‘Espejito Espejito’ (Mirror Mirror) is a curatorial project by Grandeza Studio at the Museum of America for the Mayrit Bienal 2024.
The arrival in 1492 of the “conquistadors” on the shores of Abya Yala (later also known as America) marked the starting point of a geopolitical fiction of planetary scale in which Europe would self-narrate as the epicentre of progress while drawing the rest of the world as an immense cartography of “virgin” peripheries waiting to be “civilised”, “modernised” and exploited.
America was not discovered but invented. And by way of reflection, the fiction of Europe crystallised.
According to Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, the invention of America was the result of another fiction –”race”– which would consolidate as the first social category of modernity.
Both “race” and other indexers previously implanted in European productive, reproductive and social fabrics (such as “gender,” “class,” “capacity,” etc.), contributed to consolidating a taxonomizing worldview of territories and bodies segregated between normative centralities –proprietary and sovereign– and peripheral othernesses –supposedly anomalous, inferior, savage and exploitable. The territorial, cultural and technological deployment of this binary, supremacist and patriarchal worldview –”Eurocentrism”– was instrumental, according to Quijano, for the expansion of incipient integrated world capitalism, today in the process of self-annihilation.
According to Quijano, the most powerful feature of this planetary fiction with the capacity to transform worlds was the imposition of a distorting mirror on the “dominated” that would lead them to see and imagine themselves through the lens of the “dominator”, thus naturalising the very regime of colonisation and neutralising the autonomy and legitimacy of their own historical and cultural perspectives.
On the other hand, for Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato, it is Europe today that is trapped in its own narcissistic mirror. Segato argues that Europe is the first victim of Eurocentrism, precisely because of its foundational refusal to recognize itself reflected in the “communal cosmos of non-Western and non-monotheistic civilizations,” which prevents “the old continent” from imagining itself beyond an exhausted self-fiction that cracks to the sound of war and climate disaster.
The curatorial project Espejito Espejito (Mirror Mirror) explores the metaphor of the mirror to transform it (once again) and redirect its distorting power towards the construction of dissident fictions of the patriarchal-colonial and Eurocentric legacy. Today, the distorting mirror, far from going unnoticed by the subjectivities it was once intended to “discipline,” has become the object of estrangement and vandalization by an array of artists, designers and architects who continue a legacy of dissident practices that reclaim autofiction as an instrument to generate new horizons for cognitive emancipation.
The exhibition brings together dissonant, syncretic and transversal display of existing works, new works, performances and spatial interventions that invite visitors to imagine decolonized and de-binarized “New Worlds” from Madrid’s Museum of America –historical guarantor and archival reservoir of the Eurocentric autofiction currently immersed in a process of reflection and revision of its own discursive frameworks.
In response to the theoretical framework of the Mayrit Biennial 2024, Wet Dreams by Marina Otero Verzier, the exhibition encourages participants and audiences to “disoñar” other political fictions from an erotic and collective desire to deform and shape “other ways of life, territories and economies”.
Supported by: AECID, CAP DEPT and Ministry of Culture of Spain.
Museum of America: Andrés Gutierrez Usillos, Beatriz Robledo, Javier Martín Denis, Eduardo Alonso.
