Art as a cultural bridge: Brazil and Argentina, ever closer

By Celina Chatruc

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The images are immediately associated with Buenos Aires: they show the Floralis Generica, a sculpture donated to the city by the Argentine architect Eduardo Catalano and installed two decades ago in the Plaza de las Naciones Unidas, in Recoleta. Recorded in 2017 by Joardo Filho and inspired by the film Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni -based, in turn, on a story by Julio Cortázar-, they function as a symbolic window to the way in which art can serve as a cultural bridge.

Along with other photographs and videos of artists from the five regions of Brazil that make up the collection of the Museum of Plastic Arts of Anápolis (MAPA), they are exhibited until July 10 at the House of Culture of the National Fund for the Arts (FNA) in a show curated by Paulo Henrique Silva.

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“We seek to promote international relations to open the limits, which also expanded between the provinces during the pandemic thanks to virtual meetings,” Gachi Prieto, director of Federal Culture Management of the latter institution, tells LA NACION. In that sense, she adds that for the first time the FNA Visual Arts Contest -which will distribute more than three million pesos in prizes- encompasses five regional distinctions.

Those limits will continue to expand starting in November, when Un lento venir viniendo will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói. It will be the first chapter of an exhibition of works by more than eighty Argentine contemporary artists belonging to the Oxenford Collection, which will expand in 2023 to two other public institutions: the Tomie Ohtake Institute, in São Paulo, and the Iberé Camargo Foundation, in Porto Alegre.

“The project, whose title corresponds to a verse by Macedonio Fernández, aims to make visible the contemporary production of more than 80 artists from Argentina in the complex Brazilian cultural fabric and establish a link between the artistic environments of both countries”, explains its curator, Mariano Mayer, and anticipates that nine of the artists represented in the collection will make interventions in each of the stages of the show.

An Argentine living in Spain, Mayer already has extensive experience in building cultural bridges through art. A year after having curated Remitente, an exhibition that brought together works by 18 Latin American artists at the 40th edition of the ARCO fair, this year he shared responsibility for the section dedicated to the region at the fair with Manuela Moscoso and was also in charge of Táctica sintáctica exhibition by Diego Bianchi at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. In 2017, within the framework of the participation of Argentina as a guest country in ARCO, he curated En el ejercicio de las cosas together with Sonia Becce, a circuit that included eight museums and cultural spaces in Madrid.

With information from LA NACION