As a multidisciplinary artist, as a person queer And as a resident in New York City, the work of Carlos Motta (Colombia, 1978) has focused since its inception in giving voice to the silenced stories of the different minorities, both sexual and of migrants. First in your native country and later in the United States.
After a vital and artistic trajectory marked by their relationship with groups dissident in their respective environments, which sometimes implies a double or triple dissent – for example being a person queermigrant and affected by HIV – now Motta lands at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona (Macba) with Resistance prayersan exhibition that without becoming a retrospective, does collect different Motta works over the last 25 years.
The objective of the same is, according to the director of the Macba, Elvira Dyangani OSE, “to start a new cycle of the museum in which we seek to reformulate the concept of the institution after our first 30 years of existence.” This new museum approach to which Dyangani points out, is embodied in Resistance prayers For Motta’s will to show the role that colonial power and religion, this last concept as the perpetitive instrument of the first, have had in the silence the lives and bodies queer and sexual dissidents in Latin America.
A necessary statement at a critical moment
Agustín Pérez Rubio, commissioner of the exhibition together with María Berríos, wants to make clear “the unexpected opportunity of the sample as an answer” to the global political context in which he is born, especially in the United States, place of residence of Motta. Pérez says, in this sense, that Resistance prayers “It is a necessary exposure in these times of neo -fascism in which sexual taxonomies return and putting us all in boxes erasing our identity, so that we can only recognize us by the DNI.”
Asked about the juncture created by the Trump administration, Motta shows, as a sexual person, activist queer and migrant in the United States, his deep concern for the consequences that are already having the measures applied by the current government. “What has shown us the installation of fascism in the federal administration in these few months is that nothing can be given for granted,” laments the artist.
We come from a few decades of great progress in social equalities, but now all those advances void suddenly
Carlos Motta, artist
“We come from a few decades of great progress in social equalities, but now all those advances vanish suddenly and we are faced with a perverse strategy in which minorized people, for example trans adolescents, who had found ways to identify, have to have Access to health processes and ways to organize, see how everything is taken, ”concludes pessimism.
But Motta also warns that what is happening in the United States “also represents a great red alarm for Spain, for France, for Germany and other countries where these things are considered today [los derechos LGTBI+] They are sedimented, because they are not. ” Finally, it ensures that the current administration is using forms of denunciation similar to those used by the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century, this is “the signaling of sexual dissidents” and then adjusted and silence them.
Of course, the departments of diversity and inclusion have already been eliminated in all American public museums
Carlos Motta, conceptual artist
Motta is not optimistic about the future of artists in the United States, and less in the case of activists queer or in favor of migrants. “Most state museums depend on the federal administration and we know that protocols are already being given to filter content ideologically, which will undoubtedly mean a restriction so that many artists can expose,” he explains.
“Of course, the departments of diversity and inclusion have already been eliminated in all these museums,” Even so, Motta wants to make it clear that what is happening now is the usual tonic outside the West, where “the sexogenic minorities have always been repressed” and in this sense it is considered “a privileged one who can sit before the press and express himself.”
An art designed to make minorities visible
Carlos Motta immerses us in Resistance prayers in colonial history and in the instrumentalization of Christianity as an ideological tool that oppresses sexual and gender dissidents. And its exploration seeks to “claim and rewrite”, through multidisciplinary art – which includes photography, documentary and performative video, and sculpture – homoerotic conversations that have been silenced and repressed centuries in Latin America.
“When I started my career I could choose between opting for activism or sociology, in addition to art,” Motta confesses during the presentation of the exhibition. “I decided to work as an artist, but different practices of the fields of activism and social sciences have influenced my work and have given me methodological strategies to approach certain themes of some particular ways,” he acknowledges below.
His art is not, in this way, designed to live in a museum and away from the public, but to impact social conversation and bring to the minorized groups, almost always in a joint work with different groups. An example of this is the “AIDS Contramonument” that he designed, together with the architect Koray Duman and the writer Theodore Kerr, as a proposal for The High Line Plinth, an elevated, and abandoned section, from the subway from New York in the Chelsea neighborhood , in Manhattan, which was given in 2010 category of green space.
The project, which consisted of two gigantic triangles, one pink and one black to make visible the ravages that the disease still causes today, was presented to the contest convened by the New York City Council, but was finally discarded. However, Motta kept it and now they are exposed, along with many other works, in the Macba the plans of how it was conceived on the ground.
“We propose to take the figure of the pink triangle in conjunction with a black triangle – which represents women and other minorities – and placing them as formal spaces, but also loaded with meaning, creating a space in the middle, a third triangle in which Frame a void, which is a discursive vacuum, an absence of conversation in regard to the past, present and future crisis of HIV in the world, ”summarizes the artist.
An articulated exhibition in four chapters
María Berrios explains to end that Resistance prayers It is articulated in four areas or chapters. The first is titled Queerize/Cuirize colonial stories And in the Motta a dissection of how colonization ended the homoerotic stories in America from large video panels.
The second exhibition scope has been baptized as Deviant bodies. From him, Berrios highlights “the claim of the body as a political place and a space of knowledge.” The curator says that both the HIV pandemic and Covid’s most recent, “where some bodies have been considered disposable or non -recoverable,” they have made it clear that the body is “a space of power struggle.” This area is especially distributed in the halls that connect the different rooms of the sample, especially reflected in video facilities and some drawings.
The third area is titled Acts of faith. Love as resistance. “There is like a return to the colonial archive and the weight of the Church on the body,” says Berrios, who explains that, unlike the first chapter, in this “the colonial rewriting becomes fierce and lascivious.” Finally, the fourth axis is called Transliminary worlds And he exposes some of the earliest works of the artist, especially black and white photographs of the late 90s. About them comments Berrios, to close the presentation, which “illuminate what years later will be the artistic career of Carlos Motta.”
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