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MANCHARIKUY / STARTLE 2023

Performance in three stages. 

Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires, Argentina. MACBA. 

Curated by Natalia Sosa Molina

2023

2_1_Foto Mancharikuy performance ciclo 1 ahora fuera del tiempo, museo de arte contemporan

‘Mancharikuy’ is a performance developed in three stages, which examines the consequences of social and political traumas through a commemorative action, aimed at bearing witness and fostering empathy. 

 

The Quechua word ‘Mancharikuy’ refers to the action of being frightened, and in this context, the performance seeks to cure the ‘mal del susto’ (fright sickness) associated with contemporary threats such as war, ideological, identity and economic conflicts. 

 

The structure of the work is inspired by the rituals of the Quechua healers, who, when they assessed that the ‘mal del susto’ was too strong, performed the ritual three times, with variations and new elements in each repetition. In this way, the performance of ‘Mancharikuy’ also unfolds in three phases, evolving with each stage, in the political context that Argentina was going through after the presidential elections of 2023. In the first stage, the artist creates a first sculptural object, which is presented to the community as a talisman, loaded with symbolic meanings. 

 

This action takes place on the sixth floor of the museum, generating an atmosphere of contemplation and expectation, and in the second stage, the artist produces a second sculptural object, and with both objects performs a circular dance, dragging them across the floor. This action, which takes place on the second floor of the museum, introduces a new dynamic of movement and rituality, reinforcing the process of transformation.In the third stage, the artist creates a third sculptural object, and joins the three objects with a metal rod that evokes the base rope of a quipu. With this new resulting object, the artist performs a circular dragging, whose dimension and appearance refer to the movement of a plough, suggesting an act of ploughing or renewal. This last action takes place in the public space, in the street, expanding the impact of the work beyond the confines of the museum.

 

 Inspired by the Quechua healers of the old colony, the artist uses charcoal to draw on paper, slowly dragging powdered charcoal with his feet. The sounds generated by this action induce poetic states in both the artist and the surrounding community, while the resulting drawing is physically manipulated and transformed, incorporating metal rods that contrast with the subtlety of the powder and provoke a sense of urgency. 

 

Mancharikuy’ is presented as a proposal that reveals latent relationships between materials and gestures, offering provisional ritual behaviours that exist as irrational, incomplete and mutable encounters. 

5_1_Foto Mancharikuy performance ciclo 1 ahora fuera del tiempo, museo de arte contemporan
6_1_Foto Mancharikuy performance ciclo 1 ahora fuera del tiempo, museo de arte contemporan

Mancharikuy: On the Performance Art of Gonzalo Morales Leiva

 

Victor López Zumelzu

Poet, Critic, and Art Curator, 2023

 

Performance art, unlike other artistic mediums, always operates from a place of urgency. It uses a temporal accumulation mechanism that can create ruptures in the present moment. This kind of rupture or wound is what allows performance to continuously regenerate and cite itself. Its practice, beyond being volatile and ephemeral, raises questions that are intrinsically tied to our memory and the way we record a narrative that fades during its own enactment. At this point, the very act of performing becomes an exercise in trust—spectral and rhizomatic. The fragmented scenes left in our bodies are always ghostly: sounds, smells, movements. All of these immaterial elements are the very essence of performance, activating small instances that recall the event itself as representations of what transpired.

 

The performative practice of Gonzalo Morales Leiva (Chile, 1985) is a clear example of how contemporary artists, collectives, and projects have been engaging with performance in a specific way in recent years, responding to the real conditions of the body and nature under late capitalism. By this, I refer to a complete demand for effectiveness in the performativity of productive roles and the adjustment of identity expressions within the power vectors that construct reality. Morales Leiva’s work fits within an experimental performative language that seeks to expose the tensions between fiction, representation, and action. His performances often gather various materials and elements, such as charcoal, graphite, paper, metals, and his own body—active agents of the artistic action. The space is largely constructed through a collage of rehearsed and improvised performative patterns within the limited timeframe of his performances. In this sense, Morales challenges the real limits of expectation as an experience, offering the audience a role that goes beyond mere passive witnessing.

 

In Morales Leiva’s performances, there is a discernible need to work beyond the predefined space of the performance, showing an interest in continuing the creative process even after the action has concluded. This has led him to engage artistically with the ghostly residues of the vanished action. Recordings, texts, photographs, and other sculptural objects created during his actions, which the audience encounters outside the timeframe of the performance, possess a high degree of ambivalent performativity: their status transcends mere documentation. In this way, his artistic projects blur the boundaries between the action and its expectation. The audience is invited to explore new forms of attention that transcend intellectual abstraction in the search for potential meanings within the action. When we witness his performances, we encounter an emotional perception of the gesture’s materiality—a materiality directly tied to the formation of subjectivity that, in its reproduction during the performance, opens new spaces for reinterpretation.

