“It gets entangled, entangling / like ivy on the wall / and it sprouts, sprouts / like the little moss on the stone”, Violeta Parra sang in Volver a los 17 . As on the walls, in addition to the moss, posters of denunciation, resistance or direct rejection also grow and reproduce over time and across countries, the new exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum is entitled Graphic Turn. Like ivy on the wall. A proposal of high political density in which the Red Conceptualismos del Sur returns to the museum a decade later to explore sixty years of graphic street action, especially in Latin America but also in the US and even Europe.
An expanded graphic action, yes, or even exploded, because in the sample there are even embroideries and maps. Embroideries in which the women of El Salvador have preserved the memory of the horror of the war in their country, fabrics in which the stitches are reminiscent of a child's drawings and the sewn texts are stitched with misspellings but in which the images are of soldiers, bombings, massacres, destroyed houses and desperate escapes to the UN camps in Honduras. A journey that not everyone ends, as some note on the canvas. In the sample there are from large maps that denounce the relations of domination and exploitation in the world to banners used in street demonstrations with photographs of the disappeared in the American dictatorships.
The disappeared are a profuse theme: with their faces there are even kites in which the 43 students who disappeared in Mexico in 2014 are remembered. There are also enormous and powerful photographs of Navajo Indians who fight for their traditions -What we do to the mountain we do it to ourselves, by Chip Thomas-, and posters such as the series I am and my life matters that denounce the murder of African-Americans in the United States.
And there is a leaning wooden house, Zapantera negra, which fuses the visual imagery of black panthers with the struggles of the Zapatista movement. And the posters of the sexual liberation groups that emerged in the seventies and eighties in Latin America are shown, including a massacre of transvestites in Peru by the Tupac Amaru.
The members of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur say that they want to “turn the museum into a very powerful sounding board for what is currently happening in Latin America and other parts of the world, to occupy the museum as a public space where these practices resonate but also they articulate, dialogue and configure an archive of the present that opens possibilities and gaps to imagine other forms of the future”.
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