Luis Camnitzer: Todo por aprender. La resurrección de Simón Rodríguez: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires

Donald Moffett's solo exhibition, Todo por aprender. La resurrección de Simón Rodríguez at Mudeo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. 

The institution's press release follows:

The Museo Moderno presents Luis Camnitzer’s most recent work. Since the 1960s, this great Uruguayan artist has developed practices closely linked to critical thinking, viewing art as a poetics that broadens the horizons of the known world and contributes to social change.

The exhibition revisits the thought of Venezuelan philosopher and educator Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854), who was a mentor to Simón Bolívar and one of the driving forces behind popular education in Latin America. Rodríguez imagined a grassroots Enlightenment that aspired to form free individuals, that was geared to the needs of communities and was committed to building the new societies emerging from Independence. From Rodríguez Camnitzer has drawn inspiration to develop his own vision of the relationship between art and education: a practice capable of creating the conditions for Latin American peoples to govern themselves.

In this exhibition, Camnitzer brings Rodríguez and his work into the present. Through the medium of artificial intelligence and séances, he constructs fictional dialogues between Rodríguez and other like-minded thinkers. Here artificial intelligence becomes a field of experimentation for exploring new forms of knowledge without making them an instrument to which we simply delegate our cognitive and sensory faculties. How can we use this technology without relinquishing our faculties of imagination and creativity?

The exhibition also invites visitors to assay their own definitions of such concepts as democracy, freedom and justice with the incorporation of a work created by graduates of the Labardén Vocational Art Institute. In this framework, the museum becomes an expanded classroom where art is a practice of mutual learning and collective construction of meanings.

Curation: Alfredo Aracil
Exhibition Design: Iván Rösler
Production: Laura Roldán
Installation Coordination: Germán Sandoval
Technical Coordination: Guillermo Carrasco