l’Amérique Latine éraflée / De schaafwonden van Latijns-Amerika
Curated by Alexis Fabry and Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall
Event: l’Amérique latine Eraflée
Place: Fondation A Stichting
Date: March 6th 2021 – June 27th 2021
Catalogue design: Olivier Andreotti (Toluca Studio)
Description:
Toluca Éditions + RM
Softcover
168 pages – 30 x 24 cm
129 images
2 Bilingual editions : French and Dutch / Spanish and English
ISBN: 978-84-17975-67-8
March 2021
Graphic design / Graphisme: Olivier Andreotti
The walls of an architecture in ruins, scored, scarified, discolored by saltpeter, in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Mexico, bear the wounds of time and the traces of political struggles…
The stones of the ancient civilizations were torn up and divested of their coloring to construct the modernist utopia, but neither urban ghosts nor the specter of revolution have saved Latin America from the abyss of violence.
The Mexican Revolution, the very first of the twentieth century, would dwindle down into the dictablanda of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. A few decades later, the hopes of the Cuban revolution would come to wrack in disillusion. In other parts of the hemisphere, attempts at consolidating democracy were dragged down by authoritarian regimes and civil war. An informal economy has been sustained by the drug trade that also finances guerilla movements and penetrates the very workings of government.
Inequitable societies nurture injured dreams. On the ruinous walls, commercial advertisements and political slogans alike decay beneath layers of tattered posters. The nights of Lima are sleepless; the prostitutes of Buenaventura squander their youth in the suffocating heat of the Pacific coast; mothers with their children survive in the shadows of Argentine prisons. On the urban fringes of Santiago de Chile, transvestites flee the raids of the military police, while in Mexico they join the wild nights of the counterculture.
These photographs, many of them scratched, scarified, incised, inhabited by the lacerations of an entire region, trace the lineaments of a tortured landscape.
Alexis Fabry and Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall
Curators of the exhibition