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Through sound performances, lectures, conferences and concerts by renowned artists, this programme seeks to explore and expand the content of the exhibitions on display at the museum.
These activities, curated by author, journalist and cultural critic Fernando García, involve different disciplines and scenes from the museum´s identity and its programming, bringing out the echoes from the exhibited works and those of the invited artists who, together with the public, dare to accept the challenge of experimentation and the desire to push the limits.
Within the framework of the Manifiesto verde [Green Manifesto] exhibition, on Saturday, 16 September, poet Diana Bellesi (Zavalla, Santa Fe, 1946) was invited to add texts from her extensive collection of poems to works chosen by curator Alejandra Aguado and guest artist Florencia Böhtlingk. Bellesi chose to stand before a mural created by Böhtlingk specifically for that location, in one of the exhibition halls of the ground floor of the museum.
Bellesi recited her works over the course of a half hour, with her voice becoming the main instrument in this sound intervention. A loudspeaker was positioned in front of museum visitors, who were surprised by the appearance of the poet and of her deep voice, capable of moving audiences around the world. Another loudspeaker was positioned at the other end of the hall, producing a poetic ambience that contributed an additional layer of contemplation to the works of art.
A keen-eyed and sensual observer of the Argentinian landscape, the poet conducted a performative reading of 17 poems at the event and elicited applause with her recitation of the verses of “He construido un jardín” [“I have built a garden”]:
I have built a garden like someone who makes
the right gestures in the wrong place.
Wrong, not in error, but in place
like speaking with a reflection in the mirror
instead of with the one who is reflected in it.
I have built a garden to be able to converse
there, side by side with the beauty, with the ever
silent yet active death working the heart.
Leave the baggage behind it repeated, now that your body
can glimpse the two shores, there is nothing more
than the precise gestures
to let go, to take care of it
and be, the garden.
The artist Eduardo Basualdo immerses us in the aesthetic imaginary of Pupila [Pupil], his first solo exhibition in a museum in Argentina. In this audio-visual presentation, the artist reveals his creative process as he works from sketches to the final installation, and discusses the connections of a work that challenges the gaze from and towards contemporary art. With the participation of curator Alejandra Aguado and Fernando García, curator of Public Programmes.
On Wednesday 11 January, artist Mónica Giron, born in Bariloche, gave a Master Class in the auditorium of the Museo Moderno, thus marking the opening of the 2023 Public Programme calendar. Accompanied by Javier Villa, curator of the anthological exhibition of the artist, and Fernando García, curator of Public Programmes, Giron held the audience’s attention as she discussed the inner life of her works, where uncertainty is one of the central components of contemporary sensibility. Weaving together narrative and philosophical readings (from the Tao to George Gurdjieff and Gilles Deleuze) and unexpected discussions on art history (from Auguste Rodin to Carlos Alonso) and popular culture (from Winnie the Pooh to Patoruzú), Giron arranged the images of Enlaces Querandí [Querandí Connections] in relation to the new perspectives provided by Google Earth, climate change and the rescue of a native culture at the edges of fiction. The recording of her keynote lecture, available on the Museo Moderno’s YouTube channel, also reveals the mechanics of the working relationship between the curator and the artist, the result of their long interaction. The “Master Class” cycle has been conceived as a platform for artists to use their own voices to respond to the inquisitiveness of the museum’s audience.
The Sakura & Cardón concert is an intercontinental encounter between Cocaibica – the organic electronic folklore project produced by musicians Mariana Baraj, Leo Camargo and Marcelo Baraj, featuring elements from the Bolivian and Argentinian cultures in combination with ancestral and modern sounds that invite the audience to dance – and the Ensemble Selene, a quartet formed by artists Song Bonggeum and Chang Jaehyo, from South Korea, Mariel Barreña, from Argentina and Hiroe Morikawa, from Japan.
As part of the public programmes tied to our exhibition Cuerpos contacto [Contact Bodies], the Museo Moderno invited guitarist, singer and composer Richard Coleman to revisit the nocturnal underground scene of the 1980s. He was part of the same scene both as a member of the original line-up of Soda Stereo and as the leader of the bands Fricción and Los 7 Delfines. Coleman performed a solo show that was specially created to dialogue with the Cuerpos contacto exhibition.
