Archivo Caminante and Photomontages

64 | A!erall Eduardo Molinari, Día de los muertos A Conversation Between (Day of the Death), 2000, collage, Eduardo Molinari and photograph from Argentina’s National Nuria Enguita Mayo General Archive, 20 × 25cm. Part of the series El cuchillo (The Knife), 2000. Courtesy the artist

Previous spread: In !""# I founded the Archivo Caminante and photomontages. In their spatial Eduardo Molinari, Los niños de la soja ( Walking Archive) in Buenos Aires. display, I define them as expanded (The Soy Children), It comprises walking as an aesthetic poetic documents. %ey occupy spaces in 2010, photomontage, practice, research using artistic different ways: as installations; alongside detail. Courtesy the artist methodologies (for example, photography, ordinary furniture; at specific sites drawing and collage) and interdisciplin- and public spaces; in graphic materials, ary actions. It is a visual archive in films and publications. progress that critically reflects on — Eduardo Molinari dominant historical narratives; the processes of the construction of memory, Nuria Enguita Mayo: !e Archivo singular as well as collective; and actions Caminante isn’t a travelling archive, but against the mummification of social an archive that resides in movement, that and cultural memory. turns movement into action, constructing stories and conveying different potentiali- Nuria Enguita Mayo speaks to Eduardo ties. Walking, as artistic practice, defines both its form and content, and walking Molinari about Archivo Caminante writes the text at the same time that it and its questioning of narratives of searches for its subject. Archivo constantly the past and history’s configuration asks itself: who is speaking? How? From where? History, in Archivo Caminante, is in the present. not closed off, but a way to locate the place from which the present speaks: ‘it doesn’t Materially speaking, the Archivo work on history, but from history’.1 What Caminante is comprised of around fifty drives Archivo Caminante, and in what boxes, which contain three kinds of space does it unfold? documents: a) black-and-white photographs from my visits to the National Eduardo Molinari: First of all, there’s a General Archive (AGN), the main public family connection in my relationship with archive in Buenos Aires, b) photographs history — an intimacy with the images and I have taken while walking in urban stories of Argentinian and contemporary and natural landscapes, and c) ‘trash’ history that began in my childhood. or ‘garbage’ documentation of graphic Both my grandfather and my father were scraps of mass culture, including historians. My paternal grandfather Diego maga$ines, books, newspapers, posters, Luis — a son of Genoese immigrants, whose flyers, postcards, maps, videos and father was a coalman in Buenos Aires recordings that I have found in the streets — was a militant historian, politically or received from people who know of involved in the radicalismo and Peronist my interest in these materials. Joining movements, and academically as a together these visual materials, I create university teacher, integrating trends that the Documents of the Archivo Caminante: challenged the traditional narratives of manual collages, drawings, photographs his time: the Nueva Escuela Histórica and

1 Eduardo Molinari/Archivo Caminante, The Unreal Silver-Plated Book, Buenos Aires: Goethe Institut Buenos Aires/Kulturstiftung des Bundes, 2004, p.10. 2 The historians associated with the Nueva Escuela Histórica, which emerged in mid-1920s Argentina, were Ricardo Levene, Emilio Ravignani, Rómulo Carbia, Diego Luis Molinari and Luis María Torres. The Nueva Escuela sought to professionalise and apply scientific method to historical studies, leaving behind texts on history that were more similar to philosophical or sociological essays. They consciously sought to form a common historical identity for Argentina, which had absorbed immigrants and their children. The Revisionismo Histórico is a historiography focused on changing the history that had been hegemonic in Argentina until the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, it has aimed to defend the figure of the federal leaders and of Juan Manuel de Rosas, who were considered ‘barbarians’ in the official discourse.

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 65 Revisionismo Histórico.2 My father, practices, which were theoretically and Ricardo Luis, had a career focused on economically supported by the same social research and writing, less politically sector that benefitted from the neoliberal exposed. At home I would listen to the plan. It emerged with the perspective sound of his typewriter and nose around that history was a jumping-off point and in his vast library, enthralled by images not an arrival. It’s not about repeating of humanity’s history. !eir combined chronologies or ‘historic truths’, but about influence contributed to my passion creating approaches and poetic accounts. for history. Archivo Caminante works in the space I think this familial aspect has of a fold, where the same thing can be influenced my thinking about the relation- experienced in various ways — in ways ship of history to art and life, and motivated that yet do not exist, with different textures, the public and activist aspects of my plots and highlights from the ones that involvement with history. In the second appear on a hegemonic surface. A space half of the "##$s I began to wonder about for being, living, dreaming and sharing. integrating into my artistic practice a At the beginning, photographs, drawings group of questions, preoccupations and and collages were exhibited framed, meditations originating in new construc- in a traditional way, but in *$$* I first tions of historical narratives. Much of my felt the need to destroy this solemnity. generation was pierced through in their !e challenge became to generate new adolescence by Argentina’s last military devices of circulation for the reception dictatorship ["#%&—'(], but also by a of history and memory. I began to do site- return to democracy in the early "#'$s that specific interventions, installations and was characterised by both weakness and publications. I must say that this has only a combination of hope and distrust, and been possible through interdisciplinary by the intense influence of what could be collaborations, in my research and described as ‘our elder brothers’ — the artworks, with historians, archivists, generations of the disappeared, with their social and human rights activists, artists, ideals of fighting for a more just and free musicians and others. !e collective world. So for us, the years after the fall dimension of the AC project also resides in of the Berlin Wall (which in Argentina its being open to the public, for consultation coincided with Carlos Menem becoming and for obtaining reproductions of images. president) were full of conflict. Among the most di)cult issues for me, as I finished NEM: In that sense, Archivo Caminante art college in "##$, were the emergence would be searching for a ‘decolonisation’ during that decade of a cultural hegemony of history and the politics of memory, that dismantled and plundered the existing a break with the colonial matrix of power welfare state; of policies of privatisation that still marks and defines our modes of and the scrapping of labour laws; of the learning, in order to open up other possible sale and offshore ownership of natural knowledge, and to see through other gazes, resources, and the fact that these were other memories. But how do you escape legitimised in the visual arts by a group of the processes of mummification and practices that were based on the forgetting closure around stories of the past? What of social and historical contexts and is the appropriate language that should on the paradigm of the itinerant, errant be used so that potentialities embedded artist, embodied by Guillermo Kuitca. I’m in the past (far and near) do not lose their part of the same generation as Kuitca — I’m transformative capacity? fifty — and at that moment, in that dramatic context, it was so hard for artists that were EM: Decolonisation dwells in that fold I part of a resistance, or an activism against mentioned earlier. Archivo Caminante neoliberalism, to deal with Kuitca’s is a work in progress that keeps going, incarnation as a passive figure travelling at times undoubtedly with di)culty, around the world, making no public but confidently. Arturo Jauretche, an comments about what was happening Argentinian thinker I admire, said that in Argentina. We have been — until now struggles for freedom are always conducted — hearing Kuitca’s silence. through the warmth of joy. In order to !ough Archivo Caminante was given break the subordinating colonial matrix its o)cial name in *$$", it emerged more (in its historical but also contemporary generally in "### as a response to those versions) it is necessary, then, to produce

