Grüner’s approach coincides with Principio Potosí­’s aim of stressing the relationship between modernity, colonialism, original capital formation, merchandise fetishism, slavery and genocide. This outlook deserves to be supplemented by or contrasted with another two exhibitions taking place at the same time as the MNCARS exhibition. The first, Desví­os de la deriva. Experiencias, travesí­as y morfologí­as, is also on display at the MNCARS. This research and curatorial project headed by Lisette Lagnados and Marí­a Berrios takes another look at the utopia of the 20th century as regards the experience of space and the city. Lagnado and Berrios focus on certain individual and collective contributions from Brazil and Chile. In their approach, the modern and the American are not taken to be mutually excluding concepts. Quite the opposite: as the Valparaí­so School summed it up, the idea was to ask “how to be American and modern”, on establishing an American modernity that, by promoting creative freedom, would reverse the field of architecture and corporal experience imposed by Eurocentric functional rationalism.(12) Much less pretentious in terms of layout than the apparatus designed by the curators of Principio Potosí­, Desví­os de la deriva manages to convey a solid image of that modernity as viewed from the South, despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent simplicity.

However, the discourse that we are primarily interested in focusing on here, in the measure that it dialogues with -disagrees with, even- the pedagogy of the images of history set forth in Principio Potosí­, is that put forward in the exhibition Fetiches crí­ticos. Residuos de la economí­a general, the intellectual authors of which are Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mariana Botey and Helena Chávez MacGregor, all members of the El Espectro Rojo project. In a text categorically titled “En defensa del Fetiche” (In Defense of the Fetish), Medina and Botey call for a positive reconsideration of that core concept of modern thought. Far from being presented as a merely mercantile administration of desire, Medina and Botey view the fetish as the object and interstice “that accompany the differing concepts of sexual, economic and esthetic value that led to the violent interaction of unequal economies and epistemologies that continues to be decisive in each and every stage of the economy-world of capitalism during the past five centuries”.(13) In the opinion of both authors, in Western epistemology the fetish reduces the heterogeneous and the immeasurable -whatever did not fit in with the cosmogony of Enlightenment thought- to the domain of myth and savagery. Conversely, its current vindication seeks to show, by pointing to its very opaqueness and the power denied by that imagining of otherness, the resistance contained in the elusiveness of the realm of the senses offered by the fetish.

Those and other initiatives have come together this year as part of the bicentennial milestone. Distancing themselves from the official tone of patriotism, the different approaches taken in the exhibition and bibliographical projects we have referred to make up a highly unstable territory. Although they do not share a common position that could serve to establish a bicentennial counter model, they all seek to destabilize, with varying degrees of success, the consensus-driven, biased and self-complacent ideology promoted by nation-states through their mass media, academic institutions and cultural policies. It remains to be seen whether they can go beyond the bicentennial museum and publishing agendas to spark a drawn-out public debate to socialize the issues we have touched upon. In the final analysis, that is what their political relevance rests upon.

Quotes:

1) Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Nuevo traje postcolonial”, cfr. http://salonkritik.net/09-10/2010/07/nuevo_traje_postcolonial_ cuauh.php
2) Harun Farocki, “Das Silber und das Kreuz”, Principio Potosí­. ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?, exhibition guide, page 9.
3) Marcelo Expósito, 143.353 (los ojos no quieren estar siempre cerrados), Ibid., page 8.
4) Marcelo Expósito, 143.353 (los ojos no quieren estar siempre cerrados). A video installation and single-channel video by Marcelo Expósito (2010). Those bicentennials often cover up the influence exerted by international and domestic colonialism in areas such as the land rearrangement born of the large-scale cultivation of privately-owned crops such as transgenic soy, which displaces and exploits the native population, as Eduardo Molinari’s adjacent installation shows.
5) Incidentally, some of the transnational corporations that hide their faces behind those guises finance the museum’s initiatives and projects.
6) The reference to the situation of workers in today’s China is perhaps the most evident proof of the discourse lameness to which we are referring.
7) http://www.museoreinasofia.es/programas-publicos/pensamiento-y-debate/principio-potosi-reverso.html
8) Cfr. AA.VV., Principio Potosí­ Reverso. Madrid, MNCARS, 2010.
9) Xavier Antich, “Modernidad invertida”, suplemento Cultura/s, La Vanguardia, 16/06/2010.
10) Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch´ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires, Retazos, 2010, page 5.
11) Cfr. Eduardo Grüner, La oscuridad y las luces. Capitalismo, cultura y revolución. Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2010.
12) Cfr. Desví­os de la deriva. Experiencias, travesí­as y morfologí­as. Madrid, MNCARS, 2010.
13) Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey, “En defensa del fetiche”, Fetiches crí­ticos. Residuos de la economí­a general. Madrid, CA2M/ El Espectro Rojo, 2010, page 8.