Haber estado allí

Haber estado allí, a photograph taken by Sady Gonzalez, is the image of the body of the leading Colombian political official Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, assasinated on April 9th, 1948. The photo was taken after the autopsy of the corpse at the Court of Justice, and then published in a special edition of the newspaper El Tiempo celebrating its 100th anniversary. In this image, a number of people make an effort to be included within the photograph, demonstrating the importance of documentation of their presence within that moment.

Cicatriz

In Cicatriz 1996-2003, Rosângela Rennó undertakes a kind of mental archaeology. Using the glass-plate negatives she discovered in São Paulo’s State Pennitentiary, she enlarges photographs of former prison inmates to the point where, on the one hand, the cold detachment of the original mugshots becomes tangible, while, on the other, they are quickened by the palpable reality of their scars, tattoos and, in some cases, even the whorls of hair on the backs of their heads. The result is a painful visual uncovering of the repressed unconscious –for the inmates, a late but all-important step out of the shadows of anonymity.
– Urs Stahel, curator

Rennó’s metaphorical Cicatriz refers to the scarlike qualities of tattoos and to her technique of installing texts and photographs by surgically cutting and the inserting them into the museum walls. Yet it is the artist’s play with memory that most poignantly evoked scarification. Rennó has tackled the issue of social amnesia elsewhere. Her work on the trauma of public and private events may at times resemble forms of research and investigation, yet it is in fact quite speculative, poetic, and melancholic.

–Adriano Pedrosa, Artforum

Gladio

Every secret intelligence operation needs a public space in which to confuse the public opinion and establish a narrative that prevails over the search for truth. Gladio (the name of the most notorious secret army known in Europe) presents the covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers that are exemplary of the use of this strategy of tension. The artist has intervened these printed covers with black oil plaster and stains of a semi transparent solution, preventing the viewer from reading the underlying texts. Analogously, the mass media acting on the heat of ghastly a acks, respond with an initial story that helps to veil the truth and its complexity by shocking the public.

Dispositivo Foucault

Based on 22 groups of declassified documents ranging from 1941 to 1993 from the CIA archives, the US State Department, the intelligence services from Italy, Germany, France and Belgium, as well as leaked NATO files, this work deals with the surveillance of French intellectuals during the 1980s, juxtaposing the available printed files to Michel Foucault’s words about secrecy, a central concept in Jarpa’s work. While Foucault dictated his class in Security, Territory and Population in the Collège de France, the international secret services devised strategies to influence his thinking and that of his fellow citizens, strategies that went from the manipulation of public opinion to the seeding of false flag attacks to stop the advance of left-wing politics in Europe at all cost. This work inaugurates the exhibition Waking State, the first in which the artist frontally addresses the secret operations of US agencies in Europe, closing with this show a cycle of work in which Jarpa sought to understand how foreign agencies and governments have operated at the margins of legality, over and over again, in Latin America and Europe.

Searching for We’wha

These five triptychs combine photographs from the American West (new Mexico and Arizona regions) with line excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived her life in a feminine gender expression.

Searching for We’wha aims at questioning gender fluidity, indeterminacy, neutrality and non-conformity using We’wha as a symbol and image of the ways in which Two-Spirit American Indians express gender in non-Western non-traditional ways. They are often accepted and revered by their tribes, and in We’wha’s case she even became an official representative of their social interests. The project documents indigenous territories, ruins and sacred landscapes as it invokes We’Wha and the ways in which certain traditions have been violently erased.

We’Wha will neverbe found since she doesn’t exist anywhere beyond colonial narratives but the photographic and textual trajectories reveal Western epistemological and representational processes and their ingrained moralism.

My Dearly Beloved R. (Monument to Alexander von Humboldt)

My Dearly Beloved R. (Monument to Alexander von Humboldt) is a photographic triptych that depicts a monument to Prussian geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt accompanied by a love letter written by the scientist to his soldier Reinhard von Haeften who apparently, surprised by von Humboldt’s declaration, left his job to marry.
The piece brings to light von Humboldt’s sexual orientation, a fact that has been systematically hidden from historical narratives about his life and work. It is told that the scientist burnt all of his personal correspondence before his death in an attempt to control his legacy. Yet some documents, like this letter, have surfaced over time making his legacy more interesting and complex indeed.