VENICE.- The Ministry of Culture of Mexico through the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) presents Life in the folds, a proposal by the artist Carlos Amorales with the curatorship of Pablo León de la Barra. This project represents Mexico at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Lidia Camacho highlights that in this edition, México commemorates the first decade of its participation with an official pavilion in Biennale Arte 2017, the most important event to promote contemporary art worldwide. To celebrate this special occasion, INBA has selected Carlos Amorales with his work Life in the folds, in which the artist “introduces us to a world where prints, sculpture, music, and cinema combine to give life and form to a new way of looking into reality, which materialize critical thinking and today’s problematics in contemporary art”.
Carlos Amorales studied in Netherlands, and participated in residencies in France and the United States. His artistic explorations led him to generate the Liquid Archive, an image bank that the artist has used in multiple ways, with which he has evidenced the crisis existing in the communication systems. Throughout his practice the artist puts at the center of his reflection language, codification, music and the implications of art in society.
Carlos Amorales’ project for Biennale Arte 2017 is the outcome of an extensive research in which the artist introduces a formal language that unfolds in the works which comprise the installation. The title of the exhibition makes reference to Henri Michaux’s novel Life in the folds published in 1949. For the artist, this means being “in the folds where a tension arises between the very concrete and the very abstract, it is here where a series of poetic images related to the places where we find life appear, not in the middle of the pages, but in the folds, in the cracks, and in the breaches, in the smallest things”.
The exhibition opens with a set of poems written in an encrypted alphabet created by the artist with abstract three-dimensional shapes. The texts displayed on seven tables, that formally refer us to paper sheets, imply a transition from the typographic to the phonetic. Each letter is a ceramic wind musical instrument, also known as ocarina that, when played, releases a specific sound for each letter. This coded language can be interpreted verbally, but can also be played as music. Around a thousand ocarinas establish a relation with an graphic musical score of 92 pages mounted on the walls of the pavilion. All these elements come together in the film The cursed village, which narrates the story of a migrant family that is lynched as they arrive to a foreign town. Where a puppeteer controls the characters of the story and a music ensemble playing the ocarinas, interprets the soundtrack, dialogues, and soundscape of the film.
In words of the curator “Life in the folds becomes a total work of art, one where the different involved disciplines, visual arts, animation, cinematography, music, literature, poetry and performance converge. In this Biennale Arte 2017 that, from its title VIVA ARTE VIVA , celebrates art and its capacity of embracing existence and facing the reality of a world full of conflict, Life in the folds invents new vocabularies, languages, images and sounds that allow life to be reinvented”.
