In the alternative museum that Sandra Gamarra has just inaugurated in the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale there are adulterated versions of paintings by Velázquez, Murillo and Zurbarán. Tropical gardens in which romantic painters, dazzled by their sensory ecstasy, forgot to include the native population, on which the artist has inscribed a handful of quotes from ecofeminist thinkers. Taxonomies of castes in colonial Mexico that accounted for all possible unions between settlers and indigenous people, reflecting institutional racism but also the role of women as a mere reproductive machine. And also images of deserted towns in today’s empty Spain, reproduced on copper sheets as the painters did during their grand tour by the ruins of Italy and Greece, which Gamarra has exhibited in display cases loaned by the Mint.
Gamarra, born in Peru 52 years ago and living in Madrid for two decades, is the first Latin American to represent Spain at the world’s largest contemporary art event. Her project, Migrant art gallery, revisits, reinterprets and repaints around fifty historical paintings from Spanish collections, from the period of the Empire to the Enlightenment. They rest in the Prado, the Museum of America, the MNAC of Barcelona, the Military Museum of Toledo, the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection or in museums in Valencia, A Coruña, the Canary Islands or Melilla, although they are not always displayed in their rooms. Gamarra exhibits them in this pastiche of an encyclopedic museum, more mischievous than violent in its dissidence, which covers the classic genres in painting – landscapes, portraits, still lifes, scientific illustrations and botanical drawings – to reveal, always with a half smile, the colonial bias that hides the Spanish artistic heritage .
“If there is something that has radicalized me, it is having a child. The ability of our generation to invent solutions is extinct” (Sandra Gamarra)
The project opposes the vision of the museum as a neutral or apolitical entity, and proposes another institutional model that is not afraid to confront the colonial wound and dares to address issues as thorny as racism, sexism or extractivism. A resounding attempt to decolonize artistic institutions, the fashionable verb since the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, used it, and which so bothers sectors of the right and the extreme right? For Gamarra, this cultural war seems to matter little to him: he has been dealing with these issues in his work for 15 years without being bothered by how much or how little they irritate. “The political context has not changed my proposal. If there is something that has radicalized me, it is having had a child. I have realized that the ability of our generation to invent solutions is extinct,” said Gamarra in Venice, a few hours after the inauguration.
His pavilion is “a tool” donated in life to those who will come after. “Decolonization cannot be limited only to the restitution of works of art. It has to be a process that is maintained over time,” says the artist. Next to her, the project commissioner, Agustín Pérez Rubio, nodded. “It is a word that I feel less and less comfortable with, because its use is being abused until it breaks. Museums must be decolonized, but it will be of no use if we do not also do it with the school, with the historical narrative and with our own minds.” In one corner of the exhibition are the Domund piggy banks, ceramic containers that represented Afro-descendant or Asian children, which were used to collect pesetas for the Catholic missions. “I had one when I was little,” admits Pérez Rubio, a member of a generation that ate Cola-Cao for breakfast and had a Conguitos snack.
In the same room appears Gamarra’s reinvention of The three mulattoes of Esmeraldasthe portrait of Andrés Sánchez Gualque that the Prado used as the image of its exhibition Tornaviaje, the first dedicated to the art produced in the Spanish viceroyalties, and which he managed to convert, with a clumsiness that was made ugly by social networks, into three chocolate bars with the percentage of cocoa superimposed on them. “It may seem like an anecdote, but it says a lot about Spanish society,” says the commissioner. “Of all those involved in its manufacture, no one saw it? And, if they noticed, no one said anything?” Gamarra has filled another room with portraits of Afro-descendants, “hidden in the official narrative,” which he has covered with cloaks out of modesty or tenderness. One of them contains a quote from Paul B. Preciado: “The trans body is to normative heterosexuality what Palestine is to the West, a colony whose extent and form is perpetuated solely through violence.”
Museums must be decolonized, but it will be of no use if we do not also do it with the school, with the historical story and with our own minds” (Agustín Pérez Rubio)
The project aims to “put its finger on the sore spot,” as Pérez Rubio acknowledges. The titles of the rooms, such as “cabinet of illustrated racism” or “altarpiece of dying nature”, also leave no room for doubt. And, at the same time, those responsible aspire to provoke “calm reflection” that can lead us to a different future. It is no coincidence that the tour ends with a “migrant garden”, illuminated by the natural light that infiltrates through the roof from the Venetian lagoon. A postcolonial oasis that replaces the monuments in honor of the conquerors with others that honor the indigenous leaders who died for the emancipation of their countries, such as the Peruvian Micaela Bastidas or the Bolivian Juana Arzuy.
The exhibition is part of the continuity with respect to Good governmentthe controversial exhibition orchestrated by Gamarra and Pérez Rubio in the Sala Alcalá 31 in Madrid in 2021, when the Community of Madrid censored the text of the introductory panel and forced the deletion of words like racism o restitution. This time, however, both have felt supported. “Maybe we weren’t the favorites to win the contest, but they understood us. The respect has been brutal,” says the commissioner. They do not fear that, with the inauguration of the pavilion, criticism from certain sectors will return. “Let those who have to be bothered be bothered,” Pérez Rubio resigns, specifying, out of a desire for transparency, that the project cost 400,000 euros (in comparison, the French pavilion costs four million).
Both would like to participate in a reflection that leads Spain to apologize to its former colonies. Will they get to see him in life? The degree of optimism of each one differs, although artist and curator agree on an idea, which they pronounce, like two heads that have been working hand in hand for months, almost in unison: “We do not work for today, but for tomorrow.”