To fictionalise history: León Ferrari and the politics of assemblage

Abstract

The artist is an assembler. His gesture is to intervene in the apparent consensus that naturalizes the progressive course of history to expose its artifice – its fable. Thus, the artist sets against the grain a disseminating reading of alternative narratives – of fictions. In other words, in front of an archive (of images, texts, times), the artist denatures the montage by means of the critical reinforcement of the montage. It is a kind of Foucaultian proposition, that is to say, a proposition of language to the infinite: addressed to the artistic work that exercises, at the possible threshold of experience, the contestation of the presuppositions of the State, the market, the media, and the Law. León Ferrari, an Argentine artist exiled in São Paulo during the last dictatorships that consumed the Southern Cone, always in conflict with the presuppositions of Western and Christian civilization, teaches with his exilic works that the historical memory is an a posteriori effect.