The world upside down, 2023
Livia Benavides 80m2 Gallery
Lima, Perú
This is how Guaman Poma describes the world that has been established over what was the Inca State. He does not, however, appeal for a return to a past where things would have been in the correct order. Guaman Poma is denouncing that this new way of understanding the world, of organizing men and the land, either does not fit with Andean reality, at best, or the rulers do not know how to carry out the project properly. What Guaman Poma is denouncing is that what this new world proposes here is not being executed as it should be; this world, here, is the one that is upside down compared to how it claims to be.
Centuries later, we live in a society where very little has changed, except that we have come to understand that the world promised by Western ideas of progress (from the colonial system to democracy) does not work—not here, nor there—but can only work for an elite (now de-localized), which is increasingly smaller and more isolated.
For this second exhibition at the 80m2 gallery, I propose to the public heterogeneous ways of confronting the impossibility of the most entrenched ideas of our society: perpetual growth, linear progress, nature as a producer of goods, the law as a social equalizer, hierarchies among species, and human supremacy. As well as the very idea of the universality of Western culture and art.
Conversely, the works that make up the exhibition are fragments of stories in which painting is the common thread of a narrative that expects to be destabilized.
