A few days ago it was released in the Reina Sofía National Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, the exhibitionPrincipio Potosí. One of the most important centers in the Iberian Peninsula in this field (it houses Picasso’s Guernica among other jewels) has dedicated one of the main temporary rooms (in the second quarter of the year) to this matter. The exhibition is expected to travel through Berlin and later arrive in La Paz.
Globalization is the first word that appears in my head when I see it and although this notion is not a new fact, the intensive use of its word in recent decades has been. More and more, especially from the new technologies and the possibilities of interconnection that they bring. Everything now looks mixed, tangled, woven, and not always with good eyes. Not always optimistic.
Precisely what the Potosí Principle proposes to us is globalization and its possibilities, for better or worse, carried out flagrantly or accidentally, and it does so using the weapons or means from which it feeds precisely: interconnections.
The show features German curators, and is comprised of works and objects from places as diverse as Qatar, Huelva, China, and Bolivia to name a few. In the Bolivian installation, at the same time as some proposals from the 17th century, the very interesting artist Elvira Espejo intervenes, as well as the provocative Mujeres Creando. The latter with a powerful installation, critical of the Church, in which he exposes a wooden latticework as a frame (conceptual, yes) that acts as a barrier and filter to the possibilities of women, very persistent until today in the national culture .
If we had the possibility of physically moving away from the exhibition, the first impression that it suggests to me is that of a web page. A lot of information, diverse connections, chaotic routes, apparently isolated concepts but linked by a context in different parts of the planet. Especially baroque in terms of information. Lots of data, sensory and referential.
This leads us to think about the abilities of curators, not only in terms of curatorship and technical expertise, but also of artistic creation, and of course, to question their aesthetic ability.
More innovative is the approach in which the concept of creation 2.0 can be associated, since some of the protagonists of the work are not considered “artists” in the first instance. It is not an exclusive sample of the world of fine arts, far from it. It is rather a hybrid between militant activism and free creation.
This is when we wonder where the vanguard of contemporary art comes from. Is it a gated community to Tribeca or Soho? Do you have to come from Europe or from San Francisco? Perhaps partial, village and local western art has been exhausted long ago in favor of a much more universal and generic one, after all, the connection of aesthetics and concepts is made with a direct relationship of the social repercussions and of contemporary concerns. Globalized concerns, and not always conceived towards freedom, but many times towards slavery originated by new mechanisms.
Also published in the Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos. Photo: Victoria López.