ALTARPIECES
Man today is an urban creature. Cities have been transformed into places that give rise to new forms of living as well
as new forms of social disorder. With increasing frequency the great urban centers resemble sick organisms in a constant state of metamorphosis. As a result, the fluid fragmentation of the metropolis is considered to be a key point in any social analysis, in the sense that the underlying beliefs supporting social order are collapsing. The megalopolis is expanding and fragmenting into new, uncharted, partially formed spaces, at once highly fluid and variable. They are spaces that are formed and destroyed only to be formed again in new ways, with any previously fixed points of reference having vanished.
The edges of all of these major cities, and sometimes large portions of their centers, are plagued by vast belts of poverty that expand like a cancer or quickly become high risk zones. It should not in any way surprise us that Mondongo focus on these images of the slums on the periphery of Greater Buenos Aires, which are clearly paradigmatic of the problems that man, left to his own devices, has formulated for the 21st century: a powerful explosive cock- tail. Poverty characterizes life in the slums and violence is their daily bread. There is no need to analyze these images. All over the world, everyone is familiar with them: buildings thrown up on substandard, hard-to-reach plots, without plumbing or potable water, in areas at risk of collapse, overcrowded and with high rates of birth and infant mortality. This is one of the major issues in a globalized world; Mondongo confront it directly and, in the form of their three dimensional, pictorial constructions, demand that we do the same. We can travel visually through these environs, sensing their poverty, smelling it, getting a direct feel for the people’s capacity for survival and resistance, and confirming not only the presence of injustice but the authorities’ indifference in the face of it. We can hear the politicians’ promises and see what comes of them. Democracy might be the best system we have, but it can be manipulated. What remains highly notable in Mondongo’s project is the confluence of social commitment and aesthetic consider- ation. These works should not be read in terms of an elitist attitude toward unbridled seduction, but as a necessary fusion of ethics and aesthetics. As Jacques Rancière points out, good art should negotiate the tension that, from one side, pushes art in the direction of life and, from the other, separates aesthetic sensation from other forms of lived experience.
—Kevin Power, 2013