FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I’d like to start with the title of the curatorial project Espejito Espejito (Mirror Mirror). Could you share how you have made use of the metaphor?

GRANDEZA STUDIO (GS) Our curatorial and theoretical framework departs from an interrogation of two metaphors of the mirror: on the one hand, the ‘distorting mirror’ (a concept developed by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, throughout his extensive work on the coloniality of power) and on the other hand, the ‘narcissistic mirror’ as defined by Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato, in her seminal text “Is Eurocentrism a European Problem? Decolonial Meditation in Twenty Theses” (2019).

However, before explaining the relevance of these mirror metaphors, we need to provide some context. The arrival in 1492 of the European ‘conquerors’ to the coasts of Abya Yala (later known as America) was the starting point of a geopolitical fiction of a planetary scale in which Europe would self-narrate as the epicentre of progress, while depicting the rest of the world as an immense cartography of virgin peripheries waiting to be ‘civilised’, ‘exploited’ and ‘modernised’. America was not discovered but rather invented. And at the same time, Europe is the consequence of the emergence of the entity of America, in the grid of a new organisation of the world. Both America and Europe were geopolitical entities constituted in this collision.

According to Quijano, the invention of America was the result of another fiction – ‘race’ – that would become the first social category of modernity. Both ‘race’ and other indexers previously implemented in the European (re)productive and social fabrics (such as ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘ability’, etc.), contributed to the consolidation of a worldview that taxonomised territories and bodies, segregating them between normative centralities – proprietary and sovereign – and peripheral othernesses; supposedly anomalous, inferior, wild, exploitable, and disposable. The territorial, cultural, and technological deployment of this supremacist, patriarchal, and binary cosmology (known today as Eurocentrism) was instrumental, according to Quijano, to the expansion of a then incipient Integrated World Capitalism – today immersed in a process of self-annihilation.

For Quijano, one of the most powerful instruments of this planetary fiction was the imposition of a ‘distorting mirror’ towards the colonised subjects, that would lead them to see themselves (and imagine themselves) through the lens of the coloniser, ultimately neutralising the autonomy and legitimacy of their own historical and cultural perspectives. On the other hand, for the Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato, Europe is today “trapped in a narcissistic mirror”. Europe is the first victim of Eurocentrism precisely because of its foundational refusal to recognise itself as reflected in the “communal cosmos of non Western, non monotheistic civilisations”, which deprives it of imagining itself beyond an exhausted autofiction that cracks to the sound of climate disaster and war. The myth of Europe is an autopoietic and toxic fantasy. According to Segato, in Europe “there is no intensity, no drama, because drama can only arouse from a limbic border of an existence facing the limit imposed by the difficulty of the other”.

KOOZ The exhibition directly responds to the theoretical framework of the Mayrit Biennial 2024, Wet Dreams, by encouraging participants and audiences to ‘disoñar’ other political fictions, from the erotic and collective desire to deform and shape "other ways of life, territories and economies”. What is for you the power and potential of designing from and through desire?

GS Today, decolonisation has become a significant topic amongst cultural and artistic practitioners and in many academic contexts. Less has been written, perhaps, about the decolonisation of desires. Indeed, many of the remedies proposed by both leftist and right-wing political spectrums to tackle contemporary challenges (especially in the global North) come from a mandate of constraint — from the scale of individual consumption and footprints to public investments, internationalist alliances and beyond. A good example of this is how the challenge of climate change is tackled through the 2030 Agenda, which is very effective in detecting (although not in applying) the necessary restrictions to carbon emissions but inoperative in proposing alternative scenarios capable of redirecting our desires towards the reduction goals that we need to reach.

