabel Tapia and Mira Bernabéuaddresses the forms of technologies of domination and social control in totalitarian contexts through multidisciplinary artistic works. That is, Tapia explains, it is not a sample that placed the art “as a vehicle of totalitarian regimes, but the works raise the question of how technologies of domination and control continue to operate, they continue their footprints, their remains and traces.” Through works by Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González, or Iñaki Gracenea With “Mecano Model”, the sample about how “socio -political structures, mobilizing tools of different types, exert forms of domination.”
“Memory forests” presents works by 21 contemporary artistsbelonging to three generations. Pieces that have been made from concrete experiences. All of them, crossed by a central question: What is the present? “You cannot imagine the actuality that we live as a smooth tissue, but rather a complex network,” says Tapia, “as a forest made of shadows and tensions. The artists of this exhibition dare to enter it by addressing the consequences and scopes in the present of the exercise of totalitarian powers ». Well, with only one look at the twentieth century you can see how these regimes have left a deep mark in the various countries. «There are constants in totalitarian action: not only the loss of constitutional guarantees, but the denial, silencing, of all dissent; multiple forms of repression and annihilation »points out the curator. In this sense, the exhibition shows different contexts, from Argentina and Chile to, of course, Francoism.
The dictatorship in Spain, explains Tapia, “has mobilized a vast production of monuments, as it attaches, on the one hand, ” Urte Askotako / for many more ”, by Taxio Ardanaz and Jone Loizaga. This work constitutes A Luck of Archivean exhaustive cartography, which gives an account of the monuments raised by Franco since 1937, many of which continue to sign people’s daily lives. It also points out as another of the paradigmatic works of the exhibition “Do you remember Franco?”, By Clemente Bernard. It presents three monuments of Franco – the Valley of the Fallen, the Arc de la Victoria de Madrid and the monument to the fallen of Pamplona -, realizing “both of their connections and correspondence and of the political violence they embody”, defines the commissioner.
Multicapa readings
The exhibition proposes to the viewer “to open a space for shared, collective reflection, about the present of our past, on still open wounds, sovereign so many graves to open,” he proposes. In this sense, it is essential to have the past to also face the present. Does art are still a victim of power propaganda? “More than a victim, today art can be used as a tool at the service of power, such as other symbolic production tools,” says Tapia. «The story is written from the present. We have all the responsibility to resume our history in hand, since even long before the postwar period, “says, and points out the” resiliences “piece of Alan Carrasco, which” critically recovers certain events and characters proposing multicapa readings, where apparently not connected events acquire new readings and perspectives. “
In ways, therefore, very diverse, “memory forests” places the viewer in the face of artistic practice as one that, from its specific tools, may either act as a witness or as a finder of reinstalling in the public sphere questions and traumas as ways of sharing and correcting. «Art can try traumas, but I don’t see how I could create them. It can propose forms of repair, rather than healing, since the traumas of a society are resulting from social and political processes, of conditions and conditioning that have not been treated. Art covers, visible »concludes Tapia.
AI, a challenge in terms of domination
► What do we do with artificial intelligence in this context? “Without a doubt, it is a challenge,” says Tapia, “if the forms of control and social domination have historically identified with the exercise of totalitarian power, today we face new forms of social domination.” The curator explains that the exhibition is also positioned in this regard, because “it is more inscribed in the present as a way of alerting or, at least, of generating an openness to a deep reflection on these issues.”
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