THE DREAM OF REASON
Whether they use pornographic images downloaded from the Internet to represent the political corruption of Argentina and its consumerist obsessions, or to show the feline and vicious sexuality that displays its merchandise in one of the city’s parks, Mondongo's ironic gaze remains. They are not political artists, but it would be a mistake to overlook their ideological and ethical concerns, as well as their commitment to forming a more collective aesthetic code through a marriage of contemporary vernacular culture in terms of images and materials.

How else can we read The Dream of Reason (2008), for example, if not with an ideological and allegorical lens? This immense work, which has a double version—one in wool and plasticine and another in wax—is not simply the image of a scene of violation, but also the image of the violation of a country; a painful symbol, brutally mistreated. There is a black-and-white version, and another, slightly softer, in color, where the background contextualizes the meanings within the work and makes them more complex. The image was drawn from sensationalist press and deals with a well-known but so far unresolved case of a rape in December 2003. The event took place in the gardens of a strange estate that Perón had built in the 1950s, La República de los Niños: a miniature republic with its own senators, deputies, ministers, Church, railway tracks, etc. Mondongo does not simply focus on a horrific crime but also observes a period of immense upheaval, in which dictatorship and even democracy appear as fantasies whose crimes remain unresolved. Manuel—one of the three members of Mondongo—extends the range of meanings in his particular reading of the work: “There is a myth that says that Walt Disney, when he visited Argentina in the 1950s, was inspired by the Republic of Children to create Disneyland. If that were true, it would be an echo of the past that resonates in recent history, with foreigners from the 'civilized world' continuing to buy and exploit everything we have—from public services, now in the hands of international companies as a result of illegal and spurious privatizations in which our politicians filled their pockets, to natural resources like vineyards, wool and soybean production, and even the emblematic meat industry, culminating in the ultimate absurdity where we cannot enter eighty percent of the Southern Lakes region (one of the largest natural water reserves on the planet) because it belongs to foreign landowners, mainly from the United States and Europe.” Perón conceived his Republic for didactic purposes, aiming to instill in children his particular demagogic reading of democracy. At the time of its construction, the Republic was a marvelous attraction where children could enjoy the meaning of life in an ideal city. It was specifically built for orphaned and marginalized children. Today it is a ghost town, sad and filled with shadows of the past, like frozen history; an eloquent but silent reminder, full of mystery, dark as the historical period it evokes, a possible stage for criminal acts.

The first of the images in this series presents desolation. Being made of wax enhances the sense of opacity and gives it a cadaverous texture. The materials exacerbate the abandoned and grotesque form of the victim, their state of abused nakedness. It represents a time when violent death and abuses of power were common. While it is true that La República de los Niños, as a dark and threatening location, can serve as a metaphor for all the other banana republics around the world, within the Argentine context, the image acquires multiple connotations that broaden its field of reference beyond the abandoned body and the accumulation of shadows that give the work the horrific density of the particular. The accompanying image is softer, crafted in wool and plasticine, and here the victim is more situated in the twists of memory and imagination; they are more a part of the landscape than a disembodied symbol.
—Kevin Power, 2010