Algunas Formas de Amistad

The forces of production precipitate historic events which the human being is then forced to react against. The mass media deliberately obfuscate any attempt to get a clear grasp on an event, and history books advance an interpretation of the facts which leaves itself open to question by means of an exercise in abstraction. Expanding an insignificant event, isolating a sudden movement, choosing an affective gesture and zeroing in on it until we lose ourselves in the sounds it emits, the grain of the photo or the word that names it, furnishes us with a chance to reinterpret the events as they are presented to us, and of understanding history from new perspectives.

Aimée Zito Lema grounds her practice in this premise. Based on a process of selection and appropriation, Zito Lema zooms in on the detail of gestures in archive images taken of working class demonstrations or counter-cultural movements in The Netherlands and Argentina—the artist was born in Amsterdam and grew up in Buenos Aires. This motif, once enlarged almost to the point of abstraction, brings to mind the mechanism that enables cooperation and development within a community, or a movement, or an affective structure than bonds a group or a family. It is revealed to us in her work, just as a tiny detail can give rise to a community spirit and all that this brings with it. Her artistic practice structures the narrative around the process, triggering a dynamic that, taken together, lends meaning to the work. The idea leads to an expression, act or performance which is carried out together with a group of local people. This work in turn gives rise to the object that, inasmuch as a metaphor, returns us to the expression from which it came, only to be recycled and give birth to new possibilities.

Several Forms of Friendship features three bodies of work revolving around collaborative acts and expressions in pursuit of social influence. Each one of the actions is circumscribed to a specific political event within the local context. Underlying all the works is the idea of movement captured in images that uncover a force able to activate the necessary stimuli of reaction and support for the constitution of the local community. Structures that are at once both support and content connect the symbolism of the image with the physicity of the wood support, thus constructing its meaning, and revealing the absent body through its gravity.

Violeta Janeiro Alfageme