Performing against a backdrop that projected Alberto Goldenstein’s work El mundo del arte [The World of Art], Coleman played a repertoire of songs that ranged from his first composition, “Arquitectura Moderna” (1982), to his legendary cover of David Bowie’s 1978 classic “Heroes”. With this performance, he created live sound portraits, as his soundscapes coincided with the photographs of Alfredo Prior, Jorge Gumier Maier, Marcelo Pombo and María Moreno, among others. Accompanied only by his guitar and an effects pedal, Coleman created a hypnotic sound environment that, given its unpredictability, became site specific. The finale was extraordinary. With the sound of “Heroes” resonating through the hall, Coleman guided the audience to the first floor, where he finished his concert under the archway of the Ave Porco discotheque, on display as one of the Sergio De Loof pieces that is now part of the museum’s collection.
Visita desorientada [Misguided Visits] is a cycle that puts a new spin on the classic guided tour of a museum. The first edition was led by the poet, actor and performer Fernando Noy, who took participants through the galleries of the Cuerpos contacto [Contact Bodies] exhibition. Noy is both a witness and the protagonist of many of the works and subjects on display in the exhibition. For instance, he can be seen in a photograph from the 1980s together with Batato Barea and Alejandro Urdapilleta in the piece El mundo del arte [The World of Art], which was mounted for the occasion.
For his performance, Noy gathered the audience at the centre of the hall to begin a very different tour of the show. Characterised by unique histrionics, Noy presented an account of his own story, beginning with his links to hippy culture (also seen in the psychedelic section of the show), Brazilian tropicalism (the event took place the same week Gal Costa passed away) and the Buenos Aires underground, on which he placed a particular emphasis. The audience hung on his every word, as if he were a fortune teller capable of predicting the future based on the past. From his sharing of the details behind the works of Emeterio Cerro, to the emotional final full of his recollections of Batato Barea, Noy shone like a torch illuminating the cellars of the underground.
Francisco Lemus, one of the curators of the Cuerpos contacto [Contact Bodies] exhibition, and Fernando García, the museum’s Public Programmes curator, along with critic and writer Daniel Molina (who has a huge following on twitter, @rayovirtual) discussed some of the works and artists from the 1980s and 1990s underground scene. Molina was one of the leading figures of the era, working as the director of the Arts Department of the Centro Cultural Rojas and as a journalist for the magazine El Porteño, the only media outlet entrenched in the scene. Behind the images of Batato Barea, the photographs from Alberto Goldenstein’s El Mundo del arte [The World of Art] and flyers for the band Los Redondos, Molina is present, both as witness and analyst of the essence of the underground. “It was the only moment in which art achieved the utopia of being outside the market, because nobody was interested in what we were doing”, he said. The conversation took place against the backdrop of a screening that included scenes of the band Virus playing at Obras in 1984 and the last night of Parakultural, with Batato, Urdapilleta and Tortonese receiving an applause in the recorded footage and in the auditorium of the Moderno at the same time.
In the passageway where the show Baile fantástico [Fantastic Dance] was hanging, Cartón Pintado analysed his work from a historical perspective to give an account of the Argentinian grotesque in its DNA. Fernando García, curator of Public Programmes at the Museo Moderno, led a tour through images by other artists that are reflected in a certain way in the work by Cartón. After discussing how Disney films and Japanese anime influenced his childhood, Cartón spoke about Florencio Molina Campos, Antonio Berni, Pablo Suárez, Marcia Schvartz and Marcos López. In this way, the artist and the museum interacted, in real time and in front of an audience, revealing how this exhibition belongs to a style that is rooted in our painting.
Once the conversation came to a close, Cartón played some of his songs, accompanied by Horacio Cristofanetti (lute), Nina Kovenksy and La Piba Berreta. The name of the event was a reference to the exhibition-concert in which Jorge De la Vega presented his work Rompecabezas [Puzzle] in 1970.
In the hall dedicated to Florencia Rodríguez Giles’s exhibition Sintomario [Symptomary], the guitarist and composer Florencia Ruiz premiered a suite inspired by the artist’s mural and video Sensibles y vengativos [Sensitive and Vengeful], the piece at the centre of her show. Ruiz, who is internationally-recognised, wrote an instrumental piece with subtle vocalisations that follow the mutant imagining of the mural and the scenes of the video, the sounds of which mixed with those of her guitar. The suite was divided into three parts of about fifteen minutes each, surprising the public as they entered the room without prior knowledge of the intervention. When developing the composition, Ruiz conversed with Rodríguez Giles so that she could get to know the artist’s concerns and incorporate them into the sounds.
For the intervention, the composer placed herself at one end of the exhibition hall with her pedals and other items so that she could go unnoticed. Two amplifiers were placed under the mural to reproduce the clean, broken sound of her guitar, which ranged from an evanescent layer of ambient noise to a noisy high tone that also allowed her voice to be heard. Once the suite was finished, Ruiz improvised for ten minutes, mixing her own playing with the sounds of the video.
