Ser o no Sur

Ser o no Sur was commissioned by the Argentinean Embassy in Mexico through Coordinación Nacional de Artes Visuales of the INBA (Fine Arts Institute of Mexico), its purpose was to represent the cultural exchange between both countries mainly during the last five-year period of our History.  Through revision and sorting of a yet unrelated net of visual artists who reside, or have resided in this country, a visual discourse was established, charged with ambivalences towards the concept of identity, which is characterized by the implications that moving has –maybe forced– for migrants to the North of a continent that has been drawn according to established hierarchies by the occidental imperialist view.

Evidently, the geographical division leaves aside the cultural categories and idiosyncratic matters that, nevertheless, are proper to any citizen.  This concept, which has to do with social and cultural permanence to a community, is an ongoing dilemma for Argentineans. We could say there is a common thought about identity in this group of artists, which would be the meaning of being Argentine, to be born in a land far away from what is considered to be the center of power and the spirit of a young, combative nation that will try to find within its own discourse, a position with respect to that center. These vigorous reactions are present in every work of the exhibition, making the heat in them the generating and vital boost for the resulting environment achieved, with effervescent passion towards immediate perceptions and interventions to what makes us different.  Thus, identity is a suture, an articulation of differences and similarities, which leads us to take a position and a strategy towards other subjects. In short, identity is a singular, but never entire, discursive construction that develops within a historical and institutional scope that can be found in each of the selected works, which particular identification is sustained in a contextual structure built through the visible union among them.

The energy released during the formal and obsessive processes around a material or technique, as well as in manipulation or direct incidence over the components of the broaden reality –to its historical and contextual referents– appears as a connecting axis of the text which answers the original question, opening this dilemma to a timeless and revolving  perception of what being a citizen from the South (sur) implies.

Belén Moro Mori
September, 2013, Mexico City