Writing in English

Vasco Falcão: dessins et bois brûlés

@Substack

I met Vasco Falcão this summer in Saint-Brieuc, a coastal town in Brittany where he lives and where he has his studio in what used to be the village butcher's shop, a place he is painstakingly restoring (you can see images of his studio on my instagram). In October, the artist opened Vasco Falcão: dessins et bois brûlés, his first solo exhibition, currently at the Centre Culturel Le CAP in Plérin. What follows is a review of a stunning artist’s first solo exhibition.

In the artist's words: Viktoria Oreshko

@SUBSTACK

In 2024 I inaugurated a section in my newsletter called ‘In the artist’s words’ which started after I visited the studio of Viktoria Oreshko (Ukraine, 1997) at the School of Beaux-arts de Paris. Like any good studio visit, the conversation we had then was a stimulating window into the artist’s mind, her personal history and motivations, obsessions and technical methods.

That evening after I left her, I took refuge from the rain in a café where I hastily transcribed from memory most of what you’ll read, reacting to a feeling of urgency I had after our encounter.

documenta fifteen: where art and life are one

@ substack

I’ve started a newsletter using Substack! For the first issue (December 2022) I’m writing about documenta fifteen. It took me a while to finish this text because I’ve been busy planning an upcoming show (and juggling with a million things of course, but who isn’t), Chromosome Comic, opening February 4th, 2023 at Biquini Wax EPS in Mexico City, I’ll tell you all about it next time. This newsletter is free and will remain so. Please subscribe by clicking here.

Cultural Journalism In The Time on Pandemic

@ Fundación Gabo

“If for every meme created during the pandemic the country’s GDP had increased by one thousandth of a percentage, Mexico would already have been lifted out of poverty. The national production of relajo accelerated under lockdown, an unusual event in the globalized world in which half of humanity, or something like 2.9 billion people in 90 countries, found itself locked in domestic bubbles, isolated from a still misunderstood virus and connected increasingly with the outside world through phones and gadgets.

For those of us who lived in isolation, the days began predictably with gleaning essential information from the internet: the local number of new cases, the deaths that accumulated overnight, when will we find a vaccine? And masks, are they useful or not?”

Follow the link above (blue) to download the full publication, including journalism about the cultural shifts happening around the world.

Click on the button below to read my text (in English) on Mexican memes in pandemic times.

JURACAN, HURACÁN, HURRICANE: NOTES ON GUEST CURATING THE DAK’ART BIENNALE.

@ INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

In 1956, forty-six honeybee queens from South Africa and Tanzania were taken to Brazil as part of a project aimed at creating better breeding stock for local beekeepers. After having accidentally escaped in 1957(1), one queen bee went on to colonize the entire bee population of South and Central America, displacing the “local” European breeds with an aggressive and highly migrating hybrid of “Africanized” bees. (...) Today, they are back in their symbolic homeland, and their buzzing, originally recorded in Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize, 1.73 miles from the Guatemalan border, surrounds us in the first floor of the Théodore-Monod Museum of African Arts in Dakar, Senegal. 

Juan Acha: Por una Nueva Problemática Artística at Museo de Arte Moderno 

@ DAILY SERVING 

Juan Acha is finally getting some recognition. Try searching for his texts in English and you will find a handful of articles about his importance, but little directly from the man who remains one of Latin America’s most relevant contemporary art critics and theoreticians twenty-two years after his death in 1995. As a remedy, Juan Acha: Por una Nueva Problemática Artística (Toward a New Artistic Problematic), at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno, highlights the work and ideas Acha developed in the museum from 1972, when he left his natal Peru to find refuge in Mexico, until 1976.

Kapwani Kiwanga: Ujamaa

@ daily serving, selected as part of the best writing of 2016

In a major solo exhibition, Ujamaa, at La Ferme du Buisson in the Parisian suburb of Noisiel, Kapwani Kiwanga addresses Tanzania’s uprisings. Known for using methodologies from the social sciences without being didactic, the artist draws on two significant moments in the history of the eastern African country to remember and question the ideals of pan-Africanism. The first is the 1905 revolt of Kinjeketile Ngwale, who—believing in the magic powers of a herbal potion of his creation called maji-maji, meaning “water of life and immortality”—led the first revolt against colonial rule, known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. The second is Julius Nyerere’s post-independence introduction of a socialist program of collective farming, called ujamaa (a Swahili term for familyhood, extended family, brotherhood).

Soulèvements (Uprisings) at the Jeu de Paume

@ DAILY SERVING

What if the imagination made mountains rise up? Georges Didi-Huberman poses this question in Soulèvements (Uprisings), a new exhibition at the Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris. Throughout the museum’s galleries, contemporary artworks, books, historical documents, and photographs present a potent survey on the theme of social rebellions in the West, ranging from Victor Hugo’s call for the abolition of the death penalty (in the preface to his 1829 novel, The Last Day of a Condemned Man) to Maria Kourkouta’s 2016 video, Idomeni, March 14, 2016, Greco–Macedonian Border. In the latter, the artist documents the silent passage of groups of burdened refugees across the landscape—the kind of image that, through repetition in the worldwide media, has acquired a disturbing normalcy.