The Americas

En mayo de 2019 la cineasta argentina Lucrecia Martel dio una charla en el MoMA, invitada por el Instituto Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Cisneros. Ya el primer largometraje de Martel, La ciénaga (2001), llamó la atención por la contundencia de sus imágenes, la puesta en tensión con el sonido, la exposición y espacios de quiebre en las relaciones de poder partiendo del núcleo familiar, y una sensorialidad extrema y extrañada. La idea de esta entrevista es dejar una marca escrita de su paso por el MoMA, donde habló sobre un esquema temporal alternativo basado en el sonido.

In May 2019, the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel was invited by the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Institute to give a lecture at MoMA. Martel’s first feature film, La ciénaga (2001), attracted much attention because of the tension between its powerful imagery and soundscape, its exploration of power relations as rooted in the family, and an extreme and estranged sensorial quality. The idea of this interview is to leave a written trace of her visit to MoMA, where she spoke about an alternative, sound-based understanding of time.

In 1972, Argentine artist Luis Fernando Benedit installed a hydroponic greenhouse environment, containing seventy tomato plants and fifty-six lettuce plants artificially supplied with light and a chemical growth formula, as well as an environment for white mice, “consisting of a maze, food source, material for burrowing, and an enclosed area for sleeping,” at MoMA.

Shot in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest red-light district, and the city’s financial district, Neville D’Almeida’s Mangue-Bangue, presents a portrait of the “normality” of marginalized and criminalized bodies during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Paz Errázuriz’s photographic oeuvre coincided with that of a group of artists working in the late 1970s and ’80s in Chile who dedicated themselves to an “aesthetic of the margins”.

In this essay, Michaëla de Lacaze engages in a close reading of Happy Bicentennial (1976), one of the most radical pieces of mail art created by artist and poet Clemente Padín during the Uruguayan authoritarian regime of the 1970s.

American textile designer Joel Robinson remains an enigmatic figure despite his inclusion in MoMA’s collection. Robinson’s story, in many ways, mirrors the story of so many others featured in the’Good Design’ series, whose promising careers never gained the traction that such a recognition might reward.

Desde finales de los noventa, la obra de Regina José Galindo se ha caracterizado por denunciar distintas formas de opresión y violencia en la sociedad contemporánea. Uno de los temas recurrentes en su trayectoria artística ha sido el de las movilizaciones migratorias y el desplazamiento de centroamericanos como resultado de las guerras civiles que tuvieron lugar en Guatemala y otros países de la región en la década de los setenta.

Since the late nineties, the work of Regina José Galindo has been characterized for denouncing different forms of oppression and violence in contemporary society. One recurring theme in her artistic career has been the migratory mobilizations and displacement of Central Americans as a result of the civil wars that took place in Guatemala and other countries of the region in the 1970s.

Wartime espionage, and a search for “Latin Americanness” in artistic practices, was the dual mission that sent Lincoln Kirstein to Latin America in the 1940s. This essay charts these travels in relation to shifting currents in artistic languages and geopolitics—and their part in shaping MoMA’s early collection of art from Latin America.

Branislav Jakovljević, Claire Tancons, and Anoma Pieris consider how concepts related to self-representation and performativity not only generate sites of resistance, but also recast our perspective on established discourses of the national, ethnic, diasporic, and racial.

Reuniendo múltiples testimonios y reflexiones sobre la historia y legado de la comunidad textil de Tomé, LA FÁBRICA. Trazado de una investigación es un proyecto artístico-curatorial iniciado por la artista Claudia del Fierro y la curadora Ana María Saavedra en el 2016.