Body Snatchers by Benjamín Torres, curated by Janila Castañeda

Memory

Memory is an archive under construction. Corrupting the linearity of history, Body Snatchers presents itself as an untimely conversation with the past and the future, understanding art as a message that remains to be infinitely intervened.

Based on a series of explorations ranging from sculptural collage to new categories of monument, the objects in this space are articulated as an “anecdotal topography of chance,” in the sense proposed by Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou in 1966: a rigorous description of what occupies a place reveals the remnants of a life in motion. The act of making everyday encounters visible exposes a kind of autobiography through detritus, in a back-and-forth between memory, its destruction, and the constant emergence of something else. In the appearance of new sensations, Body Snatchers subverts the everyday as proof that the city is an organism built in the drift of bodies that embody culture and bring it to life through the fluidity of their nerves.

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Genealogy of residue

"[…]
against the tons of
earth & garbage
that fall on top of us
when what one wants
is to show oneself joyful & beautiful
as a palpable demonstration of
of a new ‘rebirth’” [1]

Just as art advances and mutates beyond the artist’s will, the city transforms beyond the will of power. Driven by a profound infrarrealist spirit, Body Snatchers drifts along the borders of high and low culture. From memory to action, the artist traverses the city again and again, appropriating the informality of the illegitimate to highlight the potential for reinterpretation and mutability that public space allows. In a kind of genealogy of residue, the works highlight beauty in chaos, in a constant exercise of rewriting by a permanent foreigner in the city that collapses and is reborn every day. Subverting the symbols of hierarchy and power that construct collective memory, Benjamín Torres’s work erases and rewrites the boundaries between the original and the replica, the official and the unofficial, the overflowing and the contained.

In this exercise, the sculptural allows for the hybridization of urban fragments that question what is real, assumed, adopted, imposed, and invented. Pleasure in waste makes renewal possible; in the fragments of disorder lies the construction of new stories. In the expansion, fragmentation, and reformulation of the surrounding reality, the possibility of a new rebirth emerges.

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A virus that speaks

"A poet is a microbe, a virus that speaks," wrote Papasquiaro in Endless Dream. That virus that speaks may also be the artist’s task: to question the city, displacing urban reality, perverting the logic of the pedestal and its images. A virus that alters presences so ubiquitous they become invisible—graffiti, stains, stickers, characters, advertisements—and moves with the fragility of a stranger in his own city. “The spectator does not feel at home anywhere,” wrote Guy Debord, “because the spectacle is everywhere.”

To make the monstrous or the forbidden into a spectacle is not a morbid act, but a strategy to highlight the symbols that unconsciously shape our urban identity.

To be foreigners to ourselves is a way of rediscovering ourselves within the maelstrom of the everyday. To wander without law, bringing out the poetry of the street—because in the street, the rules belong to those who walk it. In the spirit of drift and discovery: a strident adventure.

"Our ethics is the Revolution,
our aesthetics Life: one-and-the-same." [2]

[1] SI HE DE VIVIR QUE SEA SIN TIMÓN Y EN EL DELIRIO (Para Bolaño…), Mario Santiago Papasquiaro.
[2] Fragment from “Déjenlo todo, nuevamente.” First Infrarrealist Manifesto written by Roberto Bolaño in 1976.

Ph. Arturo Ochoa