Primavera Viral | KM 0.2| Virtual Exhibition

KM 0.2
Calle Cerra (Pda.15) #619 Santurce, Puerto Rico 00907

Adolfo Bimer (CHI) | Ana Izquierdo (PER) | Corbett Fogue (USA) | Lucía Madriz (CR) | Raura Olitas (PER)

The vital sign of existence?

Of the four climatic seasons, spring is the one that we associate as the ideal moment for sowing and harvesting and with it marks the beginning or regeneration of a new cycle. In the recent spring we experience neuralgic moments that precede a set of social disparities that have undermined the highest aspirations of humanity. 

The social and political context in which we find ourselves has been tainted by the virus of inequality, corruption and the darkest recesses of the human spirit. How can we face life and social relations after the pandemic? Life as we know it will never be the same. The virus, in combination with centuries of systemic oppression in a range of socio-cultural spectra, opens an analytical and processual path where diverse manifestations and social complexities operate.

By presenting Viral Spring through a virtual format, Km 0.2 come up with this kind of manifesto to generate more questions as in a kind of spell, instead of trying to find definite answers.

Despite the fact that they have artists from countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, the United States and Peru, we can observe a series of similar narratives in the body of work presented, which shows the importance of continuing to engage in dialogue about the issues that affect us despite the geographical distances. The artists who participated in this exhibition are charged with premonitions, personal cosmologies and observations that subvert the framework of which our current reality is composed, thus oxygenating existence. Through a collective look focused on historical processes, the exhibition produces a series of narrative urgencies that conspire to maintain the existing dialogue between the relationship of art and life itself.

In Ana Izquierdo's Exercises of Resistance, we observe a haircut carried out by El Chino (former combatant of the FARC- EP) on the artist's head. Izquierdo takes up this action, which she has been carrying out for a couple of years to point out the deportation policies of Latin American immigrants in the United States, in the Territorial Training and Reincorporation Space (ETCR) in Pondores, La Guajira. By inviting El Chino to give her a haircut, Izquierdo seeks to question the role played by gender, since this work of care and affection is normally attributed to the socio-cultural and politically constructed gender as "feminine" in most of Latin America. However, in 'Resistance Exercise 1', we see someone who could be socially considered an alpha "male" warrior performing an action with delicacy and even affection.

LOTE, by Raura Oblitas, questions the concept of a monument, of the objectification of history and memory, and seeks to question the right to inhabit in confrontation with the institutional use of public space. Through this series, the artist focuses on the public-private relationship by pointing out the official monuments whose locations are understood as privileged in the public space of the city. 

Breath Studies 4-6 come from a series of frames in which, using photo-sensitive paper, Corbett Fogue collects saliva and breath vapour during visits to the hospital where his father was battling a lung condition. With this action, Fogue creates mementos of the last conversations between him and his father, seeking to perpetuate the spoken word, and the transcripts of the last conversations between a father and his son.

289, by Adolfo Bimer, is a digital photograph generated from a microscope blood test. A routine blood smear, of the many that are performed daily on psychiatric patients at the José Horwitz Barak Hospital in Santiago de Chile, is viewed through a home-made optical microscope, then printed and scanned manually. The resulting image shows the movement of the artist's hand during the scanning process, as he wrote on these medical specimens a word used to designate madness. The word becomes indecipherable in the process, manifesting the distance between the disease he is trying to identify and the control system to access it.

In Todo Bajo Control, a sculpture created with grains of rice and black beans, Lucia Madriz presents an argument that has been used by large transnational corporations such as Monsanto-Bayer and Syngenta to continue using genetically modified seeds (GMOs) and their agrochemicals, contaminating ecosystems, water tables and communities, alluding to the myth that modern man usually submits to nature in order to create his own version of it through science.

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