ATOPIC TERRITORIES
Spaces and places, as well as landscapes and territories, are determining themes in Marina Camargo’s artwork.
Marina Camargo – The long end of principles
“In the long run we are all dead”. This maxim from economist John Maynard Keynes’s 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform is to this day the subject of heated discussion by both supporters and critics of his thinking. Debate ranges from how much it legitimises the inconsequential nature of state debt or is also a call for the economy to risk doing more in the present than explain past phenomena. But […]
Marina Camargo, what is the point of a map with no words and no accidents?
An atelier in Porto Alegre in the neighbourhood of Rio Branco (named in honour of the diplomat of the Brazilian borders) shares an affinity with Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. There a radical cartography is conceived, adapted to the geography of contemporary violence. At the back of the room, mirrored balls await a destiny – “I’m still not sure what I am going to do with them,” points the artist. […]
OF MAPS IN RUINS
In a story as short as it is inspired, Borges recounts the map of an empire which had the exact size of the empire, map and territory coinciding, point by point, in an unexpected one-to-one scale. A few generations passed until this cartographic delirium was found to be useless, and it ended up abandoned in the deserts, under the merciless sun and winter weathers. This story somehow accounts for not […]
LATIN AMERICAN BORDERS ON THE LOOKOUT: RECREATING BORDERS THROUGH ART IN THE MERCOSUL
{ Excerpt from text published in the book Placing the Border in Everyday Life, edited by Ashgate Publishers, where the integral version of this essay can be found: http://ashgate.com/isbn/9781472424549 } “(…) Marina Camargo’s Tratado de Limites The 8th Porto Alegre Biennial, which opened its doors in September 2011, was thus very much focused on the local-national dialectic and border issues: they appeared as a paroxysmal expression of complex relations to […]
ON THE MATERIALITY OF REFLECTION
Landscapes have always been an uncontested topic of interest for the arts. They evoke our relationship with the very paradigm of existence – the awareness of impermanence combined with the driving force of live, which is the illusion of eternity. From German romanticism to land art, this portion of nature is the one see in the distance or are faced with up close, in its full weight, shape and force, […]
DISTANT REFLECTION
With its remarkable exhibition journey, DISTANT REFLECTION presents us with a set of recent works made from photographic prints and videos. These are marked by a web of variable reactions, as if they had been drawn, designed, and constructed beforehand as a model, with the thinnest layer of snow from the alpine mountain ridges, melted by the simultaneously anachronistic and timeless social engine of memory. As one walks into DISTANT […]
RADIAL FISSURES
In Planisfério (Planisphere), Marina Camargo’s work orbits between its two main artistic thrusts: the attempt to encompass something of amplitude and the more detailed focus on the specific and the indicatory. At the crossings between landscape and confinement, the intuitive and the conventional, the diluted and the determined, the Porto Alegre-based artist uses drawing as the springboard for her works. Camargo, however, has visual supports in the lines, outline and […]
ACIREMA
In 1943, the same year he founded The Studio of the South (Taller del Sur), Uruguayan constructivist artist and art theorist Joaquin Torres-Garcia produced a small charcoal drawing depicting an inverted South American continent. A simple yet resonant gesture, Torres-Garcia’s America Invertida has since become a powerful symbol for what the artist once termed “the global south”–those regions and terrains molded and shaped through the complex and violent histories of […]
BEYOND FRONTIERS
While looking for a guiding idea for the exhibition space at MARGS – in a Biennial with a theme of territoriality – we focused on three routes in Rio Grande do Sul that seemed to offer distinctive views that were fertile for interpretation. One idea lay in the fact that political demarcations of nations, in the case of Brazil and its neighbours, do not always correspond to a cultural autonomy […]
A HIDDEN ORDER OF CITIES
1. The North American artist Robert Smithson made some important works in the late 1960s and early 70s which created a dialectical relationship between “site” and “non-site”, relativizing the work’s importance as object in favour of the more abstract idea of a path, which was a completely new approach at that time. He was thus entering the ideational and technical mechanism more common to such professionals as architects, topographers or […]
INTERVIEW
The advent of modern art in the mid 19th century is tied to an expansion of discourse about art. The growing availability of texts and statements – criticism, essays, biographies and manifestos – also includes interviews with artists. Throughout the 20th century and particularly from the 1950s, precisely when more programmatic texts in which artists announced their plans of action begin to become rarer, the practice of the interview gradually […]
THE MAP AS RAW MATERIAL
1. Fractal satellite images, aligned to the circumference of the earth by GPS, seem to make everything that has hitherto formed the art and science of maps superfluous. Perhaps Google will soon have the same effect on cartography as the photo had on painting in the late 19th century. Freed from the task of representing routes and territories, cartography could move into its impressionist phase, becoming above all a formal […]
THE SILENCE OF WORDS IN DRAWERS
In choosing the Centro Cultural São Paulo and its very busy library to compose this series of images, Marina starts by placing herself on a recurring path toward trying to understand where she is. Many artists approach their works’ place of presentation by taking advantage of architectural data or the setting’s memory in order to investigate the relations that can be established between the artwork and the space in a […]
DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING PATHWAYS
There is reciprocal tension between what is written about a visual artist’s work and the work itself: one is the unstable prop of the other, as in translation. But this tension is evidently more acute when the artist decides to work precisely with the signs of written forms, deconstructing them, bringing them back to an strange unfamiliarity. This is the path that Marina Camargo has chosen to explore. All scholars […]