KANGAROO TROPIC

Art Exhibition at LA PORTLAND By Federico Roldan Vukonich, Victoria Ruiz Díaz, and Gonzalo Fuenmayor (DOT) Curated by Santiago Villanueva May 13, 2023 - July 20, 2023

What can artworks be, beyond revisiting commonplaces? Yet it turns out that commonplaces are precisely where all differences become most evident. Perhaps that's why the word genre is also used in art to impose order... Nothing leaves us at peace until it belongs to something, until it is "integrated." We feel that we are working only if we can talk about it. Commonplaces are also codes to begin to approach each other—the excuse to believe that we share something. The common is optimistic, like a cloud, even though we live addicted to conflict. Perhaps an artwork could be that transition between commonplaces and sites of conflict.

"Only the difficult is stimulating," says Gumier Maier, quoting Lezama Lima. An artwork could then be the difficult approaching the easy, the result nearing the equation. An artwork is the tangle of common things, an entanglement... or else it becomes something else. Maybe props, maybe scenery... a backdrop. Thinking about a piece also involves caution: deciding how much to engage with something, simulating closeness, choosing a distance... where it could be the eye or something else determining that.

I’m drawn to Ann Cvetkovich's idea of "archives of feelings"—the affective as a mode of public participation, the traumatic as something distanced from any kind of psychiatric pathology.

Excerpt from Santiago Villanueva's text for Trópico Canguro at La Portland.