Mano Leyrado

A monitor reproduces randomly and “glitched” (in real-time) 7 contemporary scenes, each one corresponding to a level of the tower of Babel.
On the floor, a mountain of papers, with the imprint of 7 works from art history, is fragmented.
In this way, an anachronistic exercise is generated, emulating the media transfer and the survival of historic iconographies [Mnemósine].

A dot matrix printer prints the author’s portrait of the work in ASCII language, the continuous paper ascends to the ceiling to descend and being destroyed by a paper shredder.

Since the middle of the 20th century, art is characterized by absorbing social practices in a dialectical way, generating a constant dialogue. Currently, in the development of databases, we can find one of the dominant practices of contemporary society. An unimaginable amount of information is taken from the internet, stored and manipulated behind the backs of a large part of the population.

From the disciplines of art and curatorship, out of which he developed himself, Mano Leyrado proposes to give a plastic role to these mechanisms, to expose and rethink them in a free playing field.
Can a database be an artistic subject?

Monitor0717 started as a personal selection of cultural agents with whom the artist interacted in a physical way (non-virtual) from 2007 to 2017. This group of people has called his attention in a particular way, which he cannot specify at that moment. Also, he started to question if there is a collective identity or some kind of community behind this group. Finally, he developed a project that ended up becoming his thesis and a work of art.

“I called the 150 selected people (most of them are artists/producers) to receive:
-Between 3 and 5 files ( of any kind, video, sound, writing, etc.) that would be the register of their work and/or realizations.
-Between 3 and 5 files ( of any kind, video, sound, writing, etc.) that would be a record of the social context in which they develop themselves, what later we will call the sphere, a register of meetings, openings, parties, birthdays, dinners, etc.
-An object (must fit in a bag of 20cm x 30cm) with which the member feel identified.”

In the end, an internet site was developed out of the digital material, to show the content in a random way. Furthermore, all the delivered items were displayed in February 2018, for the course of 3 months, at the Kulturni Centar Belgrade in the city of Belgrade, Serbia.

En colaboración con Boris y Paola Mattos.

En la instalación se pueden observar tres núcleos: reproducciones de las obras robadas de Antonio Berni, la expropiación del sitio de arteBA y un audio poema de Pablo Kadchadjan.

#1. El 26 de de junio de 2008 fueron robadas 15 obras de Antonio Berni a través un ataque con modalidad “Piratas del asfalto” en su camino al Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Se trataban de collages y pinturas desde 1932 a 1981. Más allá de que los ejecutores fueron detenidos aún no se conoce el paradero de las pinturas. El robo es considerado uno de los más importantes de la historia del arte Argentino.

Las obras robadas son: La metamorfosis del pájaro azul (1930, óleo sobre tela); La muerte acecha en cada esquina (1932, óleo sobre tela); Barrancas (1934, óleo sobre madera); La mayoría silenciosa (1972, polimatérico sobre madera); Aeropuerto (1976, acrílico sobre tela); Promesa de castidad (1976, acrílico sobre tela); La olla azul (1959, óleo sobre hardboard); Los rehenes (1969, óleo sobre tela); La zapalera (1961, óleo sobre tela); La leñerita (1954, óleo sobre tela); La casa roja con techo azul (1954, óleo sobre tela); Cristo en el garage (1981, óleo sobre tela); Juanito y los cosmonautas (1962, díptico polimatérico sobre madera); El carnaval de Juanito Laguna (1960, óleo collage sobre tela), y Ramona de fiesta (1966, construcción polimatérica).

#2. Un año después de la creación del programa nacional Conectar Igualdad, el gobierno de la ciudad desarrolló el plan s@rmiento, ambos consisten en la entrega de computadoras Netbook a estudiantes.

En la pantalla de la Netbook del Plan S@rmiento puede verse el sitio actual (2017) de la feria de arte arteBA, sin embargo este no está alojado en su servidor de origen. La Url muestra que el contenido visto se encuentra en el sitio de CPU (www.cpucpucpu.art/choreo).

Luego del cierre del programa Conectar igualdad, en el año 2019 el modelo de educación digital nacional es Aprender Conectados.

#3. El espectador puede escuchar un texto escrito por Pablo Kadchadjan, reconocido escritor en el campo independiente de la literatura contemporánea injustamente acusado de plagio por su obra “El Aleph engordado”. Este texto es reproducido por una voz sintética digital.

#4. El texto curatorial está producido a partir de la utilización de extractos de otros textos curatoriales.

The installation is a tautological exercise about “One and three chairs”. The media becomes analog technology, traducing the instance of rain’s representations to three new stages:
-The television shows the “rainy” signal randomly affected by an Arduino.
-A printer executes randomly (by the Arduino) the letter “I”, drawing rain on the continuous paper.
-The wall in the back shows an image of rain through a series of points.

The installation searches for the representation of a condition where things start to “be” and where not. By grouping images in a dialectical exercise, it shows the relative conformation of conceptual bodies.