Madragoa gallery, Lisbon, may, 2022, available [here]
PLANTASIA OIL COMPANY installation view, Casa do Sertanista, São Paulo, 2021Adrián Balseca: a museum of commodities
There’s no place on the planet that isn’t linked in a more or less direct way to the world-system that was constituted after 1492. […] Since then, the overexploitation of nature and labor has come to constitute the place of Deep America/Abya Yala in the center-periphery system that was installed. — Walter Porto-Gonçalves[1]
After being postponed for a year, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the 34th São Paulo Biennial: Though it’s dark, still I sing, opened to the public between September and December 2021, an exhibition that was marked by the ecological issue and the presence of native peoples.[2] The Covid health crisis not only made evident, but seems to have deepened the inequality established on a global scale from the colonial-modern-extractivist model.
In the Biennial pavilion, Adrián Balseca presented two works that, in different ways, dealt with the failure of the projects imagined for Latin America, despite all the wealth —vegetable, mineral, cultural and human— on which the territory is based. In other words: projects designed in the contrary direction of all this wealth, to the extent that, executed in the name of a questionable “progress”, they were (and are) decisive in destroying or plundering the resources in a predatory manner, creating a desolate landscape of misery and monoculture.
The current territories of Brazil and Ecuador (where the artist was born) do not border each other, but it can be said that the two countries maintain a deep connection, both for being crossed by the Amazon Rainforest,[3] and for the “tradition” of Eeuuropean[4] colonization. Balseca also mobilizes, albeit in a subtle way, another eminently colonial institution: the museum (and art itself). In Abya Yala, monoculture refers not only to a monotonous landscape, such as soy or wheat plantations, but also to the systematic destruction of non-white cultures.
One of the works, BadYear (2020-2021), parodies the name of the American company GoodYear, founded in 1898 and specialized in the extraction and processing of rubber for tires and other similar products.[5] But this is not a simple criticism of that company: like archeological fragments, the forty objects made of natural rubber bring to mind both nostalgic and bitter memories of the latex extraction boom in the Amazon region. Nostalgic because there was a promise of enrichment, “modernization” of a place considered backward; bitter because the natural and human depredation was enormous. “Progress” turned to a mirage, once again. And so, Balseca’s “bad year” seems to synthesize the formula of Latin American “dialectics of dependency”, characterized by “passing periods of apparent growth [that] cover up a process of continuous impoverishment”, to quote the words of Argentine researcher Horacio Machado Aráoz.[6]
BadYear installation view at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021
Stamped with graphics that create an ambiguity between the grooves of the tires and the indigenous drawings, the fragments in shades of ocher on the white wall form an arrangement that recalls the installation in an ethnological museum, a prestigious institution whose mission is to collect, preserve and display objects from various cultures (non-Western), usually taken out of context, almost as if they were war trophies.
The association between museums, wars, and the rubber economic cycle may seem exaggerated, but Balseca accurately interweaves all these aspects into the same work. Museum institutions that collect artifacts —whose installation the artist mimics— usually silence the profound violence that constitutes the history of colonized populations; rubber extraction in the Peruvian Amazon in 1910 resulted in one of the first uses of the legal figure of “crime against humanity” in the context of a report on local labor conditions.[7] Thus, in BadYear, testimonies of a real holocaust are displayed as “beautiful objects” on the aseptic wall — the title of the work, however, does not silence the contradictions of this “past”.
In 1972, like other countries on the continent, Ecuador suffered a military coup that overthrew the country’s constitution and brought a general, Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, to power. The dictator launched the Andino, the first car produced in Ecuador, a partnership between local company Aymesa and US-based General Motors. The following year, according to Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles,
On October 6, 1973, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a military campaign against Israel. Six days later, US President Richard Nixon arranged for the supply of arms to the battered ally. In response, the Arab countries announced an oil embargo against the United States, Japan, and some Western European countries. In a few months the price of a barrel of oil went from $3 to $12, a 400% jump. The world went into recession.[8]
Adrián Balseca’s second work presented in the Biennial pavilion was Medio Camino (2014), a 16-minute video that begins with the image of a precarious parking lot, on a cloudy, gray day — nothing that resembles the stereotype of the tropics, warm, colorful, festive. A sturdy-looking white car rises from the ground: it is precisely the Andino, whose project sought to develop low-cost cars in “developing” countries in the early 1970s. It turns out that the euphemism used in place of “underdeveloped”, or the more rigorous “spoliated” is a promise impossible to fulfill, after all, in the words of the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, “The international division of labor means that some countries specialize in winning and others in losing”. The project has failed.
In the video, a man removes the Andino’s fuel tank and then welds a metal rod to the bumper. With the tank strapped to the hood, the Medio Camino saga begins: Balseca will make the long journey between Quito and Cuenca relying only on the generosity of those he meets on the road. Printed on a plaque, the name of the tire repair shop from which a pickup truck towing the Andino leaves, is December 6, the date of the foundation of the current capital of Ecuador by the Spanish in 1534.