The curator of the last Venice Biennale of Architecture, Lesley Lokko, expressed the urgency of tackling the current crisis of political imagination by claiming that: “it is impossible to build a better world if one cannot first imagine it”. We acknowledge that it is imperative to exercise our inventiveness and redirect our agendas towards non-extractivist, non-colonial and non-capitalist forms of existence — not by restricting our desires but by radically decolonizing them. This effort implies, amongst other things, a profound reconfiguration of notions such as joy, exuberance, excess, abundance, or simply ‘the good life’, towards models that —instead of depleting and exhausting bodies, territories, climates, ecosystems and relationships — feed from them while also feeding them.

We valued and wanted to give space, voice, and presence to practitioners whose works engage with radical forms of imagination, combined with the high doses of humour, delirium, sassiness, absurdity and rebelliousness that we believe are necessary to re-eroticise our relationship with the present. We need to move away from paralysing moralism and guilt.

KOOZ The exhibition includes works by a number of other artists who imagine decolonised and de-binarised versions of “New Worlds”. What is the potential of these imaginaries in shaping new paradigms?

GS Many of the topics that can be found in this exhibition are somehow related to the recurrent elements composing the Eurocentric representation of “The Allegory of America'', which visitors can see at the beginning of the permanent collection of the Museum. In that image (also featured on the exhibition poster) a bare-breasted woman — to representing America — wears golden accessories, weapons, ‘exotic’ fruits and feathers on her head while she rides an armadillo. A background of exuberant landscapes full of exotic animals, scenes of war, acts of cannibalism and monstrous presences surrounds her figure.

The artworks included in the exhibition recuperate some of the recurrent elements composing “The Allegory of America”: feathers, armadillos and other so-called exotic animals, fruits, bare-breasted women, scenes of cannibalism, weapons and mythological monsters. However, in these works, the bodies appear self-represented, challenging the ideas brought about by the “The Allegory of America” from a defying position, directly interpellating the audience, questioning the imposition of ‘distorting’ forms of representation and, ultimately, transforming them into rebellious acts of emancipation.

The first piece visitors encounter in the existing artworks section is Ofrenda (2021) by Elyla. In this audiovisual piece, the artist removes a mesh mask previously fastened to the skin of their face, leaving a trail of blood that falls on their naked, mud-covered body. The work speaks to the difficulty of getting rid of imposed images on the self and reminds visitors that processes of disidentification and emancipation are not exempt from pain.

Following this a foundational gesture, two further works play with more traditional museographic formats: the vitrine (Tesoros especulativos) and the framed lithographies (Perrear el dolor). In Tesoros especulativos (Speculative Treasures) (2020-ongoing), Juan Covelli works with the Quimbaya Treasures — the most significant piece of the Museum’s collection — whose repatriation has been recently requested by the Colombian government. In Covelli’s words, he explores possible alternatives for symbolic repatriation through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning as a speculative tool for the proliferation of new archaeological artefacts.

In their lithographic series Perrear el dolor (Twerking Pain) (2019-2020), Colectivo Ayllú establishes a transhistorical crossover between the Spanish colonial project, the implementation of the modern heterosexual regime, and the Afro-indigenous resistance to their imposition. These crossovers have been updated from the accounts of conquistadors and chroniclers, European representations of Abya Yala from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their oral memories of resistance. Naomi Rincon Gallardo, in Sangre Pesada (Heavy Blood) (2019), imagines ghosts lurking in a landscape of mining depletion and toxicity in Zacatecas (Mexico), immersing the audience in a delirious audiovisual display in which mythology serves as a critical tool to question old and new forms of extractivism and dispossession. Meanwhile in HIT MOVIE: Vol 1 (2022), Martine Gutierrez challenges Hollywood’s archetypes of femininity. In her words, diehard bombshells wield dominance and chaos in the name of optimism dressed as nihilism – confronting the industry’s hyper-fixation of women’s bodies as erotic casualties of violence.

