Making out on the Battlefield
November 2nd – December 21st
WE from in betWEen | diSTRUKTURA
...
Curated by Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo
In 2007 diSTRUKTURA, started an artistic project titled “We are living in a beautiful wOURld”. Through it they gathered documents and photographs tied to their closest emotional context: that of their friends in exile. A large number of young people was departing in search of opportunities and a better life, leaving Serbia, a country which since the beginnings of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991 found itself in a situation of not only political and economic but also existential crisis.
Upon Hestia’s invitation, diSTRUKTURA has followed up on their research in a different context: the migration of artists, intellectuals and other agents of the Latin American cognitive capital in the cities of Barcelona and Madrid in Spain. This change of direction, from East to West – from Ex-Yugoslavia to Austria – has now become a transit from West to East – from South America to Spain, and it allows us to think alongside these paths, in these lines of drifts relating to our identities and emotions and mostly about the processes of establishments of life models in the context of the globalization of post industrial capitalism. These transits are not casual. They refer to a colonial and imperialist past but also to a post-colonial reality in which the territories of the so called Global South are found. A geopolitical concept which reflects the realities and similarities, but also the opportunities and challenges which unite the regions of Latin America and East Europe – a relationship that is the primary focus for Hestia and the projects it develops – together with Asia and the Middle East.
Milica Milićević and Milan Bosnić propose to Patricio, Francisco, Andrea, Roy, Dayana and Aymara to show us their paths, their movements. They speak to us about concepts of adaptation and translation, but we also trace together with them a route through the emotional places which constitute the being. The six protagonist elaborate a cartography of desire , of those micro-politics which unite in a mix of compromise, resistance, refuge, escape, leisure and/or work, and which are the reflex of the characteristics and different ways of life of each one of them. In identifying of their power to resist is the first step to create “new perspectives of imagination and identification” which Franco “Bifo” Berardo proposes.
In the maps of WE from in betWEen we would walk from the Parque del Oeste (West Park) in Madrid to the beaches situated East of the city of Barcelona. The stories, descriptions, photographs, the drawings and the frottages (rubbing) of the city´s surface document in a qualitative way the possibilities of escaping, the attempts of adaptation and the survival modes in the global cognitive capitalism, be it from the takeover of the model to its frontal opposition. They do it in a way that accentuates the materiality of the practice in the traces drawn by the artists and the images captured during their walks. Together with the words of immigrants landscape is constructed, not a rational one but one that refers to the memory and emotional experience.
