_{The relationships between affectivity, violence, domesticity and criminality come into tension in the works of four Latin American artists}

Legenda: Sudden Death (2012), João Castilho works with the last seconds of life of hijackers and people involved in war and armed conflicts

The artistic projects by Mexican artist Yoshua Okón, together with those by the Brazilians Cinthia Marcelle, João Castilho, and the artist duo Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima compose the curatorial section Uncontainable, at LOOP Fair, in Barcelona.

Understanding violence as a global and interconnected phenomenon is the problematic suggested by Yoshua Okón. In Pulpo [Octopus, 2011], he approaches violence as a power device serving a global neoliberal system. In this video installation, Okón enacts the staging of battles from the Guatemala civil war, in the surveilled space of a Home Depot parking lot in the outskirts of Los Angeles, USA. His actors are real partisans from the guerrilla groups that fought in the 1990s against the coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA. Today, they are illegal immigrants in the USA.

With this piece, which consolidates his strategy in favor of a choreographed violence, the artist draws attention to the fierce scheme of economic monopoly that allowed some companies to benefit at the expense of Latin American countries, causing their ruin. But there is more than that. The social choreography performed here by Yoshua Okón focuses on the processes of domestication that these people have been submitted to. Veterans have wound up looking for an informal job at the margins of the system they fought to overthrow.

The tension between domesticity/violence is the main concept underlying Calar [Shut Up, 2011], by the Brazilian artist duo Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima. This piece simulates a conversation between two bodies and was recorded with a thermal camera, used in certain industrial fields to detect system disorders and areas of tension. The bodies confront and touch each other, producing cold and warmth. The imprints of this relationship that oscillates between affectivity and violence are visualized on the skin of the two characters, through the images generated by thermography. Here we find an almost scientific dimension of how and with what intensity one body invades another.

The phenomenon of violence as a powerful tool used by the media is appropriated by artist João Castilho in Morte Súbita [Sudden Death, 2012]. The artist works with the last seconds of life of hijackers and people involved in armed conflicts, always framed by cameras and weapons. The videos present nine different cases – which occurred at different times and places across the world – which on these nine screens share the common link of being synchronized at the moment of the deadly shot. This vulgar, anonymous violence is redeemed in the 9-channel video installation. Orchestrated as a whole, these cases receive the same epilogue, a requiem that explodes with the shots, liberating shades of color present at the moment of death.

The color spilled in Castilho’s images resembles the city that does not fit its limits and overflows into the constantly swelling metropolitan areas. Like Yoshua Okón’s Mexico City, which has increased four times in size, going from 5 to 20 million people, during the 42 years of the artist’s life. Swollen territories and uncontained situations are recurrent subjects of our civilization.

The video Leitmotif (2011), by Cinthia Marcelle, suggests the beginning of a flood. With increasing pace and volume, water and foam completely take over the frame, with more and more aggressive surges and waves. At a certain point, we notice that this convulsion is controlled by squeegees that appear from the borders of the frame. spilling from the inside, but rather the invasion of an external element which, after taking over the whole area, becomes uncontainable within its own limits.

The repetitive effort of the squeegees trying to control the flood articulates a choreographed violence. As in previous pieces, Cinthia Marcelle acknowledges a Sisyphean memory in the repetition of these movements. In the artist’s work, daily movements are dislocated from their contexts to produce, in their uselessness, a new form of occupation of time. The residues of these repetitions give shape to her atmospheric landscapes and installations. This is the leitmotif of her work, articulated again through this orchestration of waters. Leitmotif is, ultimately, an attempt to recreate nature with our own hands.

Playing with evasions and invasions / violence and control / attraction and resistance, the artistic projects by Okón, Marcelle, Castilho and Motta/Lima operate as the affective and social reconstruction of contexts in crisis.

A window to the planet´s future – Interview with Yoshua Ok

Research studies and personal perceptions of citizens in large urban centers of Latin America point to the growth of crime and delinquency in the 1980s and ’90s. How did this factor influence your work as an artist?

Well, I believe that the sensation of living in a civilization in crisis is a fundamental part of my artistic practice. And having grown up in Mexico City is definitely a determining factor for this feeling. During this period, my city’s metropolitan zone became four times larger, growing from 5 to 20 million inhabitants – an almost unprecedented phenomenon in the history of humankind, posing enormous consequences for the region’s social fabric and ecological balance. And the growth of crime and violence you refer to is the direct result of that phenomenon. In this sense, together with other megalopolises, the city is converted into a kind of window to the planet’s future: a world with a brutal increase of population, with an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth, and greater degradation of the natural environment; the undeniable evidence of an unsustainable system headed toward self-destruction. This situation is becoming so severe that it is nearly impossible to ignore it, as either an artist or a common citizen.

Mexico did not undergo a period of declared military and political violence as Brazil did. But in what measure have authoritarianism, corruption and other forms of violence practiced by the state influenced the country?

It seems to me that there is little to be gained from analyzing these phenomena on a national or regional basis, since we live in a global and interconnected world. This is to say, a large part of the conditions that generate violence are the result of policies on the global level. The Latin American dictatorships are an excellent example of this interconnectivity. In every case – including that of Mexico, which in its own way also lived under a dictatorship – they were planned and directed from abroad (specifically, by the US government, pressured by private corporations), and in a certain way they prepared the ground for the current global system: neoliberalism. That is, I think that we live at a time in which the governments have been converted into tools, while the power is concentrated elsewhere. It is an era in which the nationalist discourse is used as a means of diverting the public’s attention. Octopus, to a large extent, deals with this.

Thus, it was the violence and corruption exercised by the neoliberal system that influenced me. For me, it is extremely important not to deal with violence (whether practiced by the government or by organized crime, if in fact there is any difference between the two) in a decontextualized way, since there is a great danger of converting it into sensationalism or, even worse, into exoticism, and thus isolating it and disconnecting it from its origins.

Paula Alzugaray is director of seLecT and curator of Uncontainable at Loop Fair Barcelona

*Originally published in seLecT LOOP Fair issue.