“It is enough for the poet to be the bad conscience of his age”, stated Saint-John Perse in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Something similar could be said when artists address the vicissitudes of society. We should not ask for measurable political action when their role is to point out, to render evident, to shake us from indifference. Art may not provide answers, but most of the time it interrogates, proposes uncomfortable issues, almost like rubbing salt in a wound. Artists are seldom celebratory, nor do they usually provide solutions- art’s potency lays in the symbolic efficacy of the actions it proposes more than in the practical effects they entail. Paraphrasing Ferreira Gullar, art exists because life is not enough…

A comprehensive look at the Jorge M. Pérez Collection reveals a tendency towards art with an interest in social change, art that examines the conflicts and contradictions of contemporary society, art that critically analyzes historical events and reframes them in the present. An interest in the marginalized, the marginal and the margins (of society, of History) is what brings together the works in this exhibition. We have highlighted those works that address these issues through allegory, metaphor or veiled allusion, thus eluding direct illustration. Many of the works included in the exhibition, due to their size or complexity have never been exhibited and will be shown together for the first time.

The exhibition is structured around themes or nuclei that are organically linked and establish dialogue and correlations among artworks that do not necessarily illustrate an argument nor are they contained by one. Entangled Histories proposes essential questions: how do we remember as a society? Who is forgotten by History, and for what reasons? how is a traumatic event inscribed in the (social) body? Extraction and flows examines displacement of peoples (usually forced), as well as the unequal logic on the territory; Artivism: art in the social sphere focuses on political unrest and public protest on the streets, an essential expression of Democracy which is more and more ineffective in an inexorably reduced public sphere. In a world of generalized surveillance in real time, State Terror signals how protest is countered with repression and violence. Social control manifests itself in a less conspicuous but equally effective way with spatial segregation policies. This fifth section: Spatial Politics reflects on Modern architecture and its role in creating segregated communities, buildings to place the “undesirable,” namely, people of other races, class and nationalities, among them immigrants. Finally, Emancipatory Calls summons to revendicate difference, in the understanding that a more just society can only be built on respect for one’s right to be different.

But social change cannot be just a theme: it needs to be a strategy. As critic and philosopher Boris Groys has remarked, activists working from within art (or artivists) “do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art—not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself”. Therefore, we propose a series of activations by artists working in the community, with the intention of establishing long-term relationships with the neighbors of Allapattah, where El Espacio 23 is located.