According to Fernando Noy, Batato Barea’s “numeritos” (“little numbers”) – old theatrical slang used to avoid the foreign and neutral word “performance” – in the underworld scene of Buenos Aires took place with the speed and colourful magic of a hummingbird. Time consumed each of his appearances on stage with the same voracity and transience that it did his own life Hummingbird Culture evokes the fantasies of the counterculture in post-dictatorship Argentina, through the chronicles and poetry of Fernando Noy (San Antonio Oeste, Río Negro, 1951).
The exhibition shows Argentina’s cultural and artistic production in the 1980s and 1990s through his eyes, as a protagonist of the period and a survivor of a generation devastated by the violence of the last military dictatorship and later by the AIDS crisis. His outlandish and mutant biography is uniquely linked to hippy culture, the 1960s avant-garde, his “sexual exile” in San Salvador de Bahía, Brazil – where he fled the persecution and police raids that went after sexual dissidents – the return to democracy and the explosion of counterculture identities in Buenos Aires.
Based on that pivotal experience, this exhibition evokes the space of a dressing room and the Carnaval as moments when the logic of everyday life is suspended and transitions and mutations are hastened. It is a stage that will bring together works and archives from the period by Batato Barea, Omar Schirillo, Delia Cancela, Alejandra Fenochio, Luis Frangella, Guillermo Kuitca, Marta Minujín, Marta Peluffo, Pablo Suárez, Jorge Gumier Maier, Ana Gallardo, several of which are from the Museo Moderno’s own collection. It will present a topsy-turvy world in which one can invent fantasies with make-up and find shelter from the pain by following the flight of the hummingbird.
Host Artist: Fernando Noy
Curated by: Jimena Ferreiro
Exhibition Design: Daniela Thomas, Felipe Tassara e Iván Rösler
Production: Julieta Potenze
