Resilient Currents, on communal re-existence. Commissioned by Thanks for Nothing

The exhibition, which culminates three years of research and management, presents selected works by seventeen artists or collectives originating from Central and South America that have, as a common objective, the forms of creation intrinsically related to the collective. With this show, Thanks for Nothing begins the cycle of three exhibitions preceding the opening of its space, La Communale, which will open to the public in 2028 in a former hospital in West Paris. It thus sets the tone: “an alternative way of life to the hegemonic Eurocentric project” (in Alban Achinte’s words)—and the art of the world as a medium. The tour through the exhibition progresses like Regina José Galindo's imaginary tributary, from vindictive historical revisions to converging towards a more intimate sphere.
After walking past the works of the collective Ayllü (Latin and queer communities of Spain) who challenge the heteronormated societies, and the critical review of the archive on the king of Araucania of the Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü, we move on to the denunciation of slavery by Noé Martínez. Artist Juliana Góngora, with extreme delicacy, presents her family's most personal piece of furniture: the bed in which her father slept, while Angélica Serech's grandiose textile piece wraps, among the knots, strands of her family's women's hair, thus inviting their personal stories. More explicitly, but with equal generosity, Guadalupe Maravilla offers us an ex-voto that tells his story as a migrant child in the context of internal war. In front of him, Patricia Domínguez's interview with a shaman from the Peruvian Amazon defends a different way of healing, taking care of oneself, and dreaming while she presents herself as a being from the future... inhabiting the jungle and revealing her powers. The blue room of Nomasmetaforas also invites us to experience forms of dreaming, induced and accompanied by plants: a work that allows us to see "the soul" of plant beings, just as Jorge González Santos does with rocks. María Sosa and Noé Martínez, of the Rojo Negro collective, in turn, establish a very personal dialogue between their reality and archaeological, historical, and epistemological studies, proposing new readings of the past in the light of empathy. The hydro-feminist piece Multiple Clitoris by Carolina Caycedo seems to introduce, in turn, the video of Seba Calfuqueo, who appears dressed in the water, dancing: is it not a beautiful response to Galindo's performance?
Through her curatorship, Ilaria Conti invites us to be citizens rather than consumers and to carry the possible alongside, not below, the artists—a position that reminds us of our responsibilities.