In the large format photography of La Emancipación de las Ñustas (The Emancipation of the Ñustas) (2018), Cholita Chic celebrates the sexual transgressions of a group of women from Arica (Chile), their cultural hybridity, and their liberation from imposed stereotypes by weaponizing an Indigenous clothing style that became popular in the 1920s. Their bare-breasted bodies defy the exotic and colonial image constructed by heteropatriarchal structures (wife, peasant, unfortunate). At the same time, they wear balaclavas to accentuate their belligerent defence of feminist and affective struggles.

In Bugs (2023), Vitória Cribb uses the digital environment to unpack her investigations and reflections on digital presence, surveillance, digital bodies, self expression and psychological damage in cyberspace, and how it intersects her subconscious. Cribb invites the audience to question the limits and power relationships between humans, technology and non-humans. Carlos Martiel, in Extensión (2022), slowly breathes while lying flat. His naked body is covered by nine dead animals, often associated with the Western idea of ‘the exotic’. The inert bodies of the animals seem to become alive through the breathing movements of the artist, conveying the radical interconnectedness of life and death processes between humans and other living beings on the planet.

Video games also serve as a platform for speculative world-building: Tatyana Zambrano and Hernán Rodríguez present a video game called Banana Valley (2022) that explores the tension between imperfect systems in which play, guaracha music, and joy converge in a delocalised territory. Here, the metaverse becomes the stage of future political fictions, depicting a utopian land in which cyber-mechanical work undermines new illusions. UNKRNS: Más allá del hechizo emprendedor (UNKRNS: Beyond the Entrepreneurial Spell) (2023) is a speculative video game, designed by Diego Morera and Sebastián Lambert, about Latin American unicorns (referring to the private companies that achieve values of more than $1 billion — such as Uber, Airbnb or Rappi). The work investigates their spatial practices, their bodies and rituals, their gestation based on solutionist myths and their neocolonial trans-scalar geopolitics. Accompanying this videogame is a cartographic tapestry called Tapiz, tapiz, 1.000 millones, please (Tapestry, Tapestry, one billion, please) (2024), created in collaboration with Virginia Sosa Santos and manufactured collectively through workshops in Montevideo and Madrid, maps out the global location of unicorns.

KOOZ Espejito Espejito is housed within the context of Madrid’s Museum of America, which itself is the site of investigation for three new commissions. How is the space of the institution called into question? Do these narratives address the institution as an archival reservoir of Eurocentric autofiction?

GS The Museum of America in Madrid was created by decree on 19 April 1941 (during the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco), to celebrate and praise the ‘epic’ and ‘heroic’ narrative of Spain as an empire, thereby framing the alleged ‘discovery and conquest’ of America as one of its most significant feats. After its opening, the Museum’s first discursive revision coincided with the celebration of the fifth centenary of Columbus’s arrival to the Abya Yala coasts; that is in 1992. This transformation started then and finished in 1994. Although Spain’s right-wing political actors found its reconfiguration treacherous to the institution’s original patriotic aspirations, in fact it did not change much.

However, with the arrival of the new director — Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos — in 2023, the Museum seems to have entered a new phase of reflection that aims at allowing the Museum to establish productive dialogues with contemporary shifting discourses around coloniality and decoloniality. The new works commissioned for Espejito Espejito have been filmed and produced in the Museum, exploring the normally invisible spaces for the audiences (such as the archives, the restoration workshops, and maintenance rooms, amongst others). The filmic/scenographic interventions in these spaces explore the Museum as an artefact that has actively participated in constructing the Eurocentric fiction that the exhibition puts in crisis.

To develop these works, the curatorial team of Grandeza Studio conducted a preliminary investigation to identify and categorise the spaces, infrastructures, artefacts, desiccated animals, replicas and testimonies accumulated over decades in the basement of the Museum. Understood as archaeological pieces of evidence, these spaces and artefacts became the raw material for the audiovisual pieces that transformed the above-mentioned spaces into three inhabited scenographies. These three works (autonomous but interdependent) were filmed during the ten days before the exhibition’s opening, in the form of an intensive art-production residency, thus allowing the collectives to resituate their ongoing investigations in the context of the Museum.