 

This approach to production and provocation within the realm of performance art is evident in how Morales Leiva uses sounds to experiment with new forms of fictionalized memory. Through various strategies, he appropriates and recomposes the materials he works with—for example, the sound of his footsteps on paper, sliding at a rhythm that diverges from our everyday experience. His charcoal-stained feet obscure and complicate immediate recognition, or he uses the noise and friction between flesh, paper, and charcoal as a virtue, altering the melodic rhythm and posing questions that resist specific meanings.

 

During the “Una hora fuera del tiempo” (One Hour Out of Time) series at MACBA, curated by Natalia Sosa Molina, Morales Leiva’s performances created a mental space for memory and the recognition of an identity adrift, beyond their ritualistic and performative nature. His performance series titled “Mancharikuy” explores the aftermath of social and political traumas through an act of commemoration as a form of living testimony and empathetic receptivity. “Mancharikuy,” a Quechua term, refers to the act of being frightened. In other words, “Mancharikuy” becomes a performance to heal the fear and fright caused by present-day social threats—whether from war, ideological, identity, or economic conflicts that define our contemporary world. During the colonial era, Quechua healers performed rituals surrounded by their community to heal the sick. In this collective experience, the “Callers of Courage” faced the risk of confronting new illnesses brought by the colonizers.

 

After witnessing these actions, a question lingers: How can such an ephemeral work make us feel part of a community? In any community, there are always rituals and dominant fictions rooted in a collection of shared images and stories passed down through time. These fictions, often shaped by tradition and popular culture, become dominant structures of the collective imagination. They play a vital role in projecting the community’s identity, evolving through contradictory movements between consensus and disagreement. The ritualistic and shamanic forms proposed by Gonzalo during the series do not seek to recover lost or forgotten memories. Instead, they question the very meaning of community and its boundaries—what forms of representation and affection bind us to others, and how do we share a language that, even in its darkest or most abstract form, we can understand and interpret. In this sense, Morales Leiva engages with his community and Chilean history through sound, the creation of abstract landscapes, and labor practices. He incorporates materials and methods evoking manual labor, such as charcoal work, reflecting the economic and political trajectory of his region of origin.

 

Morales Leiva’s interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, photography, installation, video, and performance. He uses common materials like paper, charcoal, and metals to depict the social impact of objects on the historical and social body. This body needs healing but remains inaccessible, as his actions render the papers immediately unavailable to the spectator. In a shift towards ephemeral temporal ecosystems, Morales Leiva pays tribute with his immediate, inaccessible landscapes to a human condition shaped by the effects of territorial and subjective extractivism.

 

His performances and drawings during the MACBA series became elusive, rising and dragging across the exhibition space as abstract plows, totems, or quipus, whose inner workings remain unknown. Morales Leiva’s circular and elliptical forms, as he improvises drawings on paper, manifest an intuitive drawing approach that captures the social and ritual qualities of nature while engaging with the performative space’s vocabulary. The curvilinear patterns he creates with his feet interconnect into a network of tones and lines, mimicking the flow of time and its immediacy. The line maintains an honest connection with the self and the practice of automatic creation, akin to an endless choreography where one form begins as another ends, perhaps symbolizing the infinite rhythm of life. By merging ritualistic practices with performative, pictorial, and sculptural creation, Morales Leiva recontextualizes elements often seen as separate or atomized. His use of charcoal reflects the movement of laboring bodies, imprinting elliptical, oval forms on the paper, resembling a moving constellation visible only in the moment of the action.

 

The continuous friction, erosion, and wear of materials produce sounds that induce both the performer and surrounding community into poetic subjective states, which are channeled onto the paper. The resulting drawing is archived by folding, piercing, and threading the paper with metal rods. The metallic sounds and drilling contrast with the subtle dust, breaking the calm and creating a sense of urgency. However, Morales Leiva later harmonizes the space into a sculptural body formed during the performance, acting as a talisman that concentrates and emanates intense physical and energetic force. As this new sculptural body drags along, the spectator finds themselves immersed in the artist’s complex abstract language, which blends the power of sound with physical intensity, navigating the site-specific objects and staying in orbit around a ritual that constantly invites us to be aware of our political time and physical presence.

 © 2024 Gonzalo Javier Morales Leiva

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