Carlos Motta: "There is once again a risk that HIV will become a global pandemic affecting more than 20 million people"

BarcelonaThe Macba begins to celebrate its 30th anniversary this Friday with the first major European exhibition of the Colombian artist based in New York Carlos Motta (Bogotá, 1978), entitled Prayers of resistance (until October 26). With more than 25 years of experience, Motta is known for his analysis of the weight of the Catholic religion in the foundations of colonialism in Latin America, and for his efforts to rewrite colonialist historical narratives and give voice again to the individuals and communities that were crushed. His works highlight that the impact of this entire colonial past is fully alive today. "There is a large part of my work in which I have reflected on ancient Europe, the Europe of the conquest of the American territories by the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The Eurocentric, hegemonic, imperialist discourse has been foundational for these works in which I challenge the categories of knowledge that were imported through the conquest," he warns. "I have not yet worked on contemporary European policies in relation to coloniality and racism," he adds, "but I have dealt with them a lot from the American context. In some way, the Eurocentric idea corresponds to the Global North, whether specifically European or American, and the North-South division remains quite marked."

Do you think museums can be decolonized?

— This question requires different approaches. I cannot tell you yes or no, in the sense that decolonization processes must be processes that are more than just objectives. They must be pedagogical, educational, bureaucratic, administrative processes that change thinking. It is not something that can be created overnight and carried out in six months. For a museum to be decolonized, it must propose a plan of processes and methodologies and developments that will require a lot of time to carry out.

Could opening the door of the art world to creators who have been left out of the canon become a formula that does not contribute to making them visible and does not involve any act of reparation? At the last Venice Art Biennale, these artists seemed to be in a commercial showcase for collectors from all over the world to discover.

— Decolonizing processes of thought require decolonizing the foundational structures of knowledge systems, art being one of them. If you place the idea of art in the context of the Venice Biennale or a major museum in a European city, you must respond to the stories that built these platforms of knowledge so that these institutions are what they are. In the case of Venice, for example, it is a world fair and, although it has changed a little, it is a place of representation of nations that is burdened with these problems of ethnocentrism, white hegemony, power. So we believe in art with a capital A that perhaps already has a conflict, a clash with other forms of art that are not those paid for by a big patron or a patron and then installed in a church or a palace. There are artistic processes that are completely different, that perhaps are not even called art in these terms, but are community processes, processes of creating artifacts that are part of rituals, for example. In order to decolonize them, you must provoke a rupture in these institutions. If you want to disrupt the Venice Biennale, perhaps the most effective way to make the best Venice Biennale is to cancel it and make another exhibition that really reflects on what these very intense problems of clashes of knowledge are.

HIV and AIDS have a very important place in your work.

— If you're thinking about sexuality and gender, as well as class and race, you always have to talk about HIV, because it has very strongly intercepted the development of these communities since the late 1970s and early 1980s.

One of the most outstanding pieces of this line is Legacy, in which he appears with a gag that prevents him from reproducing the stories of a timeline of HIV and AIDS that a collaborator recites to him.

— My idea was to create a performance I used a gag that was durable and physically resilient, that served as a kind of signpost to what the history of HIV has been and dealing with the weight of the history of HIV in the world. The gag has a dual use, because it is also used in sexual practices in fetish communities. Because my mouth is forced shut, it is quite painful, my jaw starts to hurt and I can't remember things. It's an exercise in trying to remember and rearticulate, but I always fail. The gag has a very specific visual effect, because saliva starts to fall from my mouth, my tongue gets tired and I start to cry. This was a way of representing what the heavy weight of these stories in relation to HIV has been, which have to do with sexualities, genders, communities, ethnicities and class differences.

The opening of the exhibition seems a counterpoint to the premiere, at the Teatre Lliure, of the work The inheritance, by Matthew Lopez. The play suggests that the HIV and AIDS pandemic has reached fiction and the mainstream from a white, male paradigm, while many other groups continue to lack visibility. Do you think that is the case?

— Something very important that is happening right now is the challenge to what we have defined as progress from different groups. HIV has changed its level of importance in society, it is seen as something that happens in the Global South, in African communities and with people in invisible places. But, as we are experiencing with the Trump presidency, this progress is absolutely fragile and can be broken. So, due to the decision to freeze humanitarian aid funds, there is again the risk that HIV will become a global pandemic that can affect more than twenty million people who were benefiting from the medicines financed with these funds. The same thing happens with trans policies: the idea of progress is created, there has been a social change, an expansion of language and there are people who are growing up with the identity they want to assume. However, as we have seen in the last month, trans people, trans teenagers, have lost all their rights and have literally been erased from the LGBTI acronym. This idea of progress can be broken at any time, and we are left in a space where we have to start fighting again for all these things that we thought had happened. Now, in the Spanish context and in Western European countries, there is a kind of complacency similar to what there was in certain American contexts. We believe that the worst is over, but the great lesson and the great challenge is to understand that it is not. If the right were to win in France, Spain or Germany, I am not so sure that these things that we already understand as part of our society in the mainstream would still be there. And this is very serious, because it continues to place us as vulnerable communities in ways that we must confront.

You beat me to it. I wanted to ask you how you feel about Donald Trump's return to power and his offensive against the LGBTI community.

— We were already preparing ourselves, because the discourse of Trump and his colleagues has been filtering into society for a long time. However, it was a one-time thing. Everything they have done so quickly, this shock therapy, was a one-time thing. I think people are responding with collective processes, and we are understanding how to respond