Artists: Astro Escudero, Rami George, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez
Curator: Jameson Paige
Presented by: BIENALSUR at Capille del Arte de la Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico
Past Remains (Lo que Queda del Pasado) is a film exhibition as part of BIENALSUR that explores history’s discursive resonances and connects artistic practices from Latin America and the Middle East. How history is recounted varies depending on its author and the reader, and the films in this exhibition lean into this complexity. Artists Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Rami George, and Astro Escudero attend to the slipperiness of historical record by leveraging different approaches to multivocality. Their works link historical struggles against oppressive imperialisms through aesthetic practices of archival investigation, reenactment, and montage across cultural diasporas. Together, these artists blur distinctions between official and informal accounts, and between what is recorded and what is true.
Past Remains is a title that indicates a doubled meaning. Firstly, it uncovers a material presence of the past–institutions, archives, regimes, etc.–that structures how the present is encountered. Secondly, it brings into focus the staying power of history; that its events and affective dimensions remain with us today either as lingering residues or constant tides that slowly shape us. This duality of materiality and feeling steers the films in the exhibition, as well as the layout for how viewers encounter them.
Images include installation shots as well as video stills.
Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez confronts real and fictional tellings of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua through the 1983 Hollywood film Under Fire. Rather than approach the film itself, Rodriguez’s piece, Under Fire From All Sides, approximates a real conversation had between the director and creative team behind the film through a loose reenactment. The embellished conversation examines how global politics are scaled to culturally-specific media such as Hollywood films, which mount skewed and inaccurate restagings of history in the process. The conversation continuously emphasizes the dual power of film and photography to both represent and strip down the truths of history.
In Untitled (the Wars in Lebanon), Rami George navigates a partially-ruined Beirut sourced from many individual accounts to create a fractured narrative of the civil war in Lebanon. The city becomes a dislocated archive, and its buildings become portals for understanding personal histories. George’s approach materializes memory’s inability to stabilize linear accounts, instead revealing how ideas of place and cultural inheritance are strained across geographical and temporal distance.
Astro Escudero directly engages the dichotomy of image and material forms of remembering in Four Dimensions of a Monolith. The film traverses monuments, women’s hair and bodies, as well as standardized textbooks to constellate history, gender, and coloniality in Ecuador. Their work plays between the soft sensuality of intimate recollection and the clinical solidity of official records.
The films in this exhibition represent divergent interventions on historical record, embracing not just counter-narratives but also new methods for understanding the past. Brought together here as an effort towards solidarity across global contexts, these artists highlight how the past continues to live, and impede upon and disrupt the present, causing all types of ripples in the process.