66 | A!erall an arduous search in two areas of our centres or metropolises and peripheries knowledge: language and the imaginary. or colonies.4 Today the challenge of !at’s where a deliberately destructive, decolonising takes place in a multipolar intolerant and authoritarian machine way. While there exists a map of ‘past’ continues to operate — one that tries to imperialisms and colonialisms, we must break the bonds that join wishes, dreams also pay attention to the present one, not and memories to the deep knowledge of the based only on control of territories and cultures it attempts to dominate; to destroy people, but as a cartography of the move- language, the tools of free expression and ment of financial capital. Because of this, narratives about communities’ histories; the decolonising fight now challenges us to and to make scarce their poetry, their ask shared questions for shared problems imagination and their imaginary. !is is in all the different latitudes of the world how capitalist machines have historically where capital imposes ways of living and tried to turn all knowledge and ancient flattens cultural and environmental learning into mummies, dead artefacts diversity. And it is here where art, with its that can be easily and harmlessly exhibited. ability to make materially visible something !ese are the fundamentals areas in just before ‘pure imagination’, shows its the current fight against colonialism as it ever-sharp political teeth, its transforma- exists now, because they’re precisely where tive and subversive powers. But it goes the struggle wants to grow strong. So it is without saying that for this we must be necessary to relentlessly search for what united and brave. the Argentinian writer and anthropologist NEM: I’m also interested in another ! is is no small aspect of thought you’ve suggested about images, something that’s connected to this ‘pure archival activity: what do we imagination’. You’ve discussed the need do when we face a documentary for new images ‘that may let us discern nothing? Is this nothing what’s to come, by making present a barrier or is it a tool for that which is possible, which still does rethinking our dynamics of not exist’.5 To make images ‘that do not remembering and forgetting? represent, but that simply present’. How can we approach new ways of seeing? Adolfo Colombres refers to as ‘the splen- How can we exit from the highways of dours’: moments, events, but also artefacts, dominant thought? devices and rituals of social and cultural brightness.3 !is means being able to tap EM: To be able to think about new ways into, on the one hand, our rational capacity, of seeing means jumping off the train into our ability to bestow names, categories of representation, for one. But above and independent notions, and, on the other, all, it means awakening our sensibility, our ability to bravely and lucidly use our astonishment and curiosity, capacities intuition, our ability to dream, to imagine that are dulled by the dominant machinery, and to envision our futures. while also celebrated in direct proportion. Perhaps the word ‘our’ deserves a !e key point is that not everything can special gloss, because the perversion of be sold and bought. current financial and semiocapitalism Your question involves two separate has blown away that traditional idea of issues: defining artistic subjectivity and colonialism as a phenomenon organised assessing the current state of artistic territorially around the existence of education. Regarding the former, an

3 Adolfo Colombres, Teoría transcultural del arte: Hacia un pensamiento visual independiente, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol, 2005, p.23. 4 For more on semiocapitalism, see Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Generación Post-alfa, patologías e imaginarios en el semiocapitalismo (trans. Diego Picotto et al.), Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2007, pp.107—08: ‘With the term semiocapitalism I define the mode of production that prevails in a society in which every act of transformation can be substituted for information, and the working process is carried out through the recombination of signs. Then, the production of signs becomes the main economic cycle, and economic valuation becomes the criterion of valorisation of the production of signs. In its traditional forms, semiosis had meaning as its specific product, but when semiotic processes become a part of the cycle of value production, the assignment of meaning isn’t the purpose of language any more.’ 5 Eduardo Molinari/Archivo Caminante, ‘El arte es un trabajo que interroga al mundo del dinero’, Woki-Toki [online journal], 14 September 2008, available at http://www.wokitoki.org/wk/109/eduardo-molinari- el-arte-es-un-trabajo-que-interroga-al-mundo-del-dinero (last accessed on 20 February 2012).

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 67 example would be Documenta, an almost learning ‘trades’. !e neoliberal hegemony Eduardo Molinari, blinding cultural reflection — in each of in Argentina tried to dismantle and Los niños de la soja privatise the public, non-fee-paying (The Soy Children), its editions — of narrative needs and of 2010, installation, a reconsideration of art’s place in society. education system, starting a process of dimensions In terms of that event’s actual curatorial social elitism around artistic education. variable. Installation !is became evident when a handful of view, ‘The Potosí discourse, it seems to transform curators Principle’, Museo and perhaps also artists into agents, which foundations and private initiatives, Nacional Centro in Spanish refers more directly to someone supported economically by the same social de Arte Reina Sofía, sectors that gained from the plundering Madrid. Courtesy who works on behalf of someone else the artist in providing a service (financial traders, of the "##$s, camouflaged themselves real estate brokers, laboratory workers, as ‘agents’ in order to demarcate a new police or secret intelligence o)cers), and territory, the result of a combination whose work often entails an opaque fusion of elitist private art colleges with ‘art of knowledge and interests. I wonder what pedagogical projects’ in the poorest this narrative change responds to. Why is it neighbourhoods. !is move is thus a double necessary now, in the current political and operation, shaping one’s way of seeing and economic context? What kind of imagina- understanding the world. !e situation tion, of ways of seeing, does this agent calls for a new analysis of the relationships embody? Personally, I think this language of art, space and power. reproduces the colonial matrix of power. Regarding artistic education, NEM: Archivo Caminante is displayed contemporary art’s transdisciplinary as constellations of images, following nature has blurred the boundaries of the metaphor of hypertext. It’s a bundle artistic and political practice, as well as of critical reflections about dominant those of art and science, art and religion, historical narratives and about the modes art and economy, art and work. !e of construction of individual and collective consequences when it comes to thinking memory. But how do you combine spatiality of educational institutions are huge, and the breadth of memory at a moment because we’re not talking only about when time (of discourse, of thought, of

