In collaboration with Daros Latinamerica.
"Guillermo Kuitca. Das Lied von der Erde"
Guillermo Kuitca is one of Latin America's leading contemporary artists. He is born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he also lives and works. In the work of Guillermo Kuitca, realms like architecture, theatre, music and geography play a central part. A more and more reduced amount of motifs generated from maps, town plans, house plans, theatre seating plans, genealogical family trees and as an exception – the bed – are mostly talking about humans, which are since 1987 absent in his pictures. The exchange of humans and places might create a new kind of map, as he said in 2005: I use genealogical trees thinking that when I replace places for names of people a new type of map will appear.
(Guillermo Kuitca: Sperone Westwater catalogue, No. 27. 2005). A house plan might become human itself, as in "House Plan with Broken Heart" (1990) or in "House with AIDS" (1987). Theatre seating plans start to move or even to burst and maps become plans of links between humans. Where is the human in the practical and objective dimension of a plan? Where is the human in an empty bed? The stories of the absent part in Kuitca's work become the most dominant and underline each picture with a strong human and at the same time uncanny feeling.
Bruno Bosteels is an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and a BA in Romance Philology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, near Brussels, in Belgium in 1989. Before working at Cornell, he held positions as an assistant professor at Harvard University and at Columbia University. Bruno Bosteels is currently preparing two book manuscripts: one on Jose Luis Borges: "After Borges: Literature and Antiphilosophy" and one on the French philosopher Alain Badiou: "Badiou and Politics". Bruno Bosteels is the author of dozens of articles on modern Latin American literature and culture, contemporary European philosophy and political theory. He is a long time student of the works of Alain Badiou, which involves – as examples – basing the discourse on Hegelian terms, and to discuss antiphilosophy, materialistic dialectics and critical theory.
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