Artist: Felipe Mujica

32nd Bienal de São Paulo – INCERTEZA VIVA
September 7, 2016 – December 11, 2016
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil

Mujica presents the work Las Universidades Desconocidas [The Unknown Universities], constituted of a group of 30 curtains made by two different teams: half of them in the center of São Paulo and the other half in the outskirts of the city. The title comes from a book of poems by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, which proposes something like an abstract place where we can all relate to, it alludes to autonomy, suggests how one person is basically its own best guide. The artist reports that during his stay in São Paulo the trips between the center and the outskirts became his Unknown University, just like making the work on a horizontal dialogue with the fabricators and all the experience lived throughout this process.

The public also brings its own unknown universities that end up projected onto the work: the curtains are manipulable, the public can touch them and move them in the space making various combinations between them. Interacting with the work is in it self an act of learning and an opportunity. In 3 months, by the end of the show, the curtains will possibly be used and dirty after a period of multiple configurations created and lived by the public.

–

Mujica apresenta o trabalho Las Universidades Desconocidas [As Universidades Desconhecidas], constituído por um grupo de 30 cortinas feitas por duas equipes diferentes: metade no centro de São Paulo e a outra metade na periferia da cidade. O título vem de um livro de poemas do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño, que propõe algo como um lugar abstrato com o qual todos podem se relacionar, nos remete à autonomia, sugere como uma pessoa é basicamente sua própria guia. O artista relata que na sua estadia em São Paulo as viagens entre o centro e a periferia foram a sua Universidade Desconhecida, assim como construir o trabalho num diálogo horizontal com os fabricantes e toda a experiência vivida durante esse processo.

O público também traz as suas próprias universidades desconhecidas que acabam projetadas no trabalho: as cortinas são manipuláveis, o público pode tocá-las e move-las no espaço formando diversas combinações entre elas. Esse próprio gesto de interagir com a obra é por si só um ato de aprendizagem, uma oportunidade. Ao final dos 3 meses de exposição, as cortinas estarão possivelmente gastas e sujas, após um período de múltiplas configurações criadas e vivenciadas pelo público.

• Happenings

Artists: Felipe Mujica and Herbert Weber

Felipe Mujica and Herbert Weber
October 9 – November 7, 2015
Christinger de Mayo
Zurich, Switzerland

Two-person exhibition.

• Happenings

Artists: Felipe Mujica, Margarita Azurdia, Jorge González, Ana Maria Millan, Javier Tellez and Johanna Unzueta.

A reherasal by Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta
June 10, 2015
ISCP -International Studio & Curatorial Program
Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artists and Beta-Local collaborators Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta will present original artworks and documentation of work by Margarita Azurdia, Felipe Mujica, Jorge González, Ana Maria Millan, Javier Tellez and Johanna Unzueta in ISCP’s exhibition galleries. The exhibition will reveal contrasts between Geometric Abstraction, with its idealistic and formalist characteristics, and more personal, exotic and political forms of expression. Works include a video of a flying body crossing the US-Mexico border in a semi-circle trajectory, a ceramic turtle resting over a neo-geo-style cube, and a group of photographs of Minimal-like sculptures and paintings with the artist fashionably posing next to them, among others. This presentation is a prelude “test-drive” or “rehearsal” for an exhibition scheduled for later this year in Santiago, Chile at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo.

• Happenings

Artists: Akira Ikezoe, Alberto Rodríguez Collía y Andrea Mármol, Buró de Intervenciones Públicas, Elisabeth Wild, Federico Herrero, Felipe Mujica, Jessica Kairé, Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, Johanna Unzueta, Jorge De León, Melvin Laz, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, Regina José Galindo, Stefan Benchoam.

Tocar Madera
April 25, 2015
El Aserradero / Proyectos Ultravioleta
Guatemala City, Guatemala

After more than five and a half years and countless collaborations, exhibitions, presentations, excursions, concerts, workshops, lectures, derives, debates, talks, screenings, discussions, performances, bike rides, fairs, encounters and legendary parties, Proyectos Ultravioleta is moving to its new space in zone one of Guatemala City.

