THE REPUBLIC OF CHILDREN/PANOPTICON
Mondongo reads the world with irony, and sometimes through parody or postmodern pastiche. Whether they use pornographic images downloaded from the Internet to represent the bloated and insatiable political corruption of Argentina and its consumerist obsessions, or to show the viciously feline, modern, and gay sexuality that displays its merchandise in one of the city’s parks, the ironic gaze remains. Post-2001 Argentina has virtually disappeared from the world due to an nonexistent foreign policy and its entrenched internal corruption. Brazil gains hegemony, and few statesmen seem interested in making a trip to Buenos Aires. The Kirchners have failed to recognize that Argentina cannot survive on its own and needs to negotiate effectively with Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Mercosur. Out of necessity, everyone has had to learn to survive alone, or more precisely, those who have learned survive, and those who haven’t are left hanging by their fingertips. Mondongo's work is, therefore, naturally filled with ironic and even cynical signaling. Thus, they inevitably see what they see: either an artistic system or politics. Their relationship is parodic, using and abusing, and as such, it moves toward a public discourse that openly seeks to avoid the aestheticism and modernist hermeticism and its concomitant political self-marginalization.

They are certainly not political artists, but it would be a mistake to overlook their ideological and, more precisely, 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 (newspapers, the internet, reproductions, both original and borrowed photos) and materials (condoms, matches, plastic bags).

How else can we effectively read The Republic of Children, for example, if not with an ideological and allegorical gaze? This immense work has been approached in different ways: a double version—one in wool, thread, and plasticine (a combination they have used in several works), another in wax—and one from their panopticon series. It 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, like a postmodern princess who falls victim to the natural violence frequent in our mass social distress. There is a strong 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 extracted from sensationalist press and deals with a well-known but still unresolved case of a rape in December 2003. The incident occurred 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. However, Mondongo does not simply focus on a horrific crime but also looks back at a period of immense upheaval, in which dictatorship and even democracy often appear as fantasies whose crimes remain unresolved. This was a period that began with Perón, continued through the dictatorship, and passed through Alfonsín and Menem, like a repugnant roller coaster. Manuel 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 resonating 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. It serves as an eloquent but silent reminder, full of mystery, dark as the historical period it evokes, and vulnerable to criminal acts.

The first of the images in this series presents desolation, like a black-and-white horror film. Being made of wax enhances the sense of opacity and gives it a cadaverous texture. The materials heighten the violence and focus on the abandoned and grotesque form of the victim and 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 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, 2009