Carlos Motta
Requiem
10.14.2016—
02.19.2017

Carlos Motta’s work interrogates political and social history and proposes counter-narratives that recognize social groups, identities, and communities whose voices have been muted by dominant powers. Motta focuses on the histories and politics of sexual and gender minorities in documentary as well as narrative and poetic projects that engage those issues from critical perspectives. Motta’s works encompass an array of formats, such as installation, video, photography, and sculpture. 

The artist produced Réquiem [Requiem] specifically for the exhibition at MALBA. The project investigates the tense historical relationship between religion and dissident sexualities through a series of works with alternative visions of the moral values endorsed by the doctrines of Christianity. The cornerstone of the exhibition is the three-channel video installation entitled Réquiem which, on the basis of a sexual rereading, questions the narratives of deliverance and transcendence in the death and resurrection of Christ. To that end, Motta looks to the thinking of Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, specifically her Teología indecente [Indecent Theology]. In three videos based on performative acts, the transcendent body is sexualized, queerified, politicized, and poetized in pursuit of new fictions that take sexual difference into account.

Motta asks himself what would happen if we imagined a future that includes everyone, male and female, a future reached on paths that we have always been told were "impossible." What would a real reform of the Catholic doctrine—one that takes into account the lives of persons who have traditionally been excluded due to their sexual orientation—mean? Would such a reform bring the end of the Church as institution? Is an impossible future a future to be longed for? Through speculation and fiction, the exhibition scrutinizes the present and the enormous influence that the Catholic Church exercises over society.

A coproduction of MALBA and the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio created specifically for the exhibition, RÉQUIEM was created partly in collaboration with Norwegian theologian Linn Marie Tonstad, Italian performers Stefano Laforgia and Andrea Ropes, and Italian singer Ernesto Tomasini under the supervision of Angel Moya García and Eugenio Viola.

This exhibition is possible thanks to the support of: