DOSSIERS

www.kunstbildung.com.ar Artículos I y III (Fabiana Serviddio)

Kunstbildung Gallery is pleased to present the video ADN(i) (DNA(i)), by Ricardo Pons, first work of the trilogy that is composed by REM-Made in Argentina and Sudtopía, all of them are productions based on the problematic of national identity.
ADN(i) was selected in Latinoamerican 3er Festival of Rosario, in Rosario Digital I and in Buenos Aires Video XI ICI – Embassy of Spain, in 1999. It won the first prize in FM La Tribu Contest the same year.

In 2000, as part of videoinstallation Trilogía, it could be seen in the exhibition "Drei Ufer (Tres Orillas) Arte en Interacción Argentina–Alemania", in the Cisterciens Monastery of Neuzelle, Brandemburg, and was part of the action "Radiografía de la Pampa" in collaboration with german and argentine artists, in Festspielhaus Hellerau of Dresden, both curated by Volkmar Billig. Was selected as part of argentine video track in the First Biennal of Buenos Aires in MNBA.

Ricardo Pons was born in Ramos Mejía, in 1960. He was form as engineer and musician. From 1985 to 1991, he took part in a cinema team Cinetroupe, directed by J. J. González. From 1992 to 1994, he perform fiction videos in an independent way.
From 1995, he started in videoart with Chimeneas del Tercer Mundo, De pies y manos and Anteluna. After that, Alas Negras(1996), Metáfora de un Crimen Perfecto(1997), Lajka(1997) and Tránsito(1998). His latest videos are REM-Hecho en Argentina, Sudtopía and La tierra (2000).

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Article III

ADN(i) (DNA(i)): Utopia of an archaeology of identity (by Fabiana Serviddio)
“It’s because this New World constitutes a place for us, narrative of a displacement, that so profoundly gives birth to a certain fullness of imagination, recreating the infinite desire to return to the “lost origin”, to again be one with the mother, return to the beginning. […] And yet, this ‘return to the beginning’ is like the imaginary in Lacan –it can be neither satisfied nor compensated, and is, for that reason the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, searching, discovery- in short, the reservoir of our cinematic narratives.” (Stuart Hall)
ADN(i) was shown for the first time in the Miguel Cané Public Library as part of the “Manifiesto Cimarrón”(Cimarrón Manifest) exhibition, in collaboration with Patricio Larrambebere, Silvina D'Alessandro, Gabriela Larrañaga and Eduardo Molinari. Since 1997 this artists’ group has executed a series of actions, appropriating spaces, centered on the idea of the utopian recuperation of identity through an “excavation” of personal and collective memories.
Keeping in mind the diverse sub-genres into which video art has split during four decades, among which [Carlos] Trilnick and [Graciela] Taquini point out documentary, experimental and fiction, this production falls clearly into the latter category: an implicit, powerful script reveals that for Ricardo Pons, the author, the mere exploration of the visual, plastic richness of video is far from being his central interest. ADN(i) was conceived from the start as a hypothetical game of pseudo-scientific research: “the possibility that in the future, reading our identity as Argentines would be based on DNA and not on documents that elude the false exercise of memory”, the artist tells us. But from where does Pons reconstruct this identity?
Perhaps it would be more fruitful to think of it, not as a previously existing condition that cultural practice represents a posteriori, but as a production that is never complete, always in process, and that always is constituted within, and not outside of, representation. The inquiry into identity as an exercise in representation is given shape here in the form of a narrative of Argentine history that connects the Italian community’s agrarian past, the waves of immigration following the second world war and the present day of the urban port city in one continuous vision. Through an anonymous character who goes through these images, a past marked by displacements and ruptures is given back its unity, that dictates, in juxtaposition to the visual, the incorporation of experimental music by Lucena. It remains clear that this is a contingent personal construction: Pons’ discourse on identity will later visit the indigenous past in La Tierra (The Earth), result of his collaborative work with Gabriela Larrañaga.
The renewal of the search for national identity in different parts of the hemisphere throws the recent process of globalization into relief, consequence of that begun with the “meeting of two worlds”, that was the conquest of the Americas. The artistic field has not remained exempt from these effects, where the poetic language of memory, fantasy, narrative and myth attempt to form unstable points of identification and at the same time stitch together parts of a never factual past, always under construction. The European, part of this narrative, continues to speak to us, endlessly, intersecting every moment of our lives, revealed in desires and repulsion. ADN(i) internalizes a symbolic pilgrimage to the place of birth, a quest toward the utopian project of recovery, while simultaneously speaking of our uncertain present.