The Latest at Goethe

Latin America is celebrating 200 years of independence. Celebrating? Well, the anniversary retrospection is ambivalent. The invoked integration of the region has yet to happen, as an exhibition by the Goethe-Institut starting its tour in Buenos Aires also shows. By Ole Schulz

A body twists and turns in a hammock, sometimes stretched out limply, other times jittering wildly. The hammock is gold, blue and red with white stars – the colours of the Venezuelan flag. The video by German artist Christine de la Garenne is accompanied by cawing parrot noises. If you listen carefully, you can hear the parrots singing “Gloria al bravo pueblo,” from the national anthem of Venezuela.

“Glory to the Brave People,” the five-minute video by de la Garenne, is one of the artworks that can be seen starting 25 March in the exhibition Menos tiempo que lugar at the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires to celebrate 200 years of independence in Latin America. Less Time Than Space, as the enigmatic title of the exhibition is named after a line of poetry by Mario Benedetti in Spanish, will then be shown in various cities of Latin America before travelling to Germany in 2011.

For the project El Arte de la Independencia: ecos contemporáneos (The Art of Independence: Contemporary Echoes), the Goethe-Institut invited intellectuals and artists from Germany and Latin America to take part in a “dialogue.” The associated exhibition was not intended as “a jubilation show,” says curator Alfons Hug, director of the Goethe-Institut in Rio de Janeiro, but to take the past as an approach for contemporary reflexion; to understand “independence” as an attainment that must always be reinterpreted and aspired for.

The resultant works frequently satirize the Bicentenario, the 200-year bicentennial of independence. For example, Peruvian Fernando Gutiérrez undertook a journey in a VW bus to southern Chile with the great-grandchild of legendary Admiral Miguel María Grau Seminario – to create an opulently produced photo series with the descendant of that national Peruvian hero, who valiantly fought, yet could not prevent the annexation of southern Peru to Chile. This defeat is still a national trauma in Peru today.

Fatal contradiction

In Argentina, the exhibition will be shown at the Palais de Glace. The “Ice Palace,” erected in 1911 in the French style of the Belle Époque, typifies the trials and tribulations of Argentinean history. Initially opened as a skating rink where the bourgeoisie of the capital city could indulge in the latest European fad, the palace later was transformed into a place in which the crystallizing national culture could be expressed: the Palais de Glace became one of Buenos Aires’s best-known tango salons.

Argentina, where the Bicentenario will be celebrated on 25 May, was one of the first Latin American countries to wrestle independence from the Spanish mother country. Nonetheless, it was difficult for the young nation to find its own identity, as well. As early as 1845, the intellectual and politician Faustino Sarmiento constructed a fatal contradiction: civilization versus barbarianism. Sarmiento took up the position of the “civilized European” as opposed to the “American barbarian.”

Further to the north, decades before Sarmiento, one man in particular – Simón Bolívar – went down in the annals of history as the “liberator” after endless battles between the “patriots” struggling for independence and the “royalists.” In his Letter from Jamaica of 1815, Bolívar clear-sightedly warned against nationalism and invoked the integration of the continent – a challenge that still remains unsolved today.

Creoles take advantage of the power vacuum

The dissociation of his homeland from Spain proved far more difficult than later heroic sagas let on. Actually, the modern states are each celebrating the beginning of their independence movements, which lasted many years. They commenced as efforts for more political and economic autonomy from the mother country in a power vacuum while Spain was occupied by France in 1808 and Spanish King Ferdinand VII was held captive by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The long-running battles for independence that ensued in Latin America were “civil wars” under the leadership of the white creoles of Spanish origin, according to the Argentinean historian Héctor Pérez-Brignoli. “In almost all cases, on both sides not only creoles, but also mestizos, indigenous people and blacks were involved.”

The political ideals of the “Republican” Bolívar became increasingly more authoritarian over the course of the wars of independence and ultimately forms of state were created that primarily served the interests of the ruling creoles.

An occasionally sarcastic viewpoint

In spite of any ambivalence, in Latin America Bolívar is still an almost unchallengeable national hero today. While Venezuela’s populist President Hugo Chávez eloquently announces a “Bolivarian Revolution,” which will lead the continent to “21st-century socialism,” in a survey of intellectuals and artists, the libertador was once again named the by far most important individual in the history of Latin America.

Some of the artists involved in the Bicentenario exhibition of the Goethe-Institut took Bolívar’s Carta de Jamaica as their starting point for dealing with the heritage of messianic politics and its eternal promises. The overwhelming viewpoint is critical, sometimes even sarcastic. Venezuelan Alexander Apóstel, for instance, has the Letter from Jamaica read aloud in poor neighbourhoods of Caracas in English, the language in which Bolívar originally wrote the letter. Since the readers do not speak English, the result is grotesque gibberish.

While politics “has lost many of its ideals on the long road through time and space,” according to curator Alfons Hug, art has the freedom to “dream on.” And although for some viewers the wriggling body wrapped in the Venezuelan flag in Christine de la Garenne’s video may seem to be solely in a death struggle – symbolic of the futility of sanctimonious political discourse – the artist herself states that for her it concerns visualizing both “the persistence of conditions of oppression” and “the efforts to overcome this condition.” For one necessity cannot be denied: “To continue to engage in spite of recurring exhaustion or disappointment.”