NOTES FOR MANIFESTACIÓN
Something I have noticed at Juliana Lafitte and Manuel Mendanha’s shows is that their works make people want to talk. Exclamations, interpretations, discoveries. After a dazzled and speechless moment, we all seem suddenly to have something to say.
I went to their studio to see Manifestación, and the word I used was “recreation.” “It is not a recreation,” Juliana told me. “It’s a cover,” Manuel added.
In short order, they put an enlarged photo of their work next to a photo of the same size of Berni’s Manifestación. The effect took me aback: The inverted vanishing line in Juliana and Manuel’s Manifestación made their protesters and Berni’s converge at a single point, like columns of political organizations converging to protest at a public square.
Juliana and Manuel’s square is Plaza de Mayo. Berni’s is in Rosario.
It is a mirrored cover. Put Juliana and Manuel’s Manifestación next to Berni’s and follow the perspective lines—in the first, from the lower–right corner to the upper–left corner, and in the second from the lower–left corner to the upper–right corner: The columns draw the V for Victory.
The taxing, relentless work, the care in the building, the additions, the fine–tuning, the precision with which this work manifests its camaraderie with that other work is grounded in a set of shared procedures whose names seem like titles of essays: “photography as note,” “the iconographic tradition,” “technical choices,” “the exploration of meanings,” “the construction of genealogies,” “formal experimentation.”
And if the works are friends, naturally the artists are as well! Berni painted Manifestación ninety years ago. Ninety is the combined age of Juliana and Manuel. They could almost go on an outing together! Juli Lafitte, Manu Mendanha, and Toni Berni. In any case, Juliana and Manuel give Berni’s Manifestación another life. They inject it with new energy: the shadow of the imminent.
Pan y Trabajo (bread and work) is the slogan on the only poster in sight. To hold up a poster like that one takes a crowd.
The despair in the eyes of Berni’s protesters is striking. It is the despair of exclusion, the pain of hunger, the wrinkles of rage. Only one protester has his hand in a fist. “A community’s real burden is not us, but the rich. All we ask for is bread and work. The rich do not work. They consume a lot and do not produce anything.”
A single fist is more than enough to say that.
In Juliana and Manuel’s Manifestación, the fist does not seem to emerge from amidst the bodies as it does in Berni’s. It is clearly held up by someone who is looking straight ahead severely. Juliana and Manuel displace the meaning (and the weight) of the fist onto a group of people looking at something off to the side, outside the painting, and onto others looking up at the sky. What is it the people looking off to the side see? What is it the people looking up at the sky see?
I read somewhere that Berni used “anonymous models” for his work. Juliana and Manuel used friends. Except for their social background and maybe their place of origin, I do not know anything about Berni’s protesters. I know that one of the men in the front was in another one of his paintings, but that’s it. But I know personally all of Juliana and Manuel’s protesters.
I even think I recognize a pompous art critic in the final stretch of the work, where the details of the faces get blurry.
Are Juliana and Manuel aware of the measure of restlessness they have injected in Manifestación? Or did they let the skill at play in each dot in the fabric of the work “naturally” augment the skill in what is fabricated on its own, beyond the work’s field?
The girl holding a loaf of bread in Berni’s work gives off a sense of disconcertion in Juliana and Manuel’s. She seems to understand what it is that unsettles the ones looking up at the sky and to the sides.
There is a threat. That is what the girl understands or senses, and she holds her finger to her lips. Now she looks out ahead. There is a threat and they are not safe from harm.
To the sides, outside the field, are the
police.
In the sky there is an airplane. A number of them, actually, since not all of the people are looking in the same direction. And this is not exactly an unlikely coincidence of commercial planes. “A community’s true burden is not those who march. The true burden are the powerful.”
In effect: What inhabits the work, even if it is not seen, is part of those things that are fabricated on their own, as a reflection or consequence of the artists’ mastery of every single point visible in the work. In other words, they create the work, and the work, on its own, sees to the rest.
And therein lies the most dreadful thing about Manifestación: What the work insinuates. Because what do “airplanes” in Plaza de Mayo, whether in 1955 or in 2024, mean but massacre?
—Sergio Bizzio, 2024