On the B-Side of Modernity: An Interview with Iosu Aramburu

In your work, there are fragments and ruins, but there are also new men, modular forms—glimmers of utopia in the vanished past. Besides these modern ideas, your installations sometimes incorporate other works of modern art. In your recontextualization, the ideas that these older works contain aren’t exactly revived, but rather animated in ways that perhaps weren’t possible in their particular moment.

It’s always been important for me to approach the idea of modernity with open questions, looking for a dialogue rather than imposing a critical agenda. In this regard, I’ve always been interested in seeking a utopian potential in the work of artists who came before me. In 2018, I presented an exhibition at the Art Museum of the National University of San Marcos. It consisted of a painting on panels that zigzagged across the middle of the room, thereby subdividing the gallery into a series of smaller spaces. In each of these new spaces I placed an artwork selected from the museum’s collection. There was a painting by Emilio Goyburu from the 1920s, a painting by Julia Codesido from the 1950s, and an engraving by the E.P.S. Huayco group from the 1980s. Circulating the installation produced a loop that connected the disparate moments during which these artists represented an avant-garde. My choice to paint panels was driven by convenience (I didn’t have the space to paint or the ability to transport a single painting that could subdivide the gallery), but also by my longstanding interest in fragments and modules. I’ve made several series of artworks with elements that don’t have a specific order, and therefore vary with each installation.

And how is it linked to these small portraits?

These other paintings are made from drawings and an engraving that several artist friends of Mariátegui made after his death, either in the hospital or in his house as funerary portraits. It’s unusual for a person to die and have seven artists doing his portrait. These quickly made works are by Carmen Saco, Camilo Blas, Julia Codesido, and others. I was interested in taking their sketches and finishing them. When I work from somebody else’s photograph, drawing, or painting, I think of myself as establishing a dialogue with the artist that came before me. Often, I approach their work like a musical score. Somebody has started something and I’m just making a variation on it. In the end, the artists who interest me most are often on the B-side of modernity, so to speak. They are artists who made work that has more to do with the time they lived in than with the construction of an individual career. In this respect, I’m interested in artists who aren’t at the center of global, or for that matter local, modernisms. I’m drawn to artworks that belong to moments in history that perhaps are less in the limelight. Artworks that pass us by in silence.

In addition to the connections through time that your work establishes with historical art and artists, how does collaboration in the present figure into your practice?

I’m part of Bisagra, a collective of artists and curators. We had a physical space for programs, meetings, and exhibitions between 2015 and 2018, and now we’re dedicated to sporadic projects. The project I’m most focused on now is the Colección Cooperativa. We’re a partnership of 16 artists and researchers—none with particularly high incomes. We’ve obtained many works by artists who were active from the beginning of the 20th century, and some contemporary artists. We collect, preserve, and digitize these works, and try to place them in exhibitions. It’s a collection that isn’t constructed with clear divisions between, for example, artwork and archival material, or categories like Indigenous or popular art, or between historical and contemporary artists. The collective makes decisions democratically and we’ve established that every year the number of members must increase. Our idea is that eventually the project won’t be a group of 16 friends buying artworks, but a project by a large and more diverse collective.