The result was a three-channel audiovisual triptych (over a pre-existing three-dimensional map of America) composed of the works Los escombros, America Megabyte, and Sabe Dios. The audiovisual pieces of this triptych were created by three collectives of practitioners (La Escuela Nunca y Los Otros Futuros, Nmenos1, and Jorge Nieto & Julia Irango with Ana Moure & César Fuertes) with the support of the curatorial team, the Museum of America team, and the audiovisual production agency CAP.

KOOZ Addressing the collective La Escuela Nunca y Los Otros Futuros now, your group spans the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, spread as you are between Santiago de Chile, Berlin and Barcelona. You have addressed a number of artefacts within the collection. What drew you to these objects and how do they relate to your ongoing investigations?

LA ESCUELA NUNCA Y LOS OTROS FUTUROS The video we produced in response to the museum is Los escombros (The rubble, or how to stay afloat with the remains of colonialism).

In our particular case, perhaps it would be good to clarify that we worked with two different kinds of materials found in the museum. On one hand, in the basement corridors and cellars, we found foam blocks, iron profiles, PVC pipes, wooden boxes and other materials related to maintenance tasks. On the other hand — also in the basement, but in a storage room — we found plaster replicas of sculptures and parts of pre-Columbian buildings. These pieces were abandoned, many of them broken, piled up in a mound along with other “colonial-looking pieces” like carriage wheels or wooden furniture.

Concerning your question about “artefacts within the collection”, we were interested in working with what was left outside the collection, because it was part of maintenance (secondary) tasks, or because they were replicas whose value was no longer sufficient to be exhibited or preserved (or catalogued), although not invaluable enough to be thrown away.

The question of value was precisely what we were interested in developing. The museum, whether ethnological, ethnographic, natural, archaeological, or anthropological, is an architectural-cultural artefact through which otherness (human, social and political) is determined. Within them, values ​​are assigned through the logic of selection and discard. In that sense, we ask ourselves if it is possible that what is discarded demonstrates the value, not only of what is selected, but mainly, of the mechanism by which these values are defined. When discussing the value of this mechanism, we were interested in examining which subjects and which cultures claim the right to that distribution of value.

The name of the project, Los escombros (The Rubble) comes from the Argentine anthropologist Gastón Gordillo who questions the idea of ​​ruin, through the concept of “escombro” (debris or rubble). If ruin is what a culture selects – and fetishises – from another, in order to shape a narrative that as much as it selects, it also silences; hence the rubble would be what is left out of that fetishistic selection and could allow this narrative construction to be read in another way.

Among the many remains of replicas abandoned in that museum warehouse, we were interested in a sculpture of a body with a broken head. There was something striking in the contrast between the tranquillity of its expression and the violence of the hole. From an investigation in which different specialists in pre-Columbian art and cultures collaborated, we found out that this piece was a replica of a monolithic sculpture made by the Recuay culture, which inhabited the central Andes of what we know today as Peru, between the 1st and 7th century. The sculpture would be the representation of an ancestor and would be linked to the fertility of the land and the care of the waters of rivers. The original sculpture is kept in the archives of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (today part of the Humboldt Forum) and was donated to that institution in 1886 – the year it opened its doors to the public. Everything would indicate that the movement of the piece from Peru to Germany would be related to two different events, both connected to the consolidation of national borders and its colonial and neocolonial definition in the late 19th century.

On one hand, multiple collections and pieces were moved from Peru to Europe, as a result of the violent looting and destruction of collections of pieces during Chile’s invasion of Peru during the Pacific War (or Nitrate War). On the other hand, in 1884 the Berlin Conference (or Congo Conference) was held in Germany, where the European powers carried out the “Division of Africa”. It was at that moment that Germany entered the colonial business (Berlin Ethnological Museum, founded in 1873, had before the Congo Conference in 1884/85 about 3,000 African artefacts, but by the end of the colonial period, in 1919, there were already more than 50,000). The replica would have been made in Berlin to be sent to Madrid for the great exhibitions for the celebration of the fourth centenary of the “discovery of America”, in 1892. This replica, exhibited on that occasion, could not be exhibited again, having been left relegated to abandonment in the basements of the museum. In the 1992 Museum of America curatorship, celebrating the quincentennial of Columbus’ “discovery”, it appears to have been ignored.

