Opening: Saturday July 29th 12.30pm
Vacant Houses Don't Make a City is the first solo exhibition in Argentina by Catalan artist Jordi Colomer, internationally renowned for his participatory performances in the public space. The show opens with the triptych of invented traditions: audio visual footage of actions conceived by Colomer over the last decade overlap in a chaotic and ludicrous vortex. Rudimentary scenographies created by the participants themselves give a touch of humour to the actions that storm the streets, temporarily disrupting social standards. Rooted in exceptional spaces and times, the actions follow their own rituals and laws, resulting in blurred categories, weakened defences and obliterated hierarchies. The community's choral participation is a necessary condition for the outcome of the actions, which escape the artist's control: the unforeseeable result of the work depends on the group's interaction with the urban space.
The reclaiming of the streets, contrary to the privatisation and social fragmentation promoted globally since the 1990s, entails the possibility of collective gatherings and, hence, of a break with the normative order imposed by power and control agencies. As suggested by the title of the exhibition, the very essence of a city is its inhabitants, those responsible for making decisions about their own spaces. In the projects X-Ville and The Argentine Alphabet, Colomer promotes the construction of ephemeral societies around common objectives: firstly, the building of an ideal city, and secondly, the writing by primary school students of their own literacy notebooks. The production of the works, based on a series of collective debates and agreements, as well as their presentation in exhibition spaces, reveal the possibility of a collective construction underscoring the dissolution of the hierarchies that set apart planners and recipients, authors, and audiences.
Benedetta Casini
The presentation of the artist Jordi Colomer at BIENALSUR 2023 is a co-production with the Institut Ramon LLul and has the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires (CCEBA) and the program of the state-owned company Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) for the internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE).
* ABCedario is produced with the support of Fundación "la Caixa".
Image: Jordi Colomer, X-Ville, 2015 (Prod Xarxa, Loop, ESAAA)