68 | A!erall Eduardo Molinari, work), understood as continuity, has blown of designing and creating new spatialities, Columna vertebral up and fragmented itself into different temporalities and narratives in specific (Vertebral Column), 2002, site-specific cells that can be recombined in different contexts, both within and outside of the intervention at the configurations of what once was the field of art. Engineering School, ‘working day’, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi In a strictly personal sense, Archivo University of Buenos Aires, has suggested? Could this ‘mutation’ also Caminante works like a sort of mother former Eva Perón be a chance to recover other powers of ship, a place from which to start and to Foundation. expression not tainted by the meaning of return to in order to acquire the necessary Photograph: Azul elements for creating a determined Blaseotto. Courtesy what’s recorded, of what’s written, but by the artist the recombination of different associations, configuration of each particular art piece. as Mario Santucho points out in his text But this is just one of its functions, not made in collaboration with Archivo the only one. Archivo Caminante is also Caminante, about the khipu, an Incan a constellation that can be consulted by textile that was used for recording and others, who may not be interested in art but counting?6 rather simply want to save visual records of events in the more or less recent past. EM: To consider this possibility I’m interested in the coexistence of these we must distinguish between the spatial two potentialities of Archivo Caminante, and narrative organisation of Archivo not their mutual cancellation. Caminante in and of itself, its materiality Often, throughout my dialogue with (its fifty boxes, the index that catalogues Santucho, we thought about the khipu’s its contents, the furniture that contains it), intensity, due to its special capacity for and what that materiality enables in terms encoding (in the sense of not revealing

6 Khipu (the word means ‘knot’ in Quechua) are mnemotechnic instruments that gather statistics and figures. They are made up of a principal string to which other strings of various lengths and different colours are tied. Khipus were used to gather statistical data, register historical events, chart the astrological calendar and calculate taxes, among other activities. The majority of khipus were destroyed by the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as part of a campaign to eradicate idolatry. See Mario Santucho, ‘En busca del quipo perdido (Criterios metodológicos para una investigación abierta)’, in Tras los pasos de los hombres del maíz, Chemnitz: Weltecho Galerie, 2008.

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 69 through its external form its contents and It’s important to understand that the information, nor its function) and because most relevant aspect of the emancipating its stories prioritise verbs above nouns.7 politics of memory is its potential for If indeed this artefact’s counting function triggering the historicity of our lives, is well-known, we also recognise — the always present potential to construct however partially due to the systematic our own history with others. destruction of Incan civilisation during the conquest of Peru — its (poetic) potential NEM: You were part of the ‘Principio for embodying the memories of the Incans. Potosí’ exhibition, curated by Alice !e khipu has struck me for various Creischer, Andreas Siekmann and Max reasons. Firstly, for helping me reach Jorge Hinderer, whose thesis considered methods by which to break away from capitalist ‘original accumulation’ tied the Western linear tradition. Secondly, to the colonial process, with its politics of for holding a huge paradox, proof of the accumulation of wealth accompanied by effects of triggering the colonial mentality: genocide, as a ‘principle’ that is updated the khipu is now silent, and we are hardly through the globalising process, with a able to listen to the voices it used to keep. di+erent face but with the same e+ects: !is is no small aspect of archival activity: confiscation, social disarticulation, what do we do when we face a documen- environmental destruction, etc.8 For it you tary nothing? Is this nothing a barrier produced the installation Los niños de or is it a tool for re-thinking our dynamics la soja (%e Soy Children, *$"$), in which of remembering and forgetting? Or is you consider ecological destruction as the khipu's silence evidence that in this age, also social and political. !at issue of in which, as you say, time and its continuity the ‘soyasation’ is the starting point for a have exploded and all that remains are critical reflection about the current context time-attention capsules, we must go back for cultural industries. to thinking from scratch about what we wish to archive and remember? EM: Los niños de la soja is made Another interesting thing, coming up of an installation and a publication, from my desire to create a visual poetic the result of research done in archives, that facilitates the development of a newspaper records, interviews, lectures political imagination and a memory and a series of walks in the provinces of without ballast, is that the khipu — perhaps Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, around the like Edvard Munch’s %e Scream ("'#(— cities of Carlos Casares and Rosario and "#"$) — keeps issuing voices in silence. the port of San Lorenzo. It started with !is forces us to sharpen our senses and a personal experience that happened in ask ourselves: what are the memories early *$$': coming back to my country you’d be interested in preserving? What after almost a year in Germany, I stumbled is valuable to remember in order to pass on a social problem that began with the on to new generations? Whom should government’s initiative to raise taxes on we ask for authorisation or permission to grain exports, to which the soy producers, share our social memories? Does the free from the small-scale farmers to the large circulation of these memories exist today? agribusinesses, reacted violently. For four And also: who determines what months they obstructed the tra)c on the memories should be secret? Is silence main highways, blocked the access of synonymous with a well-kept secret? Or is trucks to ports, burned lands, emptied their it instead proof of the terror that financial grain stores on the roads and demonstrated and semiocapitalism imposes on our ability in the most important cities in Argentina. to remember, express and imagine? Lastly, I realised my own lack of knowledge is this silence also the best guarantee of about the Argentinian ‘soyasation’, or the impunity for the crimes committed by all over-reliance of the country’s agriculture the various state terrorisms (genocides) on the product of soybeans — soybean of different historical periods? plants now cover more than *$ million

7 Because the khipu’s main function was a community’s accounting, its language mostly involved verbs — for example, how many animals were born, sold, died, etc. It also often referred to taxes — who had been paid, who was owed, who had debts. 8 The exhibition ‘The Potosí Principle’ originated at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (12 May — 6 September 2010), and travelled to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (8 October 2010 — 2 January 2011) and the Museo Nacional de Arte and MUSEF, La Paz (22 February — 30 April 2011).

