SANTIAGO REYES VILLAVECES

Barter: trade in goods and services between two or more parties. This inaugural gesture of colonial relations implicated in the confrontation of world-systems unknown to each other, which were soon reinvented into parallels, coincidences and mixtures, thereby establishing an economy of exploitation and violence that involved all: whether stone, plant, animal or human.

Contra Escambos is a group show permeated by the symbolic power of things, their meanings and mutations of value that occur in acts of exchange. Works of artists and researchers from Brazil, Portugal, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Haiti are combined in a constructivist installation (not the Russian type) that reflects on the act of bartering as a key element in the emergence of other modernisms that resulted from a dynamic of global colonialism.

The exhibition is proposed as a way of dealing with cultural narratives, political vectors and economic matrices of our colonial-modern past that still persist and manifest itself in the present.

The exhibition will take place in the cities of Belo Horizonte and Recife and unfold in several activities around aspects of each region, in order to draw connections between local contexts and the main theme of the project.