Bienalsur: 400 artists to reinvent cultural cards at the end of the world | Culture

Is it possible to reverse the artistic currents for them to circulate from south to north? The second edition of the Biennial International Contemporary Art of South America (Bienalsur) has started since the Argentinian city of Ushuaia, the most southern of the world. On the banks of the Beagle Channel and under the guard of the imposing snowy Andes mountains, Bienalsur waved three flags on the AeroClub on Sunday, which will run until October, when this endless artistic event will end. More than 400 artists will participate in 110 venues in 20 countries.

The word utopia appears in the central flag, made by the French artist Christian Boltanski, and by its side, the icy wind of Ushuaia meanders above those of Voluspa Jarpa and Argentina's Magdalena Jitrik. "We are in the south of the south and it is from here that we leave to be able to flood our thought, culture and art with the central currents of contemporary culture," said Aníbal Jozami, general director of the biennial and rector of the National Three University. of Febrero (Untref), the public university that pilot it.

The creative chaos promoted by the Biennale includes dialogues between North and South, as well as between disciplines and calendars such as interventions. The look that builds the world from the artist and biologist Pablo La Padula at the End of the World Museum of Ushuaia, built on what was once Banco Nación. "I have built several projects, one of which was the first world museum at the end of the world, because metaphorically, the idea of ​​wealth is opening up today to biodiversity that the first world no longer has, "said La Padula.

Without abandoning this project in the near future, the artist now intervenes in the museum with a collage ranging from the fabulous animals of the writer and naturalist Pliny the Old to the first century to the current transgenic creations. The mouse in the human ear born from the manipulation of genes is linked to imaginary beings such as the manticore – the body of a lion, the legs of an eagle and the human head – or the Flattering described by Jorge Luis Borges: "It is ten times bigger than the elephant It has a very short trunk and long straight fangs, the skin is pale green, the legs are conical and very wide".

The nature of Tierra del Fuego – dominated by the Andes and the immense forests of lengas, railways and coasts adapted to strong winds and low temperatures – overwhelms the visitor. Aware of the "visual power of the landscape, Bienalsur imagined how to interact with this environment and challenge it," Wechsler said. So was born Landscapes between landscapes, the exhibition presented at the Rio Grande Fueguino Art Museum, inaugurated on Monday. Artists from Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Uruguay interrogate in videos the interaction of man and the environment from different angles: Berna Reale sings under the rain on a red carpet lying on a huge landfill, Angelica Markul places the viewer facing climate change the death of glaciers and Gabriela Golder shows a scorched earth in which silence is broken only by the song of birds.

Beside him, the photos taken by Gustavo Groh reveal the ghostly presence in the local landscape of the remains of a war that was not, the one that Argentina and Chile were about to lead in 1978 for the sovereignty of three Beagle Channel Islands. . Trenches, minefields, anti-mine batteries and ammunition were abandoned in both countries after a papal mediation put an end to the tension. Groh immortalized these prints until 2015 with a pinhole camera, which he now exhibits in the traveling exhibition. The water that extinguishes the fire. "Photography is in this case a support to remember," wrote teacher Maria Teresa Luiz in the catalog of the exhibition.