ARTivism

In collaboration with Galería Quetzalli & Pabellón 4

April, 2022

“All art is political”

          Collective Artists

Always clarifying that we write from a hegemonic, heterosexual and privileged position, we cannot stop thinking, feeling, and acting in favor of new ways of relating to reality and favoring through art a paradigm shift that transcends aesthetic memory and delves into the nature of people.

At what point does art end and activism begin? Is there a true separation? Art always tells a story or many stories and comes alive in relation to the viewer. The question is how and why we tell that story.

It is really charming, seductive, and powerful when an artist manages to surprise us to such an extent that it almost forces us to break our schemes and see from a new approach.

As the great ARTivist Tania Bruguera puts it, political art does not remain only at the level of association or graphic memory. Political art works with the consequences of its existence and its interactions. And being like this, art becomes an experience and is not just an image.

ARTivism is becoming more relevant every day and, unlike a capitalist system based on individualism, it is counter-hegemonic and through tools and thoughts, it recognizes the work of others. That is to say, it is ecofeminist, with sorority, collective and humanitarian.

This is how we see it in the stories, artifacts, and lapidaries of Cesar Martínez who allows us to read, learn about, share and open, from his meta point of view, one more exploration of how that dark capacity of desire is consolidated: the work of art.

Also in the healing surfaces of Priscilla Monge, who, based on real events, transmits the pain of loss to us by drawing and writing in a delicate clay that could perfectly be a page torn from a newspaper. One that will transcend and will not be transitory like the lives contained therein.

ARTivism reminds us every day that the personal is political. For this reason, artists such as Silvia Levenson, Merino, Sala, and Birks give voice, through their visual language, to feminism.  Whether trampling on misogynistic phrases from great thinkers of history, whether recognizing women in the history of art, with an encyclopedia of the future, or talking about the disappeared and domestic violence; these artists remind us that the struggle continues and that the path is ecofeminism and its transversality.

We see this clearly in the symbiotic colonies of Natalia Revilla, who invites us to rethink migration and the role of women in the conservation of biodiversity and their fundamental role in the permanence of the culture of their places of origin.

As in Ana De Orbegoso who, making use of popular iconography, reminds us of the importance of keeping our history alive and learning from it.  Also in Poyón's hats, making us reflect on the limits and borders of territories as political, economic, ideological, and social constructions established in our minds.

The fight continues and as Claudia Rodriguez says, we exist because we resist and our only alternative seems to be to imagine new realities. Perhaps in this way, one day the appropriate images of Thornton will stop being ironic and if they reflect that freedom, prosperity, and life so longed for and the desire and urgency of social transformation, they will produce their effects.  Perhaps one day the anger sublimated in Selma Guisande's Paradise will be transformed into truth and although not a paradise, if we manage to build together a less dystopian society.

The rebellion consists of looking at a rose until the eyes are pulverized (Alejandra Pizarnik), the rebellion consists of non-violence.  The rebellion also consists of raising awareness through empowered plastic proposals, which fight for a more equitable society by promoting social participation in the art world.

Gabriela Rosso