Haunted house - 2018 Curated by Noaj Sauer
Inspired by Boris Groys describing the function of art as “making visible the realities that are generally overlooked” and the testimony of Andrea Krichmar, who at age 11, while playing in the ESMA, saw a woman chained and hooded. I created/curated an installation called "Haunted House" for the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center. In an installation, the function of space is to make everything that is placed inside it easily accessible to the eyes of visitors. Everything that is included in that space will become part of the work of art and on certain occasions, even the viewer himself. As an installer curator, I hope the space to become a platform for discussion. The Haroldo Conti is located in the grounds where the clandestine detention, torture and extermination center, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), functioned during the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship. There, about 5000 people were abducted, of which only about 200 survived. A haunted house or ghost house is a building that is perceived as inhabited by the spirits of the dead. Parapsychologists explain that their obsession of those spirits to remain on property is due to the fact that they have suffered violent or tragic events, such as murder, suicide, injustice. "Haunted House" is about denouncement, it is an installation that works the grotesque where the visitor is part of the work of art. This one interpellates the spectator from what seems to be playful, interrupting him with a reality to be discussed. The installation contains pieces from the collection of the cultural center that I give a new meaning turning them into objects devoid of their function as works of art and I articulate them with mundane objects. I chose exclusively these pieces for their rhetorical features, which work from a grotesque style because, according to the artist Luis Puelles, the grotesque "reconciles us with what we do not want to see, it is a mirror that teaches what we do not want to see". Playing with this idea and referring to Velazques and his Meninas, I placed a mirror in the installation creating a meta-art work within the art work itself, where the projected images seem like ghosts accompanying the meaning of the installation.