70 | A!erall Eduardo Molinari, hectacres, more than ,$ per cent of the disﬁgured and burnt face of a boy in the El camaleón (The total cultivated land mass in the country. town of Las Petacas, in Santa Fe province. Chameleon), 2011, installation, detail, Further, I discovered that #$ per cent Los niños de la soja owes its name to collage, 23 × 34cm. of that cultivation is transgenic soybeans, those children, victims of a way of relating Installation view, produced by the company Monsanto or to nature and human lives that bears ‘Central Workshop’, in the framework its local representatives, and that in *$$% a close tie with the Potosí principle as of Encuentro de and *$$', "'$ million litres of the herbicide put forth by Creischer, Siekmann and Medellín-MDE11, glyphosate were sprayed over Argentinian Hinderer. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. land. I also found an image from *$$& Two preoccupations emerged in Courtesy the artist that showed the effects of these fumigations making Los niños de la soja: the ﬁrst had on inhabitants: a photograph of the to do with the ecotoxicological dimension

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 71 Eduardo Molinari’s performative walks in Las Pailas (above) and Purmamarca (below), Jujuy Province, Argentina, 2000. Photograph: Azul Blaseotto. Courtesy the artist

72 | A!erall of the soy model — its environmental, How do we escape this process? health-related and social consequences. How can we separate political action It became obvious that the transgenic soy from labour and join it with the life of model involves huge health-related risks the mind? For Virno, the means of freeing for humans, and all life forms. !e second political action from total paralysis would connected this economic phenomenon be to ‘develop the public quality of the with the current cultural realm. Do we Intellect outside the realm of salaried live in a transgenic culture? !is question work, in its opposition’ and thus to connects to a reflection of Berardi’s, create a non-state-related ‘public sphere’, concerning how biogenetics and computing a political community whose central share a central operation of recombination. reference is intellect.10 In such a way In the former, this involves genes. In the the only political action would not be latter, beginning with the perverse use resistance, but civil disobedience and of language, semiocapitalism enacts a exodus, flight. recombination of signs for which the But… would flight be the only way out? signified lacks importance, since it is mere How does Archivo Caminante confront recombinatory activity that creates added this post-Fordist reality in which language value. has lost its meaning and is now only Metaphorically speaking, I imagine information, whose nature — akin to this random recombination operation as money’s — is simply to circulate? taking place inside a washing machine: can !is might possibly be the hardest semiocapitalism and its cultural industries question, because it’s posited (and, I believe, work like a huge laundrette? Can its correctly so) in spatial terms, and the museum-related institutions transform spatial and territorial issue is at the heart themselves into gigantic washing machines of one of Archivo Caminante’s challenges: that, through their exhibition and cata- to inhabit movement. loguing systems, whiten and evenpurify social conflicts, wars, genocides, misery EM: One possible position would be to and poverty, the destruction of nature? accept Virno’s view that, e+ectively, post- Fordism has sealed the destiny of poiesis NEM: In A Grammar of the Multitude, and praxis, fusing them so that every act Paolo Virno sets up a central issue in of transformation may be a mere act of understanding the multitude in post- communication, and turning thought into Fordist capitalism that has much to do with lighter fluid for the motor of production. the transformation of artistic practices and But before going on, I’d like to remem- of their actors.9 He argues that the classic ber Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea that division of human experience into three taking a position implies spatial, but also fundamental realms — labour (poiesis), temporal, dimensions. When we take a political action (praxis) and intellect (the position — and this would in a certain way life of the mind) — has disappeared, and be the opposite of taking flight, since we that the categories have been hybridised, would be a)xing ourselves to the ground especially labour and political action. in some way — we confront a double In this way, language, or communication, spatiality: the one we have in front of which had been part of political action, us, which is often unknown, and the one is now fundamental to labour (which has behind our backs, which we don’t see. been rendered immaterial), as openly In this sense, a sensibility that proposes manifested in the cultural industries. !is new ways of seeing should be the result constitutes the matrix for post-Fordism, of that force field connecting what we see according to Virno, where ‘the production with what we don’t, and should include of communication [is] the medium clues to the latter. of communication’. At the same time, For Didi-Huberman, this idea also thought ceases to be an interior activity; involves taking a position in time: an it’s transformed into something external aspiration, a request to the future, but also and public, and it bursts into the productive an awareness of the time that has already process as its main resource. passed.

9 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson), Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004; see, especially, chapter 4, ‘Labour, Action, Intellect: Day Two’, pp.47—70. 10 Ibid., p.73.

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 73 I think, then, that your question about tion and unveiled in *$"" at the Encuentro flight is, lastly, a question about movement de Medellín-MDE"", at your invitation, in and about settling, about the place from Medellín, Colombia, I make visible the which we might, necessarily, be thinking. tricks with which a neoliberal wizard hides We all develop situated thought, as the the traces that his dominant machineries Argentinian philosopher and anthropolo- and agents inscribe upon our bodies and in gist Rodolfo Kusch has explained.11 our lives. !at is, thinking isn’t seen or touched. His magic wand creates exclusionary But it has weight and therefore it is dynamics: invisibility (achieving the important, at this time when the desirable disappearance of someone or something), thing would seem to be to take flight, levitation (suspending someone or to pay attention to the land upon which we something for an indefinite amount of are thinking, upon which we take positions. time), camouflage (the ability in someone I’m an artist from Argentina, a land of or something to mimic the dominant mixed races, a land with a colonial history aspect of its environment, whether it be still felt in the present (all one has to do for self-defence or to attack) and disguise is to read the newspaper to learn of British (a benign variant of camouflage, particu- Prime Minister David Cameron’s opinions larly in the usage of the clown nose, with regard to his colonial enclaves), involving the instrumentalisation of a a land which underwent neither the first socially approved role and contributing nor the second industrial revolutions. to the proliferation of the discourse of !us I think the critical crisis of ‘no ideology’ — a recombinant rhetoric, capitalist hegemony is opportune. In all ambiguous and de-politicising, available the places suffering from the consequences to the best bidder in the market). of post-Fordism, which, due to its nature, In the installation, a red curtain leads will find ways of self-perpetuating, we visitors to a corridor with walls on which should try to generate every possible way the US flag is painted, the metaphorical of sharing, including collectively thinking backdrop of a transnational elite that tries and imagining — again, looking for shared to make us live in fear and flight. Upon it, questions to shared problems. Perhaps it’s a constellation of documents from Archivo not so much about taking flight as much Caminante is precariously a)xed: a group as it is about creating modes of inhabiting of images of Colombian and contemporary movement together, and also of ‘situated history obtained from a ‘ramble’ inside thinking’. Perhaps this is the challenge: the electronic and digital information to create a territory of positions that are networks of the internet and television. capable of shifting between the land on Archivo Caminante attempts to make the which they are fixed and the force field inverse journey to that which transforms the collective generates. And to issue any artistic practice into a mere communi- clear signs that we don’t accept any more cational practice, setting in tension exclusions and that we are politically fragments arising from the discourse of capable of constructing new folds, new information networks and channels, which territories, maps and institutionalisms. are re-laid out with poetic and visionary desires. !ese cut-outs and residues are NEM: In your works from recent years, connected with the four tricks of the neo- which include Los niños de la soja and liberal wizard. !e first group, invisibility, El camaleón (%e Chameleon, *$""), is about subjectivities and incarnations: you set up a meditation on these issues, portraits or bodies of people who were or especially on the tricks semiocapitalism are being erased from historical narratives uses to obscure the economic and (Indians, African slaves, women, union political instruments of control over and popular leaders, guerrillas, figures our lives. Could you talk a little more such as Bradley Manning). !e second, about that? levitation, is about economic processes that pretend to keep communities or societies EM: In my latest work, El camaleón, (nation-states) suspended for an undeter- composed of an installation and a publica- mined period of time, under control of the

