Must-see website Santa Fe International captures the power of storytelling

In the 1990s, when curator Cecilia Alemani was a teenager in Italy, she would stay up late to watch Godfrey Reggio’s films, which helped spark a lifelong passion for surrealism, at the heart of Alemani’s acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale 2022. So when Santa Fe invited her to plan the latest version of its biennium (now known as Santa Fe International), she was delighted to discover that Reggio is known for his cult classic ceremonies Koyaanisqatsi (1982), headquartered in New Mexico, decided to visit him.

I started with a story because the resulting show is the power of storytelling. The exhibition is titled Regio’s latest film, once (2022); 55 minutes of work is on display at the center of the program. The film can only be described as Trippy, a ridiculous image mashup that sways between the apocalypse and the fascination, like the dragon’s blood slowly fades into a mushroom cloud. Hope and the doomsday cycle are here periodically in art, just like in life. Mike Tyson plays the role of mentor and Philip Glass scores. If you lose the plot, that’s the point– then human.

The rest of the exhibition tells the story in twists and turns and wonderful ways. New Mexico is the main character of the show, and Alemani twists and layers its prototype. Southwest symbols abound: UFOs, land art, military experiments, indigenous artists, spirituality, nature- folding each other like things in Regio’s films. Importantly, Alemani’s story has characters – she calls them “characters of interest” – many writers who live in the state, such as DH Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokokov and Willa Cather. There is also the language-bending Chester Nez, one of the Navajo code speakers who encoded information in their native language during World War II, and two puppets made in New Mexico: Fire Spirit and Witch. These numbers are represented by surprising narrative wall labels, or in some cases the strange objects they generate (like Nabokov’s complex butterfly drawings).

The storytelling theme was introduced near the Helen Cordero Cotta sculpture of Elder Cochiti Pueblo in Helen Cordero, the middle layer of the mouth, where the children cling to their limbs. From there, the Star of Sex and Death in the greatest story of the show (in life, in art, in life. The three best parts are about the god of love, energy and military. A room is mostly filled with sexy paintings, such as the ritual canvas of DH Lawrence, which was banned in England in 1929, was stranded in Taos, and the authors lived briefly. Eventually, they were exhibited behind the curtains of an upscale hotel. Louise Bonnet responded directly to the canvases, sharing Lawrence’s interest in luxury butts. Nearby, Norman Zamit Zammitt’s exquisite paintings show the body parts in the box, and they were also under scrutiny in 1963 for nudity and strange sexiness, while Zammitt teaches at the University of New Mexico. His contract was not renewed, and soon, he abandoned the symbolic art altogether. The paintings rarely appear, which is one of the show’s most incredible discoveries.

“Once” Outside Santa Claus, Santa Fe has infiltrated over a dozen locations (other museums, a hotel, and even a cannabis shop), offering a range that feels spacious but not exhausting. At the New Mexico Military Museum, the themes of war and alien life come together; impressively, the work of Alemani with veterans like Joseph Yoakum and John McCracken echoes the coded abstraction of Karla Knight. On this venue, veterans and American history enthusiasts attended the conference, and Alemani also showed the films of Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, whose parents were both recently killed by Israeli bombs. Watcher (2023) is a dull and surreal look in Cyprus and among star soldiers: each combatant’s eyes are sealed when the protagonist encounters an enemy platoon, and the strange night light seems to be borrowed from the classic scene of alien invasion. In the section of the Military Museum, the power of storytelling is frightening, and the technology of apocalyptic and takeover fantasy was once something science fiction became very real.

Of course, the invention of the final knot so far was developed in Los Alamos in just 30 minutes, the atomic bomb. Nuclear and spiritual energy are the theme of the excellent part of the scene. Will Wilson (Diné) photos Spiral dock In the uranium mine area of ​​the Navajo Nation. When the U.S. government started leasing Navajo land and hiring miners to collect materials for the Manhattan project, they failed to warn of the fatal effects of uranium, but instead studied miners like lab rats. They documented high levels of cancer, did not share their findings, and remained silent as workers took the rocks home to build chimneys. Wilson is juxtaposing, mines and earthworks are all like invasive cuts on immature land, which are artistic scars.

Wilson’s photos come from a fantasy summary of Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller Pierce, both of which are a priori painting teams. Nearby is an updated version of the Southwest Spiritual Paintings by young artist Diego Medina (Piro/Manso/Tiwa), which blends in native patterns, Christian mysticism and UFOs. Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s installation links the various energies of this section: Peruvian artists rebuilt the board developed by NASA for the Apollo project, but replaced its metal wire with ropes citing Quipus or Andean Record Keecmeceking knots. Before Peru became the main exporter of the material, Garrido-Lecca restored the spiritual meaning of copper, and the local nature and culture of its extraction were destroyed.

In the show in Reggio’s movie, time spirals instead of moving forward, but “inside” rather than “everything happens in” the period. In David Horwitz’s work, I feel time folding the most dramatically. His installation occupied his room in the Finquita project, and he admitted to a Japanese detention camp in the Casa Solana community in Santa Fe: Horwitz collected sand from the scene and wrapped it in handmade glass marble, each of which was 4,555 kidnapped and imprisoned men. Horwitz was half the day, and his grandmother was intern in Colorado. Want to talk to his two children about this history, he also made another informal contribution to the international community, with his children recreating the small cat sculpture in the collection of the Museum of History in New Mexico, made by Buddhist Buddhist Tamasaku Watanabe. The resulting cat cat is hidden around the Biennale and has no wall labels around it, including Alemani in the rental car driving.

During the opening panel discussion, Hovetz was asked whether he regarded marble as a memorial. He answered whether the memorial hall must remember what has passed. If so, he said, it wouldn’t be – the U.S. government is currently kidnapping and detaining people of color. If the best stories collapse in an incredible way, the worst stories can do the same.