laberintos

[Brochure that accompanies William Cordova's exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins

& Co. gallery Chelsea, Manhattan, October 24 – December 5, 2009]

In our first imagination the labyrinth is always a place of conflict. A place

where two moral forces that write the story of a victory and a defeat confront
each other. They do so simultaneously, with a teleology reduced to survival.
Neither is subject to time, since here progression is a chimera. In its interior
there exists only one formula to read movement. Both forces may search,
both may flee, both may have signs or even mental maps at their disposal, but
both are subject to reflexivity. The other's movement will always be the key to
devise one's own and on that wager, repeated at each crossroads, hinges the
success or failure of the past. But the labyrinth's wealth is not limited to its
function as a stage for agon. I doubt that there exists an idea or mental space
that can chart with the same reliability the heartrending tension that shapes the
dualist cults, given to represent their original dialectics by opposing flesh and
spirit. The translation of the image seems logical: if the body is the fixed force,
then the labyrinth is one of the forces. In its certain materiality, in its
confusing structure, the labyrinth would be the space of containment. The
other force will remain confined in that environment, with no threat but its
own disorientation. In this second imagination the labyrinth is always a place
of misplacement. The misplacement is the conflict.
The Latin American literary tradition has appropriated this idea
repeatedly and from different political camps. There we find Carlos Fuentes,
Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Jorge
Luis Borges and Denzil Romero, among others. The Venezuelan intellectual
Mariano Picón Salas also used this image to portray a continent–his own–,
which in spite of two centuries of modern criticism and enlightened thought
was still incapable of freeing itself from its “Baroque labyrinth”. Then came
Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, who explored the farthest reaches of this
metaphor to explain the permanent dialectic between the decipherable city, his
lettered city, and the real, unruly, convoluted city. It is in this extensive and
complex tradition that William Córdova seeks to inscribe his work. Though he
recognizes his direct debt to Paz and Borges, the political languages with
which he constructs his laberintos tend to distance him from both referents.
The operation is timely and, we would say, necessary. Beyond the cultural
weight that both names might carry in extra-Latin American spheres, the
shadows of officialism and authoritarianism still cloud their literary legacies.
Córdova distances himself from these shadows by establishing the labyrinth as
the starting point of an intervention that seeks to destabilize the comfortable
resignation that sustains the present perplexity. Overcoming the deficiencies
of the standardized and a-historical criticism, his work delves into the cities of
amnesia to recover objects, images, names and political languages in disuse.

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He moves forward and backward renewing unsuspected circuits, crossing
forgotten spaces that preserve the remains of previous crossroads. There
precisely is where the alchemy begins. laberintos is not a product of nostalgia or
antiquarianism. It is an overdue reflection with regard to the potential of this
space as a source of new political conditions.
Córdova explores the possibilities of such a condition through a
critique that places our habits under siege. Dissecting the nature of processed
and unprocessed materials, altering the meanings attributed to discarded
objects and, above all, exploiting the political strengths of the neglected ties
between people and practices, his proposal aims at the construction of a visual
economy that questions our capacity–even our interest–to perceive and act
historically. The question that prowls through his work is ancient and crucial:
how can we understand and redefine–from our material conditions–the
dangerous distinction between those who take part in history and those who
manufacture it? It is on this point that Córdova approaches the Borgesian
labyrinth, offering preliminary answers to one of the questions that,
sometimes evidently, sometimes not, appears in his stories: is the labyrinth a
chaotic construction in which one becomes lost or an extremely ordered space
from which one never escapes?
I propose that part of Córdova's answers operate on the level of
boundaries, in this case shattering that curious border that insists on
distinguishing the private from the public domain (and that in short aims to
isolate the individual from the community). In more than one occasion the
artist has charted those intimate territories, which he understands as “sacred
spaces” and which I define as “miniature agoras”, where parallel knowledge,
geographically marginalized, set against the grain, is transmitted. Knowledge
that because of its very nature slows down the petrification of the official
narratives. Clinging to the strength of that resistance, Córdova stops to
analyze a key mutation: the fabrication of collective experiences from
individual experiences. It is in that transfer of languages, practices, in a word,
philosophies, where the profile and corrosive function of those counter-
structural spaces is recognized. Any individualistic obsession therefore ends up
being deactivated before the representation of the private as an instance
contrived by its gregarious vocation. By eliminating the boundary, Córdova
opens the door so that it is the individual who finally shatters and makes
possible the densification of our shared memories. The process, nevertheless,
appears to be traumatic. Heaping defeat upon defeat, Córdova constructs a
gallery of unhappy heroes with those that were left out of social immortality.
The cadavers accumulate by the dozens, hundreds, and thousands. Thus the
urgency to recreate the conditions for their names to be voiced again. Thus
the need to unblock memory, dismantle the official pantheons and see if we
can construct other orders without tutelary divinities.
The elusive nature of laberintos is not an autonomous virtue, but a
reflective one. In other words, it is a strategy. The structure has proven to be
immune to doubt, suspicion, insolence, and what is worse, to the traditional
forms of violence. The fate of those that attack from the margins is no longer

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sealed by neutralization. The failure of the fallen is not even limited to what
we knew historically as defeat. Defeat no longer belongs to the defeated,
because even that memory, that of defeat, has been expropriated. There I see
one of the reasons that get in the way of the accumulation of knowledge for a
generative resistance. When Marx insisted on the centrality of the inherited
conditions for a correct political reading, he was not saying it with the
reductionism of academic causality. His point was to make clear that only by
understanding the logic of constant reproduction one can begin to dismantle
what has been constructed. Thus the labyrinth operates as a spatial version of
this strategy. We elude as we transform the space, as we turn the place of
misplacement into a fertile arena of conflict; we elude as we renounce the
second imagination to recover the first. This is where the association with the
urban guerrilla manuals makes sense, where the idea of the labyrinth is radical.
And also with those who are now rewriting themselves in the rural, open–and
labyrinthine–fronts of the other worlds. The labyrinth is then presented as a
place pregnant with power, where there is room for deceit, concealment and
assault. It is neither chaos nor order, but trench.
The strategy, nevertheless, can exhaust itself, and it is on that tightrope
where the limits of laberintos are tested as a political reflection. If the object is
to indicate the absence of presences, the negation of preferences, and the
imposition of narratives that exclude, Córdova's wager seems to be effective.
By skillfully handling the ties within his work, the artist manages to set up
relationships that cancel the risk of homogenizing the discourses he cites.
Perhaps that is why the synchronic and the diachronic meet here with unusual
gracefulness. Nevertheless, the effectiveness remains in suspense when this
same relational system is projected onto the political plane. By challenging the
narratives in circulation, Córdova is not only updating the possibility (always
open) of clinging to alternative storylines, but also the (forgotten) right to
create them. We return, then, to the problem of practices, the problem of
making sure that our presence, our place in the labyrinth, stops being a
question of mere existence and turns into a possible story, into a narrative that
overcomes the state of emergency. If estaremos aquí para siempre, the question is
how to transform that certainty into the source of real subversion. The
question, in short, is how do we abandon the language of resistance.

Andrés Estefane
Queens, October 2009
(Translated by Alex Branger)