11 See Rodolfo Kusch, América profunda (1962), Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1999, pp.89—80; and R. Kusch, Indios, porteños y dioses (1966), Buenos Aires: Editorial Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, 1994, pp.124—25.

74 | A!erall Eduardo Molinari, international credit and funding agencies in flight or in permanent exodus. !is Los niños de la soja and banks. !is group of images also response is complex: what to do with (The Soy Children), 2010, photomontage, addresses the independence of Colombia power? How to confront it? But… is flight detail. Courtesy the during the nineteenth century, alongside possible when for power there’s no wasted artist images of Greece, the Panama Canal and territory, when its voracity will find us the IMF. !e third, camouflage, is about wherever we go? Is flight possible when cultural industries and the media, how any of our movements could be reconverted both of them are able to hide or obscure the into merchandise? !en, to reconsider language, narrative and imaginary of the the notion of cultural hegemony (taking transnational elite through globalisation Antonio Gramsci as a bold departure point) (images of military camouflage, jesters, is at the heart of Archivo Caminante’s task. contra-cultural Colombian movements Within the process that began in *$$" such as Nadaísmo, the Wikileaks affair, in Argentina, which we are experiencing Clarín and La Nación newspapers' links across South America, the cracks and with the last dictatorship in Argentina, etc). fissures, in the traditional notion of !e final group, the disguise with the clown representation motivate our actions. It is nose, is about war: the war against drugs important to imagine new institutions and in Colombia, fumigations with glyphosate, to re-create and rethink our public dimen- the US’s war-machine presence throughout sion, and to find new ways of relations with South American historically and today. nature, escaping from the exploitation of And about the ‘agents’: images of Richard resources, and from the colonial cultural Nixon’s DEA, Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say matrix. We must be careful not to commit No’ [to drugs] campaign, the Ronald the same mistakes from the past and to not Reagan aircraft carrier, paramilitarism be afraid to create a new internationalism in Colombia, the outed CIA agent and to inhabit this movement together, Valerie Plame and the artist-agent sharing, leaving behind the logic of money, Roberto Jacoby. consumerism and accumulation. Finally, answering your questions involved an embodied desire to not live

Translated from Spanish by Lupe Nunez-Fernández.˜

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 75 Eduardo Molinari, El paragüas (The Umbrella), 1987, ink, collage, cardboard, 40 × 50cm. Courtesy the artist and Colección Amalia Molinari

76 | A!erall Archivo Caminante: Constellations and Performativity — Teresa Riccardi

An American monster walks in the night. the codified allegories from the past It looks at the sky and at its surroundings. contained in present-day objects and It seems to be lost, but follows its star. the nostalgia or alienated emotional While it does so, it moves its tongue. attachment that people project onto these Soon there are many who accompany it. commodities. Embarking upon the di)cult All together their voices say: task of deciphering the contradictory ways ‘Asking, we walk.’ in which images and memory are o-en — Eduardo Molinari1 camouflaged in these objects, Benjamin created ‘constellations’ of dialectical Looking at Eduardo Molinari’s archive- images that ‘revolutionis[ed] the relations between part and whole’ and struck in-process, Archivo Caminante, ‘at the very heart of the traditional Teresa Riccardi finds echoes of aesthetic paradigm, in which the specificity Walter Benjamin’s constellations of of the detail is allowed no genuine resistance to the organising power of new meaning. the totality’.2 Today the Rabbi is no longer with us, More than a Marxist Rabbi, a Blind and the melancholic, utopian charisma of Archivist Using the Constellations political avant-garde artworks has become as His Guide not only reproducible, but, quite contrary A ghostly image, one that foreshadows to the secularisation they proclaimed, future constellations, seems to say it all. once again a fetish. !eir once political A blind man walks with di)culty, looking potential lies buried under layers of upward under a storm of newspaper make-up, branding and neoliberal faceli-s clippings, an umbrella covering his head. applied by the art market. However, He has lost one shoe, but he keeps on some practices, reminiscent of these walking, protecting himself from both historical avant-gardes, continue to the past and the present. !is may well upset the relationship between the parts be how Eduardo Molinari saw himself and the whole by reconsidering formal in "#'% when he made the painting-collage and artistic aspects in their political El paragüas (%e Umbrella): tormented praxis. O-en working with research by a past that was impossible to deal methodologies situated outside of the with. More than ten years passed before commercial sector, these practices create Molinari managed to conjure this image mobile cartographies aimed at mapping again with the creation of Archivo the present. Molinari, the blind historian- Caminante (Walking Archive), an artistic/ archivist, is one of them, and his meta- archival production of a performative work, Archivo Caminante, is undoubtedly nature that he has been carrying out a type of performance that interrogates since "###, and under its o)cial title the present, making ‘power-memories' since *$$". more agile by way of visibility instead When Terry Eagleton termed Walter of accumulation and conservation.3 Benjamin a ‘Marxist Rabbi’ he was Benjamin’s constellations reincarnated referring to Benjamin’s ability to celebrate hard-to-translate and obsolete allegories

1 Eduardo Molinari, El camaleón — Archivo Caminante, Medellín: Fondo Editorial del Museo de Antioquia, 2011. 2 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p.330. 3 ‘Power-memories' make up part of the conceptual map employed by Molinari in his figure of the blind historian/archivist. He uses them to define different aspects related to memory and history and their images. Conversation with the author, December 2011.

