In the present we can see that a system of art, structured in accordance with the market demands of the globalized world, has been installed throughout Latin America, above all, in Brazil. Despite being on the periphery, this system maintains strong links with the dominant centers.

In the book Politics/Poetics, Documenta X, published to coincide with the Documenta X exhibition in Kassel, Germany, we can see a map, dating from 1992, which is entitled Centers and Peripheries in the World. A Hierarchical Network. The map, the purpose of which is to reflect a new world order, opens from the emptiness of the North Pole. The line marking the center (The global oligopoly) passes through New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo and Berlin. The remainder is peripheral: periphery integrated at the center, annexed periphery, semi-isolated periphery: periphery integrated into the center, annexed periphery, semi-isolated periphery. The map even records the links of the global network and the strategic territorial reserves or pioneer colonization spaces. In South America, the Amazon and a long, narrow belt of land that extends along the Argentine pre-cordillera to Tierra del Fuego are included in this classification.

It is obvious that this cartographic proposal places us in the worldí­s suburb. How do we reflect on this suburban placement through art — our pronounced position — and its relationship with the centers?

A work at the Fifty-Fourth Venetian Biennial, Cartografí­a del control, by the Argentine Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), also operates through a map. Over a section of Buenos Aires - an area along the length of Riachuelo, the mythical polluted stream that curves around part of the city — the centers of economic power, the actions of military repression, the places of bellicose conflict, the militarized zones and the U.S. military bases are all marked.(4)

This work was part of the exhibition La estructura de la sobrevivencia, curated by the Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo, the purpose of which was to bring together "Works exploring the effects of political, social and economic crises on developing countries".(5) The exhibition attempts to ask itself how artists and architects react when faced by these situations, and what aesthetic forms of survival and resistance are employed. The curator based himself on the premise that art, as a means of producing knowledge, contributes to an understanding of these circumstances and indicates how to react to them.

The notions of sustainability, self-organization, and the articulation of different forms of aesthetic agencies as strategies of resistance are the basic points of this curatorship, in which verification of the proliferation of favelas stands out as the most striking evidence of the state of contemporary cities.

Connected to the H.I.J.O.S. group,(6) the GAC created the project Carteles de la Memoria in 1998, consisting of fifty-nine traffic posters along the coastline spanning the length of the Parque de la Memoria, in Buenos Aires, showing the old secret detention centers. In December 2002, the GAC organized a procession following the locations where, one year prior, the five victims of the disturbances that took around the Plaza de Mayo were assassinated.

The rite included candles, flowers and paintings recreating memories. The most powerful moment was, without doubt, when the GAC members stopped at the cardboard that showed the bullet holes, reconstructing the path of shots fired from inside the HSCB Bank, killing one of the demonstrators.(7)