Between time

Wametisé: named places. The cosmogony of some Upper Rio Negro populations, in the Amazon, recalls that a great serpent, pregnant with humanity, journeyed sinuously as it regurgitated each person into their chosen territory. Coming out of its womb, and having encountered the land, each individual then spoke their name and the name of the place where they would live. As such, to create the world is to name it. This lies at the heart of Wametisé: Ideias para un Amazofuturismo, the focal project of the 44th ARCOmadrid, aimed at achieving a vision of a feasible future world – not just for the Amazon (which has already lost more woodland than the size of France in the last 50 years), but inherently Amazonian, imbued with its communal dynamics and renewal practices between human, plant, physical and metaphysical bodies.

The exhibition, curated by Denilson Baniwa, María Wills and the Institute for Postnatural Studies collective, includes more than two dozen artists from eight Latin American countries, whose work provides a glimpse of the unyielding plurality of contemporary indigenous art – although a fruitful one, it has nonetheless prompted questions about the possibility of synthesising it into a unified movement and defining it as a mark of ‘contemporaneity’. As a matter of fact, the very questioning of this time-based relationship – also dealt with briefly during one of the talks included in the conference programme surrounding the exhibition -, even more remarkable than the aesthetic similarity between the works in the space, is precisely the factor that strengthens the curatorial approach: pierced by the filter of a (difficult) understanding of the future, the pieces in Wametisé acquire an avant-garde, almost prophetic tone, as they herald a time that is already in motion and is both conceivable and attainable. ‘[I]f there is a future to be considered’, Ailton Krenak argues, ‘this future is ancestral, because it was already here’^[1]. A kind of Amazofuturism should pay attention to these resistance efforts which, in fact, have never ceased to persist, to create names and invent worlds. As the core of the most traditional art fair in Southern Europe, which is also a gauge of a certain contemporaneity in the visual arts – with around 200 galleries and almost 100.000 visitors taking part every year, honouring talents, galleries and collections -, the event pushes for new paths, power mechanisms and vocabularies for today’s images in production and circulation.

Between listenings

The melting pot of trends, research and exchanges ignited by ARCO spills over into Madrid’s other cultural venues, as is usually the case. Other Amazofuturisms were also present and prominent at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía – with a performance by Uýra Sodoma -, at Casa de América – with an exhibition from the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection, drawing aesthetic connections between Ye’kwana pieces and modern and contemporary geometric abstraction -, at Museo Lázaro Galdiano – with a show on the historicity of the Amazon territory from the biggest privately owned collection of contemporary art in the Peruvian Amazon, the Hochschild Correa Collection -, at the Colombian Embassy – with a study on the social, political, sacred and medicinal aspects of the coca leaf -, at the Real Jardín Botánico – with Susana Mejía ‘s installation Color Amazonía – and also at Centrocentro and Archivo Arkhé, featuring two exhibitions curated by Halim Badawi in which different art-historical positions on indigenous mem9ories and legacies in Latin America and the world are put into dialogue.

Bárbara Santos presents Oro tapado, a continuation of her work on traditional knowledge as living technologies, at Casa Encendida, also curated by María Wills. The quest for gold provides a motif and an invitation to plunge ourselves into the ground, in an attempt to forge sensitive relationships with the mineral life that, even if we cannot see, makes the Earth go round. As part of a programme focusing on Listening as the first ‘’flaming verb‘’ to be employed by the institution throughout 2025, Oro Tapado synchronises us with underground and invisible voices, calling for the conversion of our bodies into vast ears, carrying sensors and transmitting vibrations that travel between human and more-than-human beings at all times. But if Santos’ exhibition manages to create a more or less immersive space for understanding this sound ecology, it is only through the (apparent) silence of a forest, a place where we read a letter written by a Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata), that our listening skills are even more effectively mobilised and tested.

Allora & Calzadilla’s installation El Gran Silencio (2024), in collaboration with Ted Chiang, is certainly one of those art pieces that instils some sort of epiphany, combining words – speculatively translated -, stories and coincidences in a scientific fable (a genre much appreciated by the philosopher Vinciane Despret, another leading speculator and translator of birds, spiders and octopuses), which greatly expands and broadens our world and language. We are standing on the area surrounding the Arecibo Observatory, one of the largest global projects in radio astronomy, atmospheric science and radar astronomy. The last wild population of Puerto Rican parrots, a critically endangered intelligent species, was waiting to arouse the same curiosity in scientists. In roughly the same year that an attempt to reach potential extraterrestrial life was beamed from a radio telescope to a cluster some 25.000 light years away, there were only 13 of the species left in the world. If the voice is that performative device of the call, which surpasses and crosses so many beings (one less predicate for our small band of exceptionalisms), then keeping our ears sharp is an imperative prerequisite if we don’t want to end up in a (really) silent forest.

Between intimacies

The ears, yes; but also touch, that wonderful sense that covers the tangible and the intangible, everything capable of impacting us. In the physical world – as Aristotle said somewhere around 350 BC – touch is a necessary condition for all sorts of movement (kinēsis).  Bodies with extremities need to encounter each other: fire heats wood, and the wood burns; the white billiard ball hits the eight ball, which then moves around; sugar is added to water, and the water becomes sweet; a person paints a picture and, on the other side, we feel their intimacy. Not by chance, in his short treatise On Sense and Sensibilia, the Greek philosopher implies that the primordial organ of touch is the heart (I.2) -, and this is what Manuel Solano, with bared chests, offers us in Egogénesis. At Travesia Cuatro – a gallery that also represents Spaniard Álvaro Urbano, winner of the eighth Catalina d’Anglade Prize at ARCOmadrid – the Mexican transfeminine artist is showing a series of self-portraits featuring different identity experiences. Intriguingly, even in the midst of these biographical records, a bird appears, just as, on another canvas, the reflection of her naked painted body penetrates the gallery’s green exterior through the glass. Solano is many – with wings and roots – and she touches this multiplicity with the finesse and precision of her hands and fingers: when the artist was 26, she lost her sight due to medical malpractice while treating HIV, but did not lose the talent for figuration, and certainly not for daring us to look.

At Museo del Prado, this ability to be struck by the image is also at play in Sigmar Polke. Afinidades desveladas – an outstanding exhibition of a meticulous, thorough and essayistic curatorial practice by Gloria Moure. An essay of the utmost excellence, as it is concise and complete, precisely in its partial, jagged and brief form – accurate while playful, enclosed while expansive; with no loose ends and yet so many pathways open. Polke and Goya, face to face, in a manifestly anachronic and yet no less powerful first dialogue: the skulls, the bones, the piercing gaze, the clouds, the Old Women, the Colossus, Saturn all resonate. The ghostly fear and death hovering and accumulating on the surfaces engraved by the German and the Spanish – themes that, as we know, transcend time and intimacy.

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Regarding the future, I could also mention the important initiative of the La Papeleria venue, with a group exhibition in collaboration with the Palestine Museum of Natural History; on listening, Tarek Atoui presents the musical forms of hospitality, at the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; or on intimacy, the Proust and the Arts exhibition, also at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. They will have to remain for the reader to explore and for anyone visiting Madrid with an attentive ear.

Umbigo travelled to the Spanish capital for ARCOmadrid, where it participated in the art magazines and publications section for the eighth consecutive year.

^[1] Krenak, Ailton. (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras, p. 8.