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 77 and betray a fascination with the discord usually taken from newspapers contained between written and graphic forms; in the archive — mounted on paper. !e Molinari follows in his footsteps, in his constellations are developed for the specific fixation on Aby Warburg and in the sites where they will be shown, their forms iconographic study of images, their and dimensions varying widely and dialectics and tensions. As he creates ranging from murals to series of images new allegories, he asks how we can look lined on the wall or arranged on a work- at the past, the present and the intervals table. For each constellation, Molinari of our memory in the midst of the storm, also uses other graphic or photographic without a cane to guide us along the way? images, sometimes retrieved from archives by his collaborators, others taken by the Brief Description of Archivo Caminante artist himself during walks in which he Several images of Archivo Caminante are researches the history of a site. !e ensuing spread out on the work table at La Dársena montages resemble veritable mythologies, in Buenos Aires, an artists’ space run by and suggest an orderly map of relations Molinari and Azul Blaseotto. !e variation articulated through formal and icono- among the images hints at the vast graphic associations to be unpacked by potentiality within Archivo Caminante: the viewer. Some of them work iconically, they include a small chameleon with its as they refer to media images, reference tail wrapped around a tree branch, walking quotes or recognisable figures. Others, upside down, its tongue outstretched in o-en located in the margins of the composi- search of food; a scheme of the di+erent tion, allude to the central image or the topic working parts of a washing machine; a of the series in a symbolic way, establishing close-up of the testicles of the Wall Street an elliptical relation to the past. Finally, bull; a cultural agent from the Centro a third type of intervention uses drawings, de Investigaciones Artísticas (Centre of lines and pages of tiny script, which recall Artistic Investigations, or CIA) wearing Benjamin’s ‘micrographies’,5 to establish Mickey Mouse ears; and an abandoned more surreal or ironic connections between factory of film rolls in Germany.4 !ese images. On the paper supporting the are just a few of the images hidden inside images, Molinari imprints ‘AC’, the initials Archivo Caminante’s meticulously labelled of Archivo Caminante. boxes, which await the Rabbi’s untangling. A detailed index suggests an internal Archivo Caminante is an archive order for the di+erent themes and disparate and a work-in-progress, comprised of documents included in the approximately an extensive body of images, photographs, fi-y boxes and corresponding envelopes newspaper clippings, flyers, magazines, that constitute the archive. !e archive, travel observations, notebooks and which people may access by engaging in drawings. It is an everyday life practice that a conversation with the artist, is open for Molinari constructs in slow and constant research as well. Molinari categorises the increments, allowing the footprints of his contents in three large groups: (a) photo- many movements and the experiences he graphs in black and white, fruits of his gathers to become visible. Some of the boxes visits to the Archivo General de la Nación house a small image bank; another set, Argentina (Argentina’s National General photographs taken by the artist himself; Archive, the AGN); (b) photographs taken and in other boxes, negatives and contact by Molinari on walks in both cities and sheets. !ere are also a number of boxes natural settings; and (c) ‘junk’ or ‘trash’ of unsorted images, awaiting their destiny documentation of fragments and graphic within the archive. Lastly, a series of residue pertaining to mass culture, found chronologically classified boxes store the in the street or donated by people familiar artworks themselves. with his interests. !e most represented In making his works, Molinari brings motifs include issues of Argentinian together pieces from Archivo Caminante and Latin American history; local and to create constellations consisting of international news events; images that drawings, collages and typed texts — respond to political forms of subjectivity;

4 The CIA is a non-profit organisation, founded by Graciela Hasper, Roberto Jacoby and Judi Werthein in 2009 in Buenos Aires, that promotes collaborative research between artists and thinkers in Latin America. See http://www.ciacentro.org/ (last accessed on 19 March 2012). 5 See Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla (ed.), Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (trans. Esther Leslie), London and New York: Verso, 2007, p.50.

78 | A!erall Anonymous, Imposición de la casulla a San Ildefonso (St Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble), c.1600, Museo Casa Nacional de la Moneda de Potosí, Bolivia. Painting included in Eduardo Molinari’s installation Los niños de la soja (The Soy Children), 2010. Courtesy the artist

and diverse forms of collective identity. constellations, showing their potential for !is material is organised according to dialectical arrangement. Like an archivist major themes and in chronological order who has lost the power to see, Molinari within each envelope, although images groups or separates them in order to be are selected primarily in accordance able to understand and clarify new with formal a)nities, which in many relationships. cases reveal appropriated iconography or In addition to his artistic/archivist challenge customary contexts of reference. practice and the image interventions, For example, the titles of the envelopes Molinari uses walks throughout the city in box & read as follows: ‘Lightning bugs. and countryside as tools for the archive. Human Rights’ (S*'); ‘Pachacuti. Latin !e artist’s walks establish additional America’ (S*#); ‘Old World ". Spain. ruptures and shi-s to what the images he France. Italy and Holland’ (S($); ‘Old takes could tell us about the places through World *. Germany’ (S("); ‘Mayﬂower. which he walks. Even if the photographs England, USA’ (S(*); ‘Cracks ". Russia, only o+er a subjective and amateur record, China, India’ (S((); and ‘Cracks *. Middle rather than description that would orient East, Arab World’ (S(.). !ese titles work the viewer, the personal connections he as clues or guidelines that map out the establishes with local communities and elements used in Archivo Caminante’s artists’ collectives, as well as with their

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 79 political agenda, link the social body to the ! e ensuing montages resemble Eduardo Molinari, archive. !e archive is activated through El camaleón veritable mythologies, and (The Chameleon), these performative acts of walking, which 2011, installation, generate and constitute it as both a literal suggest an orderly map of dimensions and performed resource. relations articulated through variable, detail. Installation view, In this sense, the project presents formal and iconographic ‘Central Workshop’, multiple challenges to the artist. We could associations to be unpacked in the framework identify this dynamic and mobile articula- of Encuentro de by the viewer. Medellín-MDE11, tion with situated social practices, insofar Museo de Antioquia, as it gives specific oral information on a this translates into circuits, environments, Medellín, particular context, tackling the immediate home furnishings, worktables and chairs, Colombia. Courtesy the artist and Museo present in a way that reconfigures past or in the development of related activities de Antioquia history and questions how it is captured that point out the specific sites to which in archival records. From another perspec- they refer, inviting the spectator to closely tive, walking becomes a ritual that enables study and reflect on the materials present- him to discuss with others, to learn, to bring ed. Whether a question of activating bonds together di+erent stories and to investigate with the public, articulating practices the site in an intimate and reflexive way, of Institutional Critique or, as has recently attempting to decolonise the ways in which been suggested, radicalising relational we archive images in our minds. aesthetic practices,6 this walking-perfor- !is form of walking does not mative aspect of Archivo Caminante can imply the territorial mobility of physical be considered, as Molinari himself puts it, displacement alone, but also deals with ‘the search for a communal or community an emotional mobility, one of recollections, aesthetic’.7 memory and cartographies of subjectivity As a praxis Archivo Caminante that unfolds on both individual and manages to turn away from the mono- collective levels. In some installations lingual nature of historical narratives

6 This refers to the reading made by the Critical Art Ensemble, quoted in E. Molinari, ‘Walking Archives: The Soy Children’, 28 January 2012, available at http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=365 (last accessed on 14 February 2012). 7 Ibid.

