How is the world where we are living?  Which are the call sings of this our time? Which affects and effects are moving day by day from the daily experience? How the different technologies are taking part on the insidious government of our bodies and subjectivities? These are some of the urgent questions that Adriana Bustos presents in ‘Quién dice qué a quién’ (‘Who says what to who’)

On this production, the artist from Argentina takes up some of the worries that beat on last works like the devastating true effects from the modern colonialism and the current narco-capitalism in Latin America. However, unlike these works, she now suggests to suffering.

Through big dimensions drawings, most of them in black and white, Bustos suggests a personal drift through ideas, sentences, pictures that quote and clarify a luck of police epistemology that would organize the dreams and nightmares of one reason worried about the order and how to keep it. On these prints converges some iconographic traditions from the Modernity. On them we recognize the practice of (post)colonial voyagers that drawn on their notebooks the weird shapes that claimed their attention. automobiles used during the last Argentinean dictatorship to kidnap people, the portrait of the Aryan family proposed by the Nazism, spies, war aircrafts, experiments with monkeys, methods of training to learn pigeons how to detonate bombs, ways of measuring bodies, and more.

Those pictures bring to our memory the old school prints that illustrate different topics and were a great help for the educational work. Like those didactic resources, each print has a title: ‘Binary digit. Bomb the bomber’; ‘Casus Belli. El silencio es salud’ (Casus Belli. El silencio es salud), ‘Let me show you how democracy works’, ‘NASA’. They explain us some principles of the eugenics, hypnotism, behaviorism, and especially principles of the cybernetic together with the portraits of the most relevant scientists: Shannon, Lasswell, Bateson, Wiener, Skinner, von Neumann. And also, just for some moments, the drawing sends us to the notes that we take in class or when we read a book. In an apparently chaotic way and with voluntary orthographic lapses, Bustos presents us meanings, theories, hypothesis and even a timeline that connects the Pope Gregory XV with Goebbels and other genocides.

These references appear again in one of the installation of the sample where books banned by the last Argentinean dictatorship and papacy are presented. This way live in the same universe of wretched ‘Les Misérables’, ‘Madame Bovary’, ‘Operation Massacre’, ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ and much more.

Far from the indicated reminiscences and according to the interest of the artist on make the science take part in the process of cause malaise, she explicitly takes up the Golden Record. The Golden Record was designed by Carl Sagan for the Voyager missions and has information that is considered relevant for the extraterrestrial civilizations to know the kind of life that occurs (occurred) on the Earth planet. The prints are presented also like time capsules that enclose a basic knowledge to know who we are and where we are. However, against the optimistic message of the scientists, Bustos presents, to who wants to see it, the corrosion of the institutions and the relationships based on the nineteenth-century liberalism. This quote to the NASA record reappears on other installation that gathers so many pictures as the Voyager brings into his belly. Each that claims our active reading.

mass media and against each attempt to control the uncertainty principle. Her drawings, installations and paintings alarm us about her project of unlimited rationalization and suggest us to suspect from the present, preserve the disorder, defend the uncertainty, distrust hedonism, practice the thought drift and warn that we are not machines.

Gustavo Blázquez

Doctor of Social Anthropology by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,

Graduated on Psychology, Researcher of Conicet, Argentina