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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Angeles Alonso Espinosa, Hervé Chandès, Alexis Fabry, Isabelle Gaudefroy, Leanne Sacramone, Ilana Shamoon (eds.), América Latina 1960-2013, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris / Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2013, pp. 391
Text.Serial.Journal
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2015-03-01
2021-09-21
2015-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Miriam De Rosa
2015/03/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
2036-461X
24
en
Angeles Alonso Espinosa, Hervé Chandès, Alexis Fabry, Isabelle Gaudefroy, Leanne Sacramone, Ilana Shamoon (eds.), América Latina 1960-2013, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris / Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2013, pp. 391
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16417/17049
15
Angeles Alonso Espinosa, Hervé Chandès, Alexis Fabry,
Isabelle Gaudefroy, Leanne Sacramone, Ilana Shamoon (eds.)
América Latina 1960-2013
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
(19 November 2013 – 6 April 2014)
Catalogue: América Latina 1960-2013. Photographs,
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris / Museo
Amparo, Puebla, 2013, pp. 391



   The history of Southern America in the last fifty years or so encompasses a
stunning variety of phases across the nations of this huge territory. America Lati-
na 1960-2013 covers this rich and long period providing an organic collection
of documents achieving its objective. Mostly centred on photography, though
including different multimedia, video and filmic materials, the exhibition aimed
at mirroring the continent “tumultuous past as well as [the] reflections of its
conflictual present” (Compagnon, p. 13).
   Specific artistic movements were interwoven with a basic reconstruction of the
historical, political and cultural situation of the continent during the long period
taken into consideration. This enabled the connoisseur to stand side by side with
the novice, and guaranteed wide access to a differentiated public. Content-wise,
this idea was strengthened by coupling a fine choice of images with a timeline
providing a contextualization of their production circumstances, reasons and
cultural insights. Therefore, far from flattening the deep variety of the selected
artistic interventions, and thus echoing the great heterogeneity of territories, cit-
ies, situations, cultures, identities and traditions quite vaguely labelled as ‘Lat-
in-American,’ the exhibition successfully highlighted the essential ambivalence
between similarity and differentiation that characterized South American coun-
tries from 1960 to 2013 on diverse levels. The four sections composing the expo
worked in this direction trying at the same time to present four thematic areas
that respectively offered a well-structured path throughout the concepts of terri-
tory [1], city [2], informing/resisting [3], memory and identity [4].
   Located on the first floor, sections 1-2 welcomed the visitor providing a de-
tailed geographical, urban and landscape map, able to frame the exhibition in
spatial-temporal terms. These images showed the endless rural plain, the primi-
tive shapes of the Amazon rainforest and the fascinating Andean scenery with its
indigenous populations, as well as the overcrowded cities depicted during the
economic crises, or as places of chaotic development and consumerism or, again,
just as colourful environments for daily life. Unveiling the ambivalent facets of a
region that appears in its dense conflicting nature, such images very often adopt a
                                               Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                                    Reviews / Comptes-rendus


sociocultural and political tone, as it happens clearly in Luz Marìa Bedoya’s series
Pirca (1998), Claudia Andujar’s series Horizontal 3, Marcados, and Health cards of
Yanomami (both 1981-3), in Facundo de Zuvirìa’s series Siesta argentina (2003),
Carlos Ginzburg’s México, Los viajes de Ginzburg (1980), or in the video Every
Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte – After Ruscha (2011) by Claudia Joskowicz.
   Benefitting from the structure of the exhibition space, sections 3-4 were lo-
cated underground and opened up a more intimate space betraying a mirroring
process between the setting and the displayed works.
   Compared to the glass-walls of the first floor that enabled a sort of continu-
ity between the landscape depicted and the physical urban context, the cities
portrayed and Paris, level -1 conveyed a sense of closure, which metaphorically
evoked the shift to personal images, to the identity and memorial value exercised
by the photographs on display, and to the narration interlacing private and pub-
lic, ritual and political elements put forth by the exhibition.
   Section 3 presented a series of works mostly produced to denounce violence, in-
equality, repression and above all the ‘politics of disappearance’ that characterized
the years of dictatorship in several Latin American countries. Often mixing pho-
tography, newspapers and official documents, works such as Juan Carlos Romero’s
installation Violencia (1973-2013), Oscar Bony’s series Suicidios (1998), or Johanna
Calle’s series Pie de fotos (2012) explicitly dealt with those themes, whereas section
4 proposed a more specific attention to the memory of atrocity, its elaboration and
ritual/religious expression. The collection gave a visual voice to the relationships
between emptiness/fullness (pampa vs. city, lack of documents concerning mass
arrests and executions vs. omnipresence of police and army, i.e. Fredi Casco’s se-
ries Foto Zombie, 2011), visibility/invisibility – and a-visibility1 – most notably in
the opposition between the exercise of power perpetrated by the dictatorships vs.
the phenomenon of desaparecidos, i.e. Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena Memoria, 1968;
Juan Manuel Echavarrìa’s video Bocas de ceniza, 2003-4), and expression/repres-
sion (Susana Torres’ Museo Neo-Inka, 1999-2013).
   These basic dichotomies presented the images of suffering and violence
throughout the four section of the exhibition and constituted at the same time a
“witnessing public.”2 Such witnessing attitude is also present in Revuelta(s), the
film that the organizers commissioned artists Fredi Casco and Renate Costa that
was screened in an ad hoc area of the gallery space, and is now freely available via
the museum’s YouTube channel. Thanks to the displayed works, the visitor was
initiated to a conceptual itinerary crossing America Latina; such symbolic path
found completion following the artists interviewed by the two filmmakers, and
in so doing gave the visitor the chance to partake this journey becoming part of
America Latina’s witnessing public.


1
  Alain Brossat, Jean Louis Déotte (eds.), La Mort dissoute. Disparition et spectralité, L’Harmattan,
Paris 2002.
2
  Meg McLagan, “Principles, Publicity, and Politics: Notes on Human Rights Media,” in American
Anthropologist, vol. 105, no. 3, 2003, pp. 605-612.

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                                 América Latina 1960-2013


   The exhibition represented thus a device able to produce such audience,3
exorcising America Latina’s past, and suggesting a way to re-appropriate the
territory, the city, the resistance heritage, memory and identity through visual
documentation practices.


                           [Miriam De Rosa, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore]




3
 Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 2012.

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