80 | A!erall Eduardo Molinari, assembled through progressive, serialised Some Constellations Already Seen Los niños de la soja temporal sequences, in order to establish in the Heavens (The Soy Children), 2010, collage, detail. a productive resistance that is open to Even if Archivo Caminante’s constellations Courtesy the artist dialogue and new forms of collective may be accessed in a number of ways subjectivity. In Head O&ce (*$$%), for — including installations, publications, instance, Molinari shows portraits of performances, environments or any the board of directors of the Argentinian combination of these — certain elements arts-funding institution Fondo Nacional are maintained throughout most of its de las Artes (FNA) alongside satellite images projects. In every case, Molinari elaborates that contexualise these ﬁgures historically on allegories that poignantly organise the and politically. Revealing details of images for the viewer, and which display a the institution, understood as a ‘living cosmogony that is more like myth, with its organism’, this constellation exposes leaps and time lapses, than linear narrative. the systematic interventions into and In some cases, these nameless ﬁgures are disruptions of the FNA’s work during presented cryptically and in others they are the military coups in Argentina in past more accessible, due to formal associations decades, which were o-en aligned with or recognisable references. If we look economic neoliberal policies. !e work closely, nothing in these images is really proposes a critical alternative to access evident. Molinari combines symbols in new protocols, databases, library repositories ways to activate the viewers’ interpretative and archives without being afraid of capacity, exposing them to what they know archaic forms of surveying sources and and what they do not, laying bare their research techniques, which Molinari own process of value production. All well appropriates and subverts. !e multiple, and good, but why, does Molinari ask us collective and ‘local’ voices that make to decipher these complex images? Are up Archivo Caminante destabilise the accounts of historians not su)cient these neoliberal arguments as well as for rethinking the discourse of history and the habitual labels and strategies of control its shi-s in meaning? hidden beneath the supposition of the If this hypothesis were acceptable for free navigation of information. Molinari, art as the promise of happiness that !eodor W. Adorno spoke of would be

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 81 Eduardo Molinari, KMK / Karl Marx Kopf, 2007, performance in front of Karl Marx’s monument, part of the exhibition ‘Tras los pasos de los hombres de maíz’ (‘Following the Steps of the Cornmen’), Art Centre Weltecho, Chemnitz, Germany. Photograph: Làszlò Tòth. Courtesy the artist

annihilated, art as praxis would not exist for Archivo Caminante. In the installation and we would find ourselves emancipated El cuchillo (%e Knife, *$$$), for instance, human beings, with no need to negotiate the artist intervenes in over ",$ photo- reconciliations of any type between graphs from the AGN that narrate violent aesthetics and politics. Since this is not the political divisions in the country’s history. case and these terms remain at variance Symbols such as a headless body, aliens, the — at least for Molinari — the willingness, knife and sign language populate Molinari’s desires and subjective capacities materi- iconography throughout the Cuchillo series alised in image-symbols, put ahead of as well as Columna vertebral (Vertebral capital’s logic, remain necessary. !erein Column, *$$*), a photo-essay and series of lies his confidence in the imperative of posters about work culture, labour unions performance, since only ritual, along with and the history of Peronist movements. community, can help to comprehend the Here Molinari’s gesture of giving out power of blindness and the paradoxical flyers with various slogans denouncing presence of the bodies that have been made the intensification of precarious labour invisible throughout history. conditions since *$$" recalled, somewhat !e ritual of walking blindly, as well as nostalgically, an idealised past of the the practice of taking photographs, drawing worker, and pointed at the dismantling or making collages and creating image- of the unions that ensued from the imple- symbols from his archive, appears in the mentation of increasingly flexible forms first pieces that Molinari made in Argentina of labour in the "##$s. It may be worth

82 | A!erall remembering that in *$$*, when the piece material. !is constellation brought was made, unemployment reached *, per together di+erent image-symbols, including cent of the active population in Argentina. the mule, the walking man, maps of the New developments and actions appear silver routes during the Colonial Vice Regal in Tras los pasos de los hombres de maí$ period in Río de la Plata ("%%&—"'"$) and (Following the Steps of the Corn Men, an image of the guerrillero, or fighting, *$$'), a piece presented in Chemnitz, Christ from the city of /lcara, Argentina. Germany, in which Molinari walks around !ese symbols interrogate memory and the city in ‘search of the lost khipu’.8 imperialist forms of colonisation in Latin In the performance, the artist stands under America and are taken from popular and a huge statue of Karl Marx’s head, dressed heretic histories rather than received as a Corn Man, a mythical figure from the history. sacred book of the K’iche’, one of the ethnic For the next Ex Argentina show, groups of the Mayas, who were prominent ‘Normality’ (Palais de Glace, Buenos during the pre-Colombian era in Latin Aires, *$$&), Molinari developed Parque America. Mimicking an Amauta (an problema (Problem Park, *$$&), which educator of the elite during the Incan included the publication El tío (%e Uncle) empire), Molinari assembles and interprets and a mural installation made of drawings a khipu — a system of cords and knots, in and photographic material, a series of this case made out of stockings, with which automaton sculptures made by Pedro indigenous Andean peoples would pass Haspereué (with whom Molinari maintains on accounts and numerical information. an ongoing collaboration) and chalk Against the backdrop of Chemnitz’s drawings by Jürgen Stollhans.11 In invoking changed landscape, which has shi-ed the tío figure, a popular devotional image from industrial production to new recovered from Bolivia’s Andean cosmogo- forms of contemporary labour, Molinari ny and the cult of the Potosí ridge miners, describes the work: the project linked to the collective forms employed by cooperatives and self-managed % e AC follows in the footsteps of the Corn factories that emerged in response Man. %is action unfolds as the search to neoliberal policies, as well as to the for the traces le' behind by these beings insurrection of "# and *$ December *$$", in their march toward new maps, when the population took over the streets new spatial forms that are not yet clearly of Argentina in protest against the most visible. %ese maps are of visions, of dramatic economic crisis in the country’s becoming, of power […]. In their voyage, democratic history. Molinari also worked these singular men and women confront with Creischer and Siekmann in the other forms of association. On repeated exhibition they organised with Max Jorge occasions they have to confront ‘those Hinderer Cruz, ‘!e Potosí Principle’, in grey men’ who annihilate the Corn Men which he showed the installation Los niños without hesitation. 9 de la soja (%e Soy Children, *$"$). For the work Molinari visited fields sown with In *$$", the artists and curators Alice transgenic soy in Carlos Casares (a town Creischer and Andreas Siekmann invited in the province of Buenos Aires) and on the Molinari to present Archivo Caminante outskirts of Rosario and the nearby port of in their project Ex Argentina (*$$*—$&), San Lorenzo (both in the province of Santa which developed over a series of exhibi- Fe) in order to make more visible to the tions. In ‘Steps to Flee from Work By inhabitants of large cities the opaque Doing’ (Ludwig Museum, Cologne, *$$.),10 phenomenon of the increase of soy farming for example, Molinari presented El camino in Argentina and its environmental, real (%e (oyal (oad, *$$.), which social and cultural consequences.12 displayed a broad selection of archival Along the way he delineated landscapes,