This first exhibition in our new home showcases the works of the 15 artists represented by the gallery. In order to mark the occasion, we invite everyone to join us, chase away the bad omens, commend ourselves to favourable luck, and touch wood.

Additionally, there will be amazing burgers by Querido Combo, finger licking Caribbean fusions by Morisoñando, and Guatemala’s finest coffee brewed by Rojocerezo.

Those arriving on their bikes can park inside our lot. Those who would prefer to come by car can park around the corner, on 11 ave (between 20 and 21st street) in front of Agrochina.

So please help us spread the word, and come celebrate with us!

Después de más de cinco años y medio, y un sin fin de colaboraciones, exposiciones, presentaciones, excursiones, conciertos, talleres, charlas, derivas, debates, lecturas, proyecciones, discusiones, performances, paseos en bici, ferias, encuentros y fiestas legendarias, Proyectos Ultravioleta se traslada a su nuevo espacio en la zona uno de la Ciudad de Guatemala.

Esta primera exposición en la nueva casa de UV presenta trabajos de los 15 artistas representados por la galería. Para celebrar dicha ocasión, los invitamos a todos para acompañarnos a ahuyentar los malos presagios, encomendarnos a la buena suerte y tocar madera.

Además, habrá deliciosas burgers a cargo de Querido Combo, comida caribeña de gran sazón por Morisoñando, y el mejor café del territorio guatemalteco con Rojocerezo.

Los que lleguen en bicicleta podrán estacionar adentro. Y los que prefieran el carro, pueden parquear en el estacionamiento de a la vuelta, sobre la 11 ave (entre la 20 y 21 calle) frente al Agrochina.

Así que rieguen la bola, y vengan a celebrar con nosotros!

• Happenings

Artist: Felipe Mujica

Arriba como ramas que un mismo viento mueve
August 15 – November 19, 2014
Museo Experimental El Eco
Mexico City, Mexico

• Happenings

Artists: Armando Andrade Tudela, Alejandro Cesarco, Elena Damiani, Clara Ianni, Runo Lagomarsino, Mateo Lopez, Felipe Mujica, Laercio Redondo.

Idea di Frattura, Opinione Latina 2
May 8 – July 19, 2014
Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
Francesca Minini Gallery
Milano, Italy

As the collaborator of Oscar Niemeyer on some of the most suggestive projects in Brasília, Athos Bulcão is the creator of the tiles that adorn so many of the public buildings as well as the edifices of the capital’s superquadras. The peculiarity of Bulcão’s method was to leave room for the creativity of the workers installing the tiles, to whom he supplied only some general instructions (usually concerned with avoiding the creation of compositions that would be too “obvious”), leaving them for the most part free to juxtapose the designs how they saw fit. If, over the course of his very long career, Oscar Niemeyer has on more than one occasion affirmed his militant communism (a claim belied, or at least weakened, by his innumerable public commissions realized for various political regimes), Bulcão’s activity reveals authentically and deeply democratic aims. The great mural painting by Laercio Redondo (part of the series Lembranças de Brasília, 2012) pays homage to Bulcão and to his method which is so open and subject to the circumstances life that are beyond one’s control; in this sense he is subtly anti-modernist. Although not directly inspired by Bulcão, the curtains produced by Felipe Mujica for the exhibition, part of a series in progress, should be interpreted in an analogous manner, since the artist defines some fundamental parameters, formally ascribable to the modernist tradition, but then goes on to leave a certain margin of freedom to the collaborators who produce them, by allowing them, for example, to choose the color of the fabrics. The collages and the sculptures by Elena Damiani often take the same repertory of modernist architecture as a starting point, but in this case the purity of the forms appears as contaminated, almost repudiated by the surprisingly fluid juxtaposition of utterly distinct architecture and spaces, in the case of the collages; and by the very widely differing materials such as glass and marble (the one transparent and fragile, the other strong and opaque), in the case of the sculptures. Through the images Damiani moreover establishes, albeit in a fragmentary and non-linear fashion, a narrative; a fantastical and complex universe in which we feel it would be possible to live, and, perhaps, in which someone does indeed live.