There is another replica of the same piece, exhibited in the Natural Museum of La Plata, in Argentina (founded in 1884). That one is on display and in good condition. It is worth remembering that, among many other things, the Buenos Aires Museum exhibited between 12 and 20 human beings at that time as artefacts (the Tehuelche chief Modesto Incayal and chief Foyel stand out).

Our project proposes the production of an absurd action: the construction of a raft and its navigation. Beyond the references to the maritime traffic of humans and materials across the Atlantic Ocean and the contemporary Western shipwreck, the raft is presented as a minor, precarious and unstable land without any plan or direction. Like a land without land (a land made of rubble, colonial rubble).

This project is part of a series of projects in which we have been working on the production of what we call Political-Territorial Fictions (Ficciones Politico-Terrenales). In Spanish, “terrenal” has several meanings: it refers to something that belongs to the land or soil, but at the same time to something that belongs to the planet Earth. It also brings the idea of something that is not divine, just material, made of soil; we like to challenge the word “territorio” which translates as “territory”. Maybe “terrestrial” could be more accurate: works of fiction organised through the tension between the political and the territorial/terrestrial. We are interested in investigating the relationships between the political formation of territories (on the forms of power that constitute them and the effects of power that they produce) and the territoriality of politics (how politics operates today, in the 21st century, on the land and with the land; how territory is, at least in Latin America, a space configured by the “coloniality of power”).

Given the discussions about the restitution of pieces by European museums to their places of origin, for us it seemed interesting and provocative to propose the construction of a raft as land to make room for anthropomorphic material debris from cultures that were left without a place on our continent.

A foreigner on the raft, a foreigner wherever she/it is placed, (like the people inhabiting the lands that since 1492 would be called America, who, from one day to the next, became foreigners in their own land), the replica of the Recuay sculpture allows us to deploy a series of questions about the relationship between originality and origin, ruin and debris, value and authority, coloniality of power and the power of coloniality, Europe and America. This is not only related to the huge diversity of aboriginal people but also the vast diversity of people that today inhabit this land. The tension between belonging and not belonging, between having the right to be here or not, between being complicit in the sustained and continuing colonial and neocolonial violence and, at the same time, resisting it.

KOOZ To ask the same question to the Colombian duo Nmenos1, based between Medellin and Bogota: which parts of the Museum of America collections called to you, and how does your project — the video America Megabyte — respond to them?

NMENOS1 America Megabyte is a video meditation designed to decolonize the unconscious. This project took place in the museum's conservation rooms. We replaced the period paintings undergoing restoration with a greenscreen and transformed the space by incorporating digital pieces created with artificial intelligence. This approach facilitated a dialogue between the museum's traditional pieces and new digital creations.

As a collective, we have always been intrigued by the concept of the digital real. Naturally, our first instinct was to work with the museum’s digital archive. We were particularly curious about how the museum was archiving and digitising its collection. We requested images from the museum catalogued as Pre-Columbian, including specific items like archaeological pottery, ceremonial outfits, masks, and urns. Using this material, we trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to generate speculative images based on the originals.

The video features an ironic, fictional meditation narrated through an AI voiceover where two objects from the museum engage in a conversation. One is an old replica of a monolithic sculpture from Colombia, and the other is a disorganised server located in one of the museum's offices. We also utilised various objects from the museum’s collection, such as silver lingots from Potosí in Bolivia, weapons and machetes from Africa, replicas of the Quimbaya Treasure, and amulets from Morocco. These items were animated by the museum's conservation technician, who intervened with the pieces to craft a fictional narrative. The goal was to draw a parallel between the colonial era and what we call digital colonialism.

