Latin American art through the lens of the pandemic

While it is impossible to predict the state of the art world post-Covid-19, historically, the most innovative ideas on how to reflect and reshape the way we live in the near future can be found in the works of artists who ‘thrive in adversity,’ to borrow Hélio Oiticica’s poignant phrase. Coming from nations that are simultaneously home to incredibly biodiverse habitats and sites of economic and political instability, Latin American artists such as Saraceno, Villar-Rojas and Dávila certainly provide important insights that may help us envision a sustainable future for humankind, while also helping us to interpret and digest current events. 

As the Coronavirus continues to roil the art world’s calendar, the São Paulo Biennial, one of the most important art events in Latin America, is currently scheduled to open at a delayed date in early October. However, as the pandemic escalates in the country due to President Bolsonaro’s refusal to implement preventive policies based on scientific advice, the biennial’s organisers will have to keep a close eye on how events will unfold in Brazil over the next few weeks. This has not stopped the most progressive and groundbreaking Latin American artists from showing the world how best we can adapt while holding up a mirror to the current crisis through art, connecting and illuminating the anxieties of the time. In other words, Latin American art reverberates even more intensely in the current crisis.

For example, over the past decade, Argentinian Adrián Villar-Rojas has produced several large-scale sculptural installations that are evocative of ruins from a post-apocalyptic, post-human future. His monumental sculptures, which are often surrealist works of cracking clay or concrete, feel particularly haunting right now as we look towards our unknowable future. 

So too are Jose Dávila’s sculptures, currently on show at the Dallas Contemporary, haunting in their structural uncertainty. Using construction-grade I-beams, boulders and other objects that seem held together in precarious balance, Dávila disrupts the formal order associated with modernity and minimalism. These works, at this moment more than ever, powerfully convey the feeling of impending collapse. 

Of course, the Latin American art scene is not only bound up in mirroring the world’s disquiet. Earlier this year, Tomás Saraceno live-streamed the progressive and innovative launch of his Aerocene Pacha in Salinas Grandes to an audience of 26,000. Aerocene Pacha is the first inflatable sculpture to lift a human into the atmosphere using only solar power and wind currents. For several years, the Berlin-based Argentinean artist has been actively investigating the possibility of fossil-free air travel as an alternative to minimize carbon emissions. While only a few months back Saraceno’s project may have been seen as a fanciful, media-pulling exercise, through the lens of lockdown, it has donned a renowned sense of urgency. Studies published by the scientific community worldwide over the past weeks demonstrate the correlation between high air pollution levels and increased Covid-19 death rates. This may be the moment to reinvent the industry in more sustainable terms such as the ones set out in Saraceno’s.