Less than 450 km separate the cities of Quito and Cuenca, but the journey by car that no longer worked, took six days — by the way, one cannot help but think of the difficulty that the Ecuadorian Andes mountain range imposes on the vehicle itself, even if it worked. The geography of the place establishes a fundamental contradiction, being naturally inhospitable to oil-based road transport, the most important commodity produced by Ecuador.
Faced with the Andino’s inability to move through the Andes, several people tow the car, in documentary images that show both the dismay of the region, for centuries exploited, and also its resilience. There was no established route, and it was truck drivers, tractor drivers, families of travelers, and even a man with his horse who helped on the journey. In the words of the artist, “seeing this stranded, rusty, and rather old 1970s car, people knew immediately that it was broken. It was amazing to see that, through an affectionate connection, people wove a network of solidarity on the road.”
Finally, the Andino is dropped off at the door of Cuenca’s Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno, in front of a square with maintained trees and palm trees. The museum’s facade establishes a strange dialog with the car: geometric shapes, right angles, the old white surface, the metal plate seem to suggest that modernity — or the desire for modernization — has grown old in Latin America; the Andino has become a museum piece. Just like the developmentalist promise for the oil-producing country, which sees its resources diverted to serve international interests. Together, the two works bring something melancholic and point to the ambivalence of Western institutions, such as the ethnographic museum (BadYear) and the modern art museum (Medio Camino), which are a constitutive part of the project of expansion and conquest.
In São Paulo, besides the modern and/or modernization projects, such as Oscar Niemeyer’s Biennial pavilion, there are other historical properties that are markedly colonial. Among them is the Casa do Sertanista, built in the middle of the 17th century, where Balseca presented the exhibition PLANTASIA OIL COMPANY (2021), which featured an oil change ramp, Amazonian plants grown in it and in rusty oil industry cans, and a series of documentary photographs about the destruction of the forest. According to the Rewilding Collective,
Stripped of a modernist aesthetic, moving between utopia and dystopia, Adrián Balseca’s gardens [...] present the possibility of an alternative place: a heterotopia to live in a world in crisis.[9]
By intertwining two highly symbolic spaces — the modernist Pavilion and the old colonial residence — the artist seems to stage a certain typically Latin American desolation, attesting that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin.[10] The rubber fragments of an “old civilization”, the museums, the towed vehicle, and the aged cans create an aura of abandonment and decay.
The plants, however, insist on growing in what once contained oil; the people generously carried the Andean, making their patent that no “progress” can come from outside. In other words, beyond the desolation, Adrián Balseca’s work suggests that Latin America's political, social, economic, and even epistemological problems must be faced from within, taking into account all the wealth of local knowledge and practices that resist and flourish. Even in a devastated land.
Notes
[1] “A desordem do progresso”, preface to the Brazilian edition of ARÁOZ, Horacio Machado. Mining, genealogy of disaster. Extractivism in America as the origin of modernity. São Paulo: Elefante, 2020.
[2] The exhibition was conceived by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, general curator, Paulo Miyada, assistant curator, Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocci and Ruth Estévez, guest curators, and Ana Roman, assistant curator. The 34th Biennial also established partnerships with local institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Afro-Brazil Museum (among others) and the Casa Sertanista/City Museum, which presented a solo exhibition by Balseca.
[3] The biome is more than six million km² in size and encompasses seven other countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, French Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
[4] The expression is from Walter Porto-Gonçalves, who explains in a note: “Allow me the reader the neologism eeuurocentrism, because it allows that, in a single word, to join EEUU, one of the possible acronyms for United States, to the other powers that, in some moment since the 16th century, hegemonized the world from the North Atlantic (first Portugal and Spain; afterwards England; then the USA)”. In ARÁOZ, Horacio Machado, op. cit., p. 11.
[5] The company is named after the “inventor” of the vulcanization technique, Charles N. Goodyear, which prevents the biological degradation of natural rubber and was granted a patent in 1844. Before him, indigenous peoples treated latex with smoke in order to transform it into highly durable rubber. These people, if not mistaken, have never been granted a patent attesting to the creation of new technologies.
[6] ARÁOZ, Horacio Machado, op. cit., p. 28.
[7] The report was written by Irish diplomat Roger Casement (1864-1916), sent specially to investigate reports of mistreatment. He found murders, rapes, mutilations, and systemic slave labor. In this regard, see BOLFARINE, Mariana; IZARRA, Laura; MITCHELL, Angus (eds.). Roger Casement’s Diary of the Amazon. São Paulo: Edusp, 2016 and GOODMAN, Jordan. The Devil and Mr Casement: A Crime Against Humanity. London: Verso, 2009.
[8] The description is in the fourth part of a series of articles entitled Arrabalde, which brings reflections on ecosystems, forestry, deforestation, the past and the future of the Amazon, published in Piauí magazine. Available at https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/arrabalde/.
[9] Sara Garzón, Ameli Klein, and Sabina Oroshi are part of the collective. Essay available at https://www.collectiverewilding.com/plantasio-oil-co.
[10] As demonstrated theoretically by the scholars of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality group and other indigenous and Afro-diasporic thinkers before and after them.