This work aligns with our interest in creating a space for media archaeology from the so-called Global South. Our platform explores, promotes, and presents artistic practices based on digital and post-digital media. Through curation, media archaeology, and critical texts, Nmenos1 seeks to generate a space for reflection on digital culture and its influence on contemporary art. Additionally, we aim to recover the ways in which we have thought about the web in the region from the 1990s to the present.

The work of the artists in our collective is deeply connected to this new piece. Tatyana Zambrano is interested in creating political fiction through the use of metaverses using humour, absurdity and irony, while Juan Covelli has extensively worked with museum collections worldwide. In recent years, Covelli has focused on the idea of speculative repatriation, using AI as a radical tool for creation.

KOOZ Finally to the Spanish collaborators Jorge Nieto & Julia Irango, participating together with Ana Moure and César Fuertes. Can you tell us about the museum materials that informed your video Sabe Dios (God Knows)?

JORGE NIETO, JULIA IRANGO, ANA MOURE, CÉSAR FUERTES We usually work with objects that are manipulated to generate a symbolic landscape. This manipulation is primarily physical. In this exhibition, we worked with a several-metre-long fabric with a digital print of a virgin in pain, typical of the Catholic tradition, which we found useful to make an aesthetic reflection on the solemn and its fragility. It is an object manufactured by us, free of any patrimonial burden that could make it incompatible with bodily manipulation.

On the other hand, being Spaniards (and therefore on a specific side of history), and assuming that the destination of the video was the Museum of America itself, we considered interesting to take a position aesthetically disconnected from the enormous historical burden of the institution, both from the collection that it houses as well as from the building itself.

The scene is filmed in the maintenance rooms of the museum, in the basement. The instability of the situations that we present in the video made even more sense in a space like the basement, symbolically segregated from the institution but also essential for its functioning.

Bios

GRANDEZA STUDIO (Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, Jorge Valiente Oriol and Gonzalo Valiente Oriol) is a collective of architects and artists founded in Madrid in 2011 and currently based between Madrid and Sydney. Their work studies late-capitalist spaces and narratives to identify –through critical analysis– and challenge –through political imagination– the mechanisms that veil and normalize structural forms of violence against bodies and territories. GRANDEZA STUDIO’s work hybridizes methodologies that entangle with research, critical spatial practice, writing, performance, design, filmmaking and pedagogy

Nmenos1 is a Colombian digital platform formed by Tatyana Zambrano and Juan Covelli, which arises from the need to create spaces for media archaeology from the Global South. The platform explores, promotes and presents artistic practices based on digital and post-digital media. Through curatorship, media archeology and critical text, Nmenos1 seeks to generate a space for reflection on digital culture and its interference in contemporary art, in addition to recovering how the web has been framed in Latin America since the 90s.

La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros is an experimental community for the self-management of collective learning through speculation about the future from the present, and from Latin America to the world. La Escuela creates (from architecture and art) political-territorial fictions and projects with which to discuss and resist, discursively, aesthetically and materially, the hegemonic structures that organise our planet. La Escuela Nunca arises in Chile in the context of the social revolt at the end of 2019, and it works through apparitions; temporary arrangements in which a group of people convene themselves to carry out a common project.

The collaboration between Julia Irango and Jorge Nieto began in Valencia in 2020 with the scenic creation of the piece No one will die after me, which was also presented as a performative conference at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art. Their collective work has been shown and supported by institutions such as the Párraga Center (Murcia, Spain) or La Caldera (Barcelona, Spain). Their collaboration focuses on investigating the interstitial spaces understood as places that are “almost something but do not end up being it”, as places that are familiar but strange and vice versa. To do this, they turn the interdisciplinary encounter between choreography and architecture into an inhabitable experiment in which elements of pop culture become a shared substrate from which to experiment with forms of estrangement.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.