Page 95 - ARTE!Brasileiros #47

in the city of Regio Emilia, in Italy, is a notable exception. Founded by Achile Maramotti to Hurricane Irma, the show coincides with the celebrations of the 500th anniversary
(1927 - 2005), the founder of the Max Mara brand, the Maramotti collection occupies a of the founding of Havana and the almost 30th Biennial. What is the transcendence of
1957 modernist building, which served as the factory for the Italian fashion company. the island’s greatest cultural event? There have been many overlapping mediations
After his death, his three children, Luigi, Ignazio and Ludovica, opened the collection, at the Havana Biennial since its founding in 1984: local architecture, historical burden,
with 450 works, publicly, without, however, being the protagonists of the story. “They local financial crisis and that of the participating countries, mixed ideological frictions,
refuse to be interviewed, they do not participate in museum councils or institutions, they criticism inside and outside Cuba, the fate of voracious gallerists and collectors
want the works to speak for them”, says Sara Piccinini, the collection’s senior coordinator. who come to the Island looking for quality art at prices well below the international
Since then, the collection has reached 1,100 pieces. “The collection began to be created market. If compared to the previous editions the 13th Biennial is not among the best.
in the 1960s with artists who emerged in that period, so it continues today with the The same happens to the last biennials of São Paulo, Venice and Documenta of
acquisition of works by young artists or in the middle of a career”, explains Piccinini. Kassel. In Havana, the curatorship is signed by seven Cuban curators led by critic and
Part of the initial generation, names such as Mario Merz or Jannis Kounellis of the 1960s intellectual Nelson Herrera Ysla, in addition to the 21 invited foreigners.
and 1970s Art Povera movement and Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo The moment is for reflection, transition, discomfort and change, with some curators
Paladino of the Italian Tranvanguarda, a term created by Achile Bonito Oliva to point to taking up positions in other cultural institutions or simply setting out on a solo career.
the renaissance of painting in the 1980s. Biennials make history by unraveling previous accomplishments and meanings. But
It is on the screen, incidentally, that most of the works are made visible. “I believe that what singularities can still provoke surprises amid the excessive accumulation of
85% of the works are paintings”, calculates the coordinator. For this reason, probably biennials, fairs, festivals, residences? The works distributed throughout Havana, in
the collection also includes works prior to the periods featured, such as a Francis Bacon addition to Matanzas, Sancti Spiritus, Cienfuegos and Camagüey are flattened by
of 1952, and works of the Holy Trinity of German painting, composed by Anselm Kiefer, the international moment.
Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz. At the Bienal’s headquarters, Alexia Miranda’s Collective Fabric performance polarizes
the attention and occupies the lobby of the Wifredo Lam Center. With the idea of
REHANG responding to the present, with possible notions of future, alert to the urgency of
The headquarters building has an exhibition area of 6 thousand m², divided into 43 social transformations. Collectively tran- scribed circles, in various patterns and
rooms, which have remained practically with the same selection of works since the rhythms, are tools in an attempt to restore moments of peace in violent El Salvador.
inauguration. Ten of them, however, were reorganized last March to present some of the The gentrification of the great metropolis arrived in Dresden, a German city where
30 projects commissioned to young artists who have been exposed in the institution’s Manaf Halbouni, a Syrian artist, lives 34 years. As his dream of living in a house never
temporary showrooms for the past eleven years. Rehang is the title of this new session, materialized, he turns the car into a residence-studio, “where I solve everything”,
where works by the Czech Kristof Kintera, the German Thomas Scheibitz, and the Italian exhibited at the Havana Biennial as art.
artist Alessandra Ariatti, a painter born in the city of Reggio Emilia appear. The country is also on the agenda of Lais Myrrha with Cronografia dos Desmanches,
The permanent exhibition is open to the public four days a week, Thursday to Sunday, free a work in progress that has been developing since 2012. “The work comes when I
of charge, under registration. The temporary exhibitions are also free to visit. Nowadays, see the boom in real estate speculation as I walk through the streets and find five
people will visit there Fontes de Za’atari, a project by the artist Margherita Moscardini, houses destroyed once “. They are images of demolitions, abandoned sites, busts,
who, since 2015, is making a map of water sources in a refugee camp with 80,000 people ports, some unidentified. “
in Jordan. The show presents a typology and documentation of these sources and, one The Biennial of Havana bets on the young artists. In this context is Ruy Cézar
of them, was copied in marble and was installed in a square of Reggio Emilia. Campos, from Ceará who works different temporalities in three videos: Circunvizinhas,
There is no public subsidy for the museum, and everything is funded by the Maramotti The Arrival of Monet and Tangled Terminals. All members of the series Rede Vem
family, without even having as a counterpart public goals, according to Piccinini. When do Mar, one year research between Brazil, Angola and Colombia. “I try to establish
numbers seem to guide many art projects, it is rare to see a place where art is in fact a phenomenological link between the infra-structure of submarine cables and the
the center of attention as in the Maramotti collection. platforms for landing them. Fortaleza is the most important city in the South Atlantic
network with which it is connected, Sangano, in Angola and Barranquila, in Colombia”.
Fabio Cypriano traveled to Italy invited by Collezione Maramotti Operating between technology and aesthetics, the artist expresses himself between
performance, documentary and fiction, with social political bias.
BIENNIALS CUBA – HAVANA | PAGES 28 TO31 In Matanzas, the new territory of the Biennial, Marilá Dardot asserts the utopia of the
THE CHALLENGE OF THE dilution of art in daily life. “My job is a segment of the residency that I did in Mexico
in 2015, at the time of the episode of the missing students. He picked newspaper
POSSIBLE MAKES 13ª HAVANA headlines and daily intervened with writings executed with water on a concrete wall.
BIENNIAL BREATHES As he wrote them, they went out. “ In Matanzas, he opted for the performance Volver,
in which he repeatedly writes with water the phrase “La esperanza” I return to a wall
in the street. Marilá’s work has changed in recent years, “from an optimistic vision
WITH THIS THEME, THE EXHIBITION APPEARS AFTER FOUR YEARS, linked to literature, poetry, fiction and nature, to a more pessimistic view of Brazilian
INTERRUPTED BY THE HURRICANE IRMA IN 2017 political facts. “There was a political awakening in my generation, as well as in myself.”
Finally, three Cuban artists with established careers and identifiable poetics, gathered
BY LEONOR AMARANTE in the Interior Museums show, at the National Museum of Fine Arts. Kcho (Alexys Leyva
Machado), Carlos Garaicoa and Los Carpinteros. Kcho’s international flight begins
“FISH DOES NOT SURVIVE IN CLEAN WATERS”. Mao Tse Tung’s maxim resembles the turbulent with Regata, a 1993 installment, made at age 23, a year before joining the collection
sailing of the Havana Biennial over 30 years, with financial and bureaucratic difficulties of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, MoMa and the cast of the Barbara Gladstone
but not enough to wreck it. The theme of the 13th edition, The Challenge of the gallery in New York. Barco, symbol of the collective imagination of Cubans, appears in
Possible synthesizes the struggle that touches the imaginary and tries to face the gestures, sculptures or installations with objects that are nourished by various poetics.
impossible. The event continues in the search of greater correspondences between As the geographer Milton Santos said, street art, naturally urban and public, carries
the creation and the practices of life, or to converging points. With a year of delay due a heavy political burden for occupying spaces outside the institutionalized fields of

BOOK_ARTE_47_JUNHO2019.indb 95 17/06/19 22:33