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Enrique López Llamas - La ventaja de los hombres planos (1)
Papel revolución
Ordinary and durable, the virtue of papel revolución [newsprint paper] lies in its low cost. Whether as package for ingredients of the basic food basket or as printed leaflets, these low grammage and yellow hue sheets circulate around the streets with a limited lifespan. As a product of recycling, papel revolución integrates past lives into its fibers with disregard of any contradiction between its previous purposes. Political propaganda fused with resistance flyers fused with the phone number of a plumbing service. Yet in the purification process, all of the previous intentions fade away and become a white sheet, free willing, without stance.
As papel revolución does, flat men go by without raising any suspicion on their background or on their intentions. It is unimportant if they used to be artists; now they are bureaucrats. It is unimportant if they used to be reactionary; now they are decorated by the army. Their former motivations, rich in dimensions, are now ‘flat thoughts that fit between the pages of books.’
The work of Enrique López Llamas (Aguascalientes, 1993) identifies and examines the different ways in which these dimensions were flattened to become part of history. The artist approaches the country’s consistent political history based on the figure of the subverted victor—the one-time rebel that has been adopted by the circle of power. Contending that the personalities that become part of history do not really make history but simply repeat it, López Llamas discerns the behaviors and patterns that transform insurrections into corrections.
The artist is well acquainted with this vindication process. In 2016—as part of his video series Formas para derrocar un monumento (atrapar, domar, vulnerar y ocupar)—the artist climbed the Monumento a la Libertad [Freedom Monument] in Guanajuato, got on its back, and tamed it like a wild animal. The feat ended in his arrest and an offense for ‘preventing the legitimate use of the public space.’ After spending a few hours under arrest, López Llamas paid the local treasury 200 pesos to stop being a pariah and rejoin society as a flat man.
In his practice, the artist discerns the media and instruments that are used to construct the official history of Mexico and he activates them in alternative ways. Sometimes he even inverts them. For example, the project Sin título (por un beso) is an installation that includes fake documents and a video through which he seeks to revert the independence of the state of Aguascalientes by returning freedom for a kiss. Another example is his series Sobre el porvenir, for which the artist got pencils used in polling stations of the 2018 Mexican presidential elections and drew dark skies and tormented landscapes.
One of the artist’s essential resources is the rigour in his processes of historical revisionism. In order to infiltrate into the pro-government narrative it is necessary to know it profoundly. The weave of recent history is undone from its previous stitches: Unraveling it to re-weave it with a thread from a different color. La patria ya es… (4)
(1) Literal translation of: Roberto Juarroz, La ventaja de los hombres planos, en “Poesía Vertical. Antología Esencial.” Buenos Aires: Emecé 2001.
(2) Literal translation of: Section V, Article 41 from the Bando de Policía y Buen Gobierno para el Municipio de Guanajuato, 2009
(3) This is the literal translation of the title ‘Libertad por un beso’, a legend from the state of Aguascalientes that tells how president Antonio López de Santa Anna made official the separation of Aguascalientes from Zacatecas by asking Doña María Luisa García Rojas for a kiss.
(4) “The homeland already is…”