Curatorial text by  Natalia Sosa Molina – Victor López Zumelzu

1.  When we first started thinking about this exhibition the first question that came to us as curators was — how do we generate aesthetic thinking that allows for a decentralisation in the hierarchies of bodies, generating reflections that are closer to the organic and metabolic in order to allow for other ways of inhabiting the present and its imagination?

2.  To begin developing this question we called on Julia Retz (Brazil), Andrea Ferrero (Peru), and Henry Palacios (Colombia). Their work gave us the tools and propositions to think about an imagination calibrated to our sensibilities in order to promote the empowerment of the collective, conscience that we must occupy the greyness of the present to build new imaginations while recognising the necessity to decenter forms of thought that generate symbolic-metabolic movement intrinsic to all life.

3.  Modifying these imaginations is the ideal starting point, to think together with artists and their works through a somatic learning space which allows us to travel beyond classical Western reasoning linked to the brain-sight (the cause of most inequalities) and think in a way that is more anthropophagous, metabolic, and nonlinear. This idea of change based on the biological processes of feeding, consumption, absorption, and adaptation created the conditions for the birth of new imaginations in relation to the body as a receiver and transformer of perceptions that become complex when thinking about them outside these moulds. These perceptions pass through the works as what we absorb, adapt and change, as if we were a metabolising entity, a stomach and entrails capable of mobilising other affects and policies, and at the same time condensing various functions that allow the subjectivities to come to be politically materialised.

4.  In Anthropophagi Zombie, Brazilian philosopher Suely Rolnik proposes that this metabolising absorption “is not simply about “eating others” (as the modernist anthropophagi proposed) since this is linked to the enjoyment of appropriation to increase our social and narcissistic power, the basis of the unconscious colonial-patriarchal-racial-capitalist regime. Instead of eating the other, it would be more appropriate to say that it is about letting ourselves be fertilised by others and, based on their dissonant effects on our constitution, sustaining a process of transformation that gives substance to this dissonance, which It increases our power to participate in the collective work of regeneration of the cultural, environmental, MONTES NO VISIBLES 1 social and mental ecosystem, generating with them structures for the liberation of dreams, utopias and repressed desires of our time.

5. Scientifically, the stomach is considered a small brain since a set of neural networks cover its walls. There are around 100 million of these cells in the stomach, as many as in a cat’s head. This second brain does not think in the same way as the brain, and its processes go beyond the simple crushing, digestion, and absorption of what is outside our body. The stomach mixes and creates its own imaginations, poets like Pushkin already knew this (who even died from a wound to the stomach), their processes have a performative dimension capable of mobilising affects and moods that are not understood by the logical rationale of the brain. The stomach installs new horizons every moment in the form of agency: who has never felt butterflies in the stomach when they were in love?

6. Perhaps this imagination we are referring to acts collectively. In a text about the work of artist Eduardo Navarro, curator Chus Martinez refers to the octopus as a de-centered entity that has three-quarters of its brain in its tentacles, which gives each of them the ability to perceive and feel autonomously, while at the same time being part of a unit, that is why we think and feel from a decentralised place, allowing possibility to occur in that feeling.

7.  Adaptation/Absorption functions here as a political act of change and communication, the body is a recipient and generator of alliances and resistance, thinking of the works gathered as entities that contribute to putting the problems of our present in tension. In an oscillation of visual and ideological languages, the artist gives an account of the current history of Latin America, passing through stories of colonial, racial, economic and political violence that from different perspectives generate broad imaginations to inhabit and decenter the many Global Souths that exist. Furthermore, their productions point out edges from which multiple local realities of each country can be approached, from positions of abstraction, autonomy, emancipation and resistance. At times the works touch, intersect or continue their journey in parallel with these power dynamics, without denying the complexity of the contexts within our region.

8.  In the work of Andrea Ferrero, she critically considers the iconographies of power and our relationship to them. Food and chocolate as spectacle, food rituals as stagings of colonial hegemony, and their relationship with architecture and ceremonial aesthetics have framed her most recent work, in an effort to expose the cultural legacies inherited through oppression with humor and fiction strategies. Her work aims to challenge dominant political ideologies, fantasizing about alternative and speculative narratives to official stories, using archival material, prints, moulds and digital processes such as photogrammetry and 3D models as raw material. MONTES NO VISIBLES 2

9. Julia Retz’s work explores the relationship between architecture, body, skin, and the failure of modernity to subordinate a colonial vision of the natural environment and everyday space. In his work he uses different mouldable materials such as translucent fabrics and natural latex, to give his works the sensation of movement, flexibility, rupture, fragility, and even the possibility of change in the crystallised structure between the rigid and solid. What appears in his works are fractured, porous, archaeological architectures, sometimes as ruins or as new possibilities of understanding time, bodies, and the politics of living.

10. The artistic practices of Henry Palacio stress the contradictions generated by history, economics, and popular culture, constructing narratives with an intimate relationship between reality and the representation of the political context of the global south. His work manifests itself in different forms and scales — he writes on canvas with a “pasta alphabet”, using soup letters through systematic repetition and the use of cultural iconography, corporate identities, logos and symbols of popular circulation, thereby criticising the different forms of representation and self-representation that shape different layers of reality.

11.  As a whole, the works propose different moments and show the potential of thinking under different modes of contemporary subjectivity as a form of metabolism, like a large stomach, prioritising fluid thought, absorption, and transformation of inherited structures. MONTES NO VISIBLES understands curatorial practice as a poetic form and a constellation of flows in constant communication, where images, perceptions, bodies, and objects assume different types of dialogues but also operate in their singularity, thus generating a lived and potent ecosystem of relationships.