A partir del
21.12.20
Fourth exhibition in the program “History as Rumor,” dedicated to the performance Cuando la fe mueve montañas, which the artist Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) performed on April 11, 2002, in the Ventanilla area on the outskirts of Lima, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina, who also served as curator. That day, five hundred volunteers formed a line at the foot of a huge dune and used their shovels to move the sand, shifting the mountain about ten centimeters from its original location.
Francis Alÿs says: "Cuando la fe mueve montañas is a project of linear geological displacement. It began to take shape when I visited Lima for the first time with Cuauhtémoc Medina, the Mexican curator and critic. We were there for the last Lima Biennial in October 2000, a month before Fujimori's dictatorship finally fell. The city was in turmoil. There were clashes in the streets and the resistance movement was growing stronger. It was a desperate situation, and I felt it required an ‘epic response’, a beau geste that was at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent. Suggesting a social allegory in those circumstances seemed more appropriate to me than undertaking any sculptural exercise."
The work proposed a specific response to that critical moment in Peruvian history. Alÿs considered that it should be a kind of refutation of the situation of social deterioration and lack of hope. The fact that it took place in a peripheral territory—usually ignored by central cultural circuits—reinforces the idea of integration and community solidarity. Through the action, themes emerge such as the role of the peripheries in the constitution of cities, the vision of internal migration as a socially and culturally revolutionary force, the form of mobilization as a social aesthetic, and above all, the defense of the significance of expending effort on something seemingly gratuitous and irrational as the center of the possibilities for historical change.
“From the outset, Cuando la fe mueve montañas was a project marked by excess. Its production, as well as the ideas it embodies, is equally permeated by questioning and miscalculation, criticism of the notion of efficiency, and a reluctance to conform to the margins of practical reason,” explains Cuauhtémoc Medina.
Data Sheet
Action by Francis Alÿs in colaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega
Curator: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Testimonials: Gustavo Buntinx, Mark Godfrey, Natalia Majluf, Rafael Ortega and Richard Perales
Institutional Colaborators: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
MUAC, México; Museo de Arte de Lima, Perú
Opening conversation
Monday, December 21, 6:00 p.m.
Francis Alÿs in conversation with Cuauhtémoc Medina
Presents: Sharon Lerner
Main support:
History as Rumor
Multiple movement performances
On the occasion of the celebration of its nineteenth anniversary, Malba presents La historia como rumor (History as Rumor), an annual program of online exhibitions created by Gabriela Rangel, Malba’s artistic director, with the aim of documenting and contextualizing a set of performances that took place at different times and in various places in the Americas and the Caribbean, in a historical transition period marked by the end of the Cold War and the advent of the internet.
A collaboration between guest curators and various international museums and institutions is the starting point to present a research project every month that will allow us to revisit a series of actions and performances that became production milestones of their time, and that will engage in a direct or indirect conversation with problem areas of the present. A video record of testimonies from spectators who witnessed those performances, and of experts from different disciplines giving their opinion on them, will create an archive that will make up the oral history for each of the projects.
The selection of artists and specific actions respond to a very broad framework that began to be debated regionally in 1981, at the First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin, Colombia. The starting point of the selection also understands the historical transmission of performances as a rumor, defined as a multiple movement in a diagram sketched by Ulises Carrión, Mexican poet and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Both frameworks propose the reconfiguration of a set of works in a period of time influenced by the conceptualisms that began globally since the 1960s.
The exhibition of each performance includes a record of the action, along with vast archival material, such as photographs, films, storyboards, press clippings and documents that aid the reconstruction of the piece and its context. It also includes an interview with someone who has witnessed the performance and four video testimonies by leading specialists from different disciplines. The choice of the various voices and materials is intended to recontextualize these performances in the present as contemporary expressions.
The series La historia como rumor will be available until September 21st, 2021 along with Malba’s 20th Anniversary celebration.
