Monumetria

Every monument has a front, and with that front a direction in which we are going, and with that going a whole that is not singular but plural. In sum, a first person plural characterized by a future that is as shared as it is certain. The monument to Ramos de Zepeda erected in 1934 in front of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo was a clear example of this. With large dimensions and long-lived materials¿granite, bronze¿it attempted to establish a point for the city that would raise not as much the past, supported on Doric columns, but its future, represented by an advancing arm. However, it didn¿t last long: in 1967, due to the construction of the city¿s subway system, the monument had to be dismantled, then dumped, and finally re-erected away from its original site.

During the months of March, April, and May of this year, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Delenguaamano collective¿comprised of Gilberto Mariotti, Néstor Gutiérrez, and Santiago Reyes¿took it upon itself, in its temporary shoe Monumetría, to once again raise that monument in a here¿the original location given to it¿and a now¿our own times.

The problem was that very little was left of the monument¿s here, and the same goes for that now, our own times: only unconnected pieces that do not indicate a destiny, mismatched, incapable of organizing a path of any kind. And it is precisely there, on that dislocated here and now, that Delenguaamano set the basis of the monument.

Monumetría was a single work/intervention divided into four parts: Perspectiva y proyección, a transparency; Mnemocine: a museum fragment; Trabajo y reproducción: a printing of postcards; and Reconstitución, a bronze casting. Four parts that feed on each other through two concrete actions: pointing to fragments and inventing coordinates.

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