8 E. Molinari, in Tras los pasos de los hombres de maíz, Chemnitz: Galeria Weltecho, 2008, pp.26—33. 9 Ibid., p.5. 10 See Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann and Gabriela Massuh (ed.), Pasos para huir del trabajo al hacer (exh. cat.), Buenos Aires and Cologne: Interzona Editora and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004. 11 See http://www.lamusaranga.com.ar (last accessed on 14 February 2012) and E. Molinari, El tío, Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Chilavert Artes Gráficas, 2006. 12 ‘The Potosí Principle’ was exhibited at three locations: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (12 May — 6 September 2010); the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (8 October 2010 — 2 January 2011); and the Museo Nacional de Arte and MUSEF, La Paz (22 February — 30 April 2011).

Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 83 topographies and di+erent uses of agricul- politics and memory converge. !is Eduardo Molinari, tural chemicals, of glyphosate in particular, intersection, which only exists in a poten- La conservación del orden (The Conserva- a weedkiller patented by the company tial form in the archive at La Dársena, is tion of Order), 2000, Monsanto in the "#%$s, via a variety of actualised every time Archivo Caminante collage, photograph images — of trucks, fences, exportation is activated through the public presentation from Argentina’s National General routes to China and washing machines, of one of its constellations. It is such social Archive, 20 × 25cm. and of an ekeko, a fertility god.13 performance that I propose as most radical Part of the series in Archivo Caminante ’s artistic practice. El cuchillo (The Knife), 2000. Courtesy the "e Radically Performative Nature Guillermina Fressoli recently included artist of Archivo Caminante Archivo Caminante in a suggestive group In art, as in politics, maintaining an active of works by artists whose practices involve struggle to create diverse strategies of constituting archives and di+erent forms resistance — all based on doing — is not a of viewing the city.15 According to her, minor task in a world packed with images Archivo Caminante reveals disputes and manipulations. However, opposing regarding how memory operates, insofar this logic of excess from the standpoint as the works themselves shi- through time, of pure utopian nostalgia, which ultimately thus making the subject of the work and its obscures the truth about the past, can artistic procedure coalesce. Using Michael hardly be brandished as a solution Podro’s concepts of ‘subject-matter’ and either. Nevertheless, this argument can ‘procedure’, Fressoli proposes that both be presented from other positions, such the subjects that Archivo Caminante deals as ‘Neither nostalgia nor a better past’, with and the form that the installations take one of Archivo Caminante’s mottos, used present forms of perceptual and cognitive in the graphics for Columna vertebral. adjustments to reality, in which the social Observing Archivo Caminante’s forms and the artistic become indistinguishable. of operation, there are undeniable links From this perspective, Archivo Cami- between its practice and certain works or nante’s performative nature, activating themes handled by Argentinian artists viewers ‘to look again’, becomes a central active during the "#%$s, such as Lea Lublin, component of Molinari’s practice. It is Victor Grippo and Alfredo Portillos.14 no longer a question of seeing images At that time, the methods of construction that we have already seen, but one of a and forms of reflection that their work new horizon of possible readings that suggested in relation to the viewer used the enter into conflict with already naturalised rhetoric of the gaze as an accomplice. !is references. was due to an ideological self-censorship, As I look again at Molinari’s "#'% su+ered as a more or less direct result of painting-collage El paragüas, a new a political regime of state terrorism, which present is added: its own self-portrayed confined these artists’ aesthetic. At the ghostliness that looks down from the same time, learning to decipher what firmament through the camera; in other had been thus encoded became one form words, from the mirror that reflects of organising speech without words, the bedroom in the house of his father, and in any case, of looking closely at details, a historian, where the painting hangs. reading the opaque and even acting disguised as a blind man walking. In Molinari’s constellations, ideologies are only revealed by the way each viewer engages with objects and images, thus reinforcing this inheritance, where art,

13 The ekeko is a deity of the Aimara or Colla people that represents abundance, fertility and joy. It takes the form of a slightly obese, smiling figure dressed in costume typical of the Andean region and carrying a large quantity of slung bags and packages of food and other necessities. 14 See Teresa Riccardi, ‘Representaciones y mitos de “lo latinoamericano”: el dualismo, el maíz y la papa en las propuestas conceptuales y performáticas del arte argentino’, paper published as part of the conference ‘Tercer Encuentro. La problemática del viaje y los viajeros. América Latina y sus miradas. Imágenes, representaciones e identidades’, Universidad Nacional del Centro, Tandil, 14—16 August 2008. 15 Guillermina Fressoli, ‘El archivo como problema en la constitución de las formas de recuerdo artístico’, paper presented at the conference ‘Art and Archives: Latin America and Beyond From 1920 to Present. International Research Forum for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars’, 15—17 October 2010, University of Texas, Austin.

Translated from Spanish by Tamara Stuby.

84 | A!erall Artists: Eduardo Molinari | 85