Despite not having a soundtrack, Foro (Armando Andrade Tudela, 2013) is intrinsically musical: the hands of the artist and of the architecture students who have helped him to build a model of the Endless House developed by Friedrich Kiesler have designed a concert of extremely melodic forms and gestures. The synesthetic experience transmitted by the film is coherent with its subject: Kiesler’s utopian house was at the same time an idea and the realization of an idea, fusing in a single artifact two theoretically distinct moments. The sculptures of the seriesLores (2014), produced by Andrade Tudela for this exhibition, use the same material and a principal which is in some way specular, as they do not allude to a hypothetical future construction on a larger scale, of which they would constitute the model, but of the modus operandi according to which they are constructed. The artist prepares the molds for the sculptures so that, when they are removed from the mold, some “linings” break, and join the final form by painstakingly observing the sculpture from every angle to find the exact point in which to insert the broken section. Andrade Tudela has realized two versions for each mold, inevitably different from one another because he cannot control the exact point in which the “lining” will break, and, consequently, where the right place to insert the broken section will be. The idea of a fracture, of a violence often invisible, but which lies beneath the creation of utopian, spectacular and charming architecture, forms in a certain sense the core of the exhibition. The ruthless suppression of workers’ strike during the construction of Brasília, and above all the manner in which this suppression is denied by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa in the interviews conducted by Clara Ianni in Free Form / Forma Livre, Parte I and II (2013), speak of precisely this fracture that has never-quite-healed on which the capital was built, and by metonymy the country and even the continent itself. An atavistic fracture, which can be traced all the way back to the founding trauma of colonization, and the way in which, in the following centuries, the sociopolitical arena has remained substantially the same, continuously showing the same asymmetric division of power and access to natural resources. The war to which Ianni alludes in War II (2011-12) is only by appearances that of a board game: what makes these ruthless and totalitarian aims suddenly frightening and yet familiar, it not their insertion in a different context, but the manner in which, in this new context, they echo a tragic past, and perhaps an unobserved present. Like architecture, language can both reveal and hide, it can propose military aims, or, more subtly, choose not to speak of the problem directly, but to allude to it transversally, silently.

This is what forms Alessandro Cesarco’s Footnotes, 2014, which evoke, in a seemingly unintellectual context, parallel realities, the capacity of art and language to transform reality, revealing its fantastic side. In this sense, even though they may seem like a digression from the exhibition’s main themes, Cesarco’s notes in fact constitute the key to understanding all that can be (and is) said and denied, that language is an architecture of the word, which, by constructing various levels of interpretation, on one hand conceals, almost protectively, the state of things, and on the other allows it to be filtered, sifting out the fracture that is to be sought, once again, beyond what we believe we see. Analogously, the graphic alphabet invented by Mateo López to compose his poetry-sculptures, which allude to the great tradition of concrete poetry in Latin America, is not immediately comprehensible. With his words made of folded sheets of paper, López doesn’t so much say as refer, suggest, and open up a field of possible combinations. Thus the lithograph which provides the key to interpreting the work is a sort of dictionary that should allow one to understand, but it is clear that it does not tell us everything, because that would be impossible: some things, when one attempts to explain them, dissolve into thin air. And it is in this unsayable context, which in certain sense precedes the works, or underlies them, almost to highlight the need to look beyond appearances, that Runo Lagomarsino has installed it wallpaper, transforming the exhibition space into a theatrical stage adorned with a sign that is apparently decorative, but which actually speaks, once again, of violence and colonization. Illiterate, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro would sign is name by twice repeating a sort of abstract scrawl, a sign as arbitrary and personal as any violence, which always had to be authenticated by a public notary who signed in the middle. If, as suggested by the title of another works of Lagomarsino’s, Colombo’s enterprise might seem, at the beginning, like a joke (We All Laughed at Christopher Columbus, 2003), today nobody is laughing; Pizarro’s lopsided signature closes the circle opened by the cordial forms of Athos Bulcão, and reminds us that it remains, indelible and alert, underneath any new attempt to establish an authentically democratic process in Latin America.

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

• Happenings

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

Publications

Collections

• Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, Gobierno de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
• Museo de Arte Contemporaneo – Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile.

Links

• Interview with Cristóbal Lehyt 
• Interview with Macarena Molina
• Interview with Kerstin Von Gabain

• Artists