Tercer Espacio

THIRD SPACE: Translation

From February 20 to April 17, the third space exhibition is open: translations with artists Fraçois Bucher (CO), Juan David Laserna (CO), Federico Ovalles-Ar (VE), Henry Palacio (CO) and Ana Ruiz Valencia ( CO).

Plural Nodo Cultural presents ‘third space: translation’, a group exhibition to initiate the curatorial axis of Plural in 2020.

This project has the participation of François Bucher (CO), Juan David Laserna (CO), Federico Ovalles-Ar (VE), Henry Palacio (CO) and Ana Ruiz Valencia (CO). Their works present the figure of the interpreter, a subject who carries out the translation as an operation to reconstruct stories about a socio-political, economic and cultural system that seems hermetic with respect to the inhabitants who suffer it but at the same time embody it.

While the action of Ruiz Valencia, the interpretation of ‘Een ontvoogding’ a text by W.F. Hermanns in Dutch, a language that the artist does not master, leads her to link images that indicate what was the invasion of the allies to Syria and Lebanon during wwii, Bucher’s piece focuses on Katharine Gun, a specialized translator from Chinese to English who worked with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and was accused of leaking confidential information in 2003 confirming how the US and British governments sought to interfere with the UN votes for approval of the invasion of United States to Iraq.

In parallel to one of the images of this work: the UN Building in Manhattan (New York), and in the current Latin American context, the sculptural piece of Ovalles-Ar, a representation of the socio-political and economic system of Venezuela, is developed that, like the imposing concrete construction of the UN, it is closed and impenetrable; However, through the materials used by the artist, the state of precariousness in which this system is found – not to mention ideology – and therefore, the highest percentage of the population causing one of the strongest immigration phenomena today.

Located in this same immigration issue, although on the border between Mexico and the United States, Palacio takes as a starting point one of the findings of his research: the musical rights of Mexico’s anthem, are owned by the United States. In one of his videos, a lyrical singer who, in front of the monument to the revolution (CDMX), which in turn is surrounded by North American call center companies whose hiring is aimed precisely at people expelled from that country, interprets the Mexican anthem but in English.

While in the pieces of Ruiz Valencia, Bucher and Palacio, the figure of the interpreter is preset, in the series of murals of Laserna that surrounds the sample, the performativity of the spectator’s interpreter seems to be reinforced, thus diversifying the readings in a wide production. The origins of the walls is hidden or has been lost in another translation exercise: bring specific images to their color information. Suddenly, due to their harmony, these pieces make up a smoke screen, just like the one that is installed to hide, except that, on this occasion, the spectator is invited to cross it and remain inside.

-Andrea Muñoz

Curator