Text publlished on occasion of the exhibition Politics of Gestures and of Life, with the works by Fernando Bryce, CADA, Lotty Rosenfeld, espaivisor Gallery.
Art helps us to more precisely understand our surrounding environs and its context even in cases when it has no social or political pretensions. On the other hand, when its understructure and goals are clearly political, this understanding of our surroundings becomes a kind of unveiling of what powers-that-be try to conceal. The function of artists who act politically is not to represent an artistic activity but to construct a reality that competes with the officialdom of its adversary, generally defended by governments that limit freedom, or are unfettered by the constraints of memory or self-critique. When they suffer from a lack of memory, there is usually an authoritarian government near at hand, or at least the lingering effects of one, the product of a still enduring legacy; when what they are lacking is self-critique, one can gather that their democratic processes are still unseasoned.