Rep(úb)lica

October 2019 - February 2020
MARCO La Boca - Contemporary Art Museum of La Boca
Curated by Leandro Martínez Depietri

The monument that crowns the Congress building is being moved to La Boca. The Republic now hangs upside down, rendered unstable by the force of its own weight. It has lost her laurels, her reins, her chariot, and three of her horses. Of the quadriga, a single animal remains, now transformed into the indomitable and fertile figure of the stallion. He gazes at the Republic with a mixture of terror and pleasure, while she returns his gaze in ecstasy. Anthropomorphized, he lies with his legs spread apart on an iron bed whose headboard bears the motif of the Congress’s railing.
Minkiewicz constructs a grotesque replica in clay and wax, materials used respectively for the sketch and the mold of the bronze sculpture. From an unattainable monument, the sculptural ensemble crumbles from the legislative palace, which serves as its pedestal. Along with the bronze, the Republic loses her ideal character and is metaphorically reborn as a model to be assembled after the brief death of an orgasm. By perverting the narrative elements of the original, Minkiewicz revisits the tradition of the grotesque, which places form and narrative in contradiction, shattering the classicist ideal of order. If the original work by the Venetian sculptor Victor de Pol is a colonizing imitation, rooted in Greco-Roman ideology, Minkiewicz’s intervention operates critically from within it as a mise en abîme. It constitutes a profaned replica of a stylistic replica that is, in itself, the aesthetic manifestation of a political replica: the Europeanizing project of nationhood established by the American elites in the 19th century.
The projection of an erotic fantasy corrodes the triumphant allegory and contrasts the symbolic figure with the reality of a neoliberal world whose democracies widen the gap between rich and poor. It challenges the puritanical and bourgeois norms of patriarchal writing—which portrays the female body as pure—and the notion of political participation as a purely intellectual space. Reclaiming the emancipatory power of desire, Minkiewicz evokes the memory of Greek bacchanalia and Roman orgies as the political flip side of public life in the agora and the senate. Thus, Rep(úb)lica becomes a rebellious paramonument that juxtaposes the act of replicating as a means of arguing against, and the sculptural replica as a rewriting from the body. Against the monsters engendered by the dream of reason, the rebellion of the flesh bursts out with transformative force.

Leandro Martínez Depietri