SANTIAGO REYES VILLAVECES

Patria Boba
(Foolish Fatherland)

History is a cultural construct. Identity, an agreed upon fiction. Life, a space of negotiation. The title Patria Boba (Foolish Fatherland) conceals some of the key concepts that underlie the work of the Colombian artist Santiago Reyes Villaveces (Bogotá, 1986) in his first solo exhibition in Spain.

In the course of his artist residency in Murcia, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, has developed Patria Boba as a site-specific work for Gallery Artnueve by bringing to the fore some of the questions that have defined his work throughout the last ten years: scarcity, itinerant monumentality, ethical and political relationships that determine the nature of the object.
The title Patria Boba refers to a historical episode in the history of Colombia between 1810 and 1816, when the colony New Granada, which comprised today’s Colombia, Venezuela and Panama felt no longer submitted to the government of the Spanish Empire. It meant the beginning of a period rife with internal disputes, anti-colonial reforms and the construction of identities, which, according to several present-day historians, can be considered foolish (“cosa de bobos”).

The very etymology of the word bobo (foolish) conduces us to something that agitates in all of the artist’s work, the stammering, not clearly naming things, flirting but not conquering, suggesting but not imposing, working the artistic production as a political construct, as an interval such as described by Rancière, approaching the political subject in terms of interval or intermission.

These questions relating to the in-between, the negotiation,  the location of the subject in the context of post-capitalist society are just some of the issues raised by Santiago Reyes Villaveces. A banner saturated with decaying graphite. A wooden wedge that is incorporated into the public space to tighten it (Repertorio). One of his shoe shiner’s seats used both to shine shoes in the context of economic fragility and as elements of play and free time for low social classes (Lustradores (shoe shiners) in the series Brujitas (little witches)) is changed into a matryoshka-like object by relating it to the body and the public space as a place of not only economic but also of structural scarcity. Graphite screens where the very saturation conceals the image (Aspects). Fetish objects that construe the history of precarious subalternity (Florero de Llorente  (Llorente’s vase) and Caracola (Seashell). Structures that support and are supported by the exhibition space and thereby interfere with the normal circulation in the gallery, as it occurs in Cartagena, a piece that supports and is supported by a structure in which two stones from two homonymous places (Cartagena de Indias and Cartagena de Murcia) function as toponymous objects uniting two dissimilar spaces.  And finally, there is Patria Boba, the work that lends its title to the exhibition, and in which as opposed to the anti-monumentality in the work of some contemporary artists since the sixties as described in Robert Smithson’s Entropy and the New Monuments, Santiago Reyes Villaveces goes for an itinerant monumentality, always related to the others, always negotiated and fragile. Precarious, as is life.

In Geopolitics of Pimping (Geopolitica del Rufián) Suely Rolnik states that under this new postcolonial identity that was surfacing in contemporary artistic practice from the sixties onwards, we obtain a flexible and procedural subjectivity that is deterritorialized and fragile and has to remain alert before the monster of post-fordist cognitive capitalism and its identitary and cultural exploitation.

Patria Boba is a flirtation not a conquest as Santiago Reyes has mentioned on several occasions. A fragile and precarious space to dismantle the strategies of the hero. A vulnerable proposition for the convulsive space of identitary constructs we also experiment at the present moment. A vase drops and a nation is created. No decrees are needed, but simply cultural fictions and subjective weapons of destruction.

Text by Jesús Alcaide

Patria Boba Exhibition