During the first weeks of research, we decide to trace a timeline by symbolically transforming the space and its architecture. We noticed that there were two large circular pieces of concrete in the room where the exhibition was held. Almost all the guest artists wanted to intervene on those gray cement slabs. They had a magnetic quality. No one at the cultural center knew the origin of those two "pieces", but we were told they formed part of the institutional heritage and therefore could not be modified. We had discovered something important in those two pieces: a ready-made element that was at the same time a subjective point of escape towards the objective, real, memory of the space.

We then began looking for more material on ESMA, in an attempt to find out the history and the memory of that exhibition room. One afternoon, while surfing on the web, we came across some video documentation of the opening of the space in 2004, where one can see the former use of the show room: a workshop for examining and repairing heavy artillery.

With that structural memory of ESMA, those gray bases that had served as supports for repairing and examining anti-air batteries became the most important installations in the exhibition for us. All we had to do was point them out to try to return some of this historical memory back the space. This find acted as a turning point in the project’s general hypothesis: drawing attention to these things. We were in the buildings where numerous institutions now occupy the space formerly held by other institutions, each diametrically opposed to the other. Thus, following the genealogy of the site, we adopted a critical approach to institutions from a constructive standpoint and created a specific "museography" with which to develop a narrative that would allow visitors to take their own tour, become lost and find their bearings again, and ask themselves anew: where exactly am I?

One record that was useful to our research was "Memoria en Construcción, el debate sobre la ESMA" (Memory under Construction, the debate on ESMA) a book (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 2005) in which intellectuals, artists and human-rights organizations were invited by the artist Marcelo Brodsky to discuss the use of the site. In addition to texts and artworks, photographs of a group of detainees who disappeared in ESMA were included for the first time, along with images of the clandestine center taken and rescued by Victor Basterra, who together with other prisoners, was forced to perform a document-falsifying service run by the army at ESMA from 1980 to 1983.

One of the materials that enriched the debate was a publication that discussed the creation of the Memorial Museum (Memorial Space as it came to be known) and the future use of the ESMA facilities. We included the book for consultation at the exhibition. The organization formed by the former disappeared detainees had suggested in the book that the site should be preserved as a testimonial, which it indeed became when it was taken over from the army.

SGN: Are the artists who took part in "Espejos" members of the network of spokespersons for the "errorismo" movement?

GE: Not necessarily. Our membership in the errorista movement is extraterritorial: it goes beyond the field of art and the frontiers of the local-global, and is also beyond categories such as "political art". Our approach is naturally influenced by our "erratic" stance. Nonetheless, several artists and projects who are not yet part of the "errorista" movement took part in "Espejos", as did others who are indeed active promoters of the "errorist" cause.

SGN: Is the decision to center the exhibition on political critique with a playful element a way of establishing a difference vis-à-vis conventional forms of political militancy as well towards art with political content?

GE: We view this playful side as an inherent part of the game of representation that exists in politics. Politics is basically a game of representations and is closely linked to life and art as two inseparable factors, while art influenced by life and politics can be nothing other than dynamic, fraught with dialectics and above all by risks. Political criticism combined with an element of playful narration was therefore a strategy that helped us to mold an exhibition that would be of interest to different kinds of viewers. We imagined the curatorial display as a game within a labyrinth-like space that is much like memory, and where a chorus of voices/works could help the public lose itself and find its way again along an uncertain path.

One of the purposes of this show was to encourage the public to participate and rethink history collectively, in order to encourage a break with the hierarchies imposed by the old cultural institutions: doing away with the stereotyped belief that content-based art must be boring, instructive, demagogic or didactical and escaping from the repeated and typical cynicism of the neoliberal sense of humor, which became the norm in many artistic productions of recent years that sought to come across as being "social".

We’re aware that a trend has taken shape in that regard: art foundations turning into NGOs, gallery artists engaged in social work, art biennials inviting the outraged to occupy their facilities, "genre" performances as a curricular status and many other approaches that until recently were frowned upon or even dangerous and now have a renown and a visibility that make it seem as if politicization has overflowed into the mainstream art world and its agents. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is being followed by two or more currents that are fighting over the resources that have become available as a result of this new, growing market segment in the field of the symbolic. Artists are not removed or independent from the state of the world. That’s why there’s such a need to act in unison against the increasingly difficult conditions facing the creative industry, which shows a tendency to keep its workers in a state of precarity while paying the wages of its bureaucrats.

One of the works on display at the exhibition, which for us exemplifies that change towards a type of art that transforms a community’s conditions and needs, is by Matthis de Bruijne, who currently works for Holland’s Union of Sanitation Workers and Affiliates (FVN) (Shoon Genoeg!). He addresses the demands of sanitation workers (government employees and mostly immigrant domestic workers) by helping the union shape its own aesthetic identity. In his artwork --slides in a video format-- he introduces us to the union’s activities and demands, but more importantly, he shows the tensions and parallelisms between workers and artists in the big business of contemporary art by clearly highlighting the issues of negotiation and the increasingly precarious nature of employment in the creative industry. He writes: Can we find situations that are worse than those of cleaners in Holland? Sure we can...For example: art institutions in Holland currently view cutbacks in the culture sector as an excuse for hiring "assistants" [...], persons who do the work of others who left their original position. The only difference is the new salary of assistants: non-payment."