“Por Amor a la Disidencia” Comes to an End at MUAC, with Marcela Armas’ “Vortice”

Por amor a la disidencia (For the Sake of Mavericks) is the title of the first series of exhibitions included in MUAC’s Sexta Sur* project. The project is going to display shows by Edgardo Aragon (Mexico), Laura Lima (Brazil), Carlos Bunga (Portugal) and Marcela Armas (Mexico). A fundamental element of the curatorial plan is having all proposals integrating the anti-gravity as a significant vector, when it comes to analyzing it as a dissident reaction. Although the projects are individually exhibited, the intervention in space by each of these artists triggers an out-of-time talk between their practices, in terms of the local, the global, the historic, the technological and the performance, starting with the shared horizon of dissidence.

Marcela Armas’ Vortice (Vortex), to be inaugurated on October 12, is the fourth and last project of series Por amor a la disidencia. This work goes deep into the mechanisms applied by the State to build the cultural identity and produce the subjectivity by means of public education, intervening and investigating the mechanisms to produce texts books for free. 

The research began with the discovery of the origin of the raw material used to produce text books. After a presidential decree signed in 2004 all federal entities are required to donate paper used for bureaucratic processes to the National Board of Text Books for Free (CONALITEG Spanish acronym), in order to be recycled. In fact: the text books used by children in elementary school have been made with a significant proportion of paper recycled by such governmental entities as those linked to legal and decision-making processes, Government Secretaries, Foreign Affairs, the Presidency, etc. By identifying the connection between knowledge and power, Armas refers to the complicated framework of social subjection devices that operate in SEP’s books. The politic and symbolic content of these books is not only included on their pages. It also appears in the material as a mean: they carry the generic code of their bureaucratic origin.

A vortex is a turbulent flow with spiral rotation and close currents. When choosing that name for her work, Armas characterizes the political-cultural process she investigates as a phenomenon of closed flows. Nevertheless, she plays with its intensity. The material sets the movement speed that, if dominated, is no longer turbulent and goes for temporality. The whole research and her metaphoric work are reviewed, in terms of a visual and sonorous exercise, on the video that complements the work.

_{*Sexta Sur}

_{Sexta Sur is a new curatorial program that puts together, year after year, four solo shows carried out by emerging, national and international artists, in an effort to generate a space for alternation and experimentation that promotes the flow of diverging and spontaneous interventions, which come together in a true dialogue. In this sense and playing with the idea of a quarter as “own space”, the presence of each artist in different moments will be combined so the projects are conceived as the fraction of a whole: 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4.}