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First I’m going to tell you where we are, let’s start by setting the stage:
We are in Laguanacazul’s exhibition room in San Telmo, Defensa 677
I’m Alejandro Bovo Theiler, a visual artist from La Falda, Córdoba.
Here today we are opening this show entitled “Chi Commanda?”,
meaning “Who rules?” in Italian.
So if you’d like to, we can look around it
and reflect about the work, its meaning, the way it’s produced,
I’m interested in exchange.
All these characters, are they challenging authority
something different out?
No, no, no.The only challenge here has to do with reflection,
there isn’t a sense of thinking authority as rebelliousness, not at all.
how it comes into being.
And I depart form certain concepts I think I carry out everyday.
I’m not interested in closing down that concept, but in opening it up, by posing the question “Who rules?”
that I ask in the catalog’s text, because I think
it forces the space, makes it curve, generates a
where we can inhabit the ignorance, but not by giving a closed concept.
This is in general what I’m interested in in visual arts,
the fact that the work is not just constructed in the montage studio,
but that it begins to be a work (of art) with someone else's reading.
So you are asking, not just about the action of ruling, but about the action of being.
Yes, because it’s not proposed as a mystery to solve, to see who’s ruling,
but to think about the sense of ruling, departing from a question that can be incidental.
“So-and-so rules” woudn’t be an answer.
So your question is about identity.
I’m more interested in posing another question as an answer: Who doesn’t rule?
And that’s why I work with this idea where “I” and “We” appear as alphabetic language.
The “I” is this character and
the “We” is an object in the centre of the room, a chair.
When I work with this “I” and this “We” I am searching for two things to become literal:
that there is an “I” and a “We” that aren’t split, they are diverse
because they appear at differing distances, but they are the same in the sense of feedback.
Before, a collegue was asking me about the philososphy, the authors.
In general, I think that the paradigm of evolution for this society consists in being able
to think of otherness as the only possible, real way of creating bonds.
We know the doll is a fetish, money is a fetish
The first thing that I recommend anyone who watches this interview is that they should come to see the exhibit first.
Because the readings I am making of my own work are poor.
I think the work itself is always richer than the reading that, above all, the author can make.
I think the author’s is a developing reading, conditioned, disguised as objective, but absolutely conditioned.
That’s why I say the work becomes a work (of art) when the other views it, reads it,
because, literally, it’s the reading that installs it at the level of reality, the level of the vital reality of meanings.
And it reinforces the ambiguity that a work needs in order to be read.
Well, in this case, thinking…
this year, as a country we celebrate a politically relevant date as the Bicentenary (of the first Argentine national government),
but also as a social reflection or as a new meaning of a current and daily object,
while, at the same time, many other things.
I like that ambiguity. To tell the truth, if I had felt, at making it, that I’m really saying one thing…
You wouldn’t have been interested in doing it.
The process is open when it has a degree of ambiguity.
I believe that when the spectator’s posibilities to get displaced are increased, then if they are still, they can displace.
This is a crucial point where visual arts are irreplaceable,
I would ask people Chi Commanda? (Who rules?) and, well, making sure that there is not one expected response to the question.
There are more questions and, as some wise people say, it’s questions that really matter.
Of course, it’s a good thing that visual arts lead to reflection.
I think one thing is to respect the ambiguity of the construction to make the meaning open, but it’s also
good to sit around and talk about what you see. Because this gives visual arts a social aim,
but not just social, also affective and political, deeply political, that is to be able to listen.
And to be able, not to discuss the other’s way of listening, but to receive it.
I hope you can visit the show, I need you to visit the exhibition to develop my work in every sense
I’m interested in the fact that you've come and that it’s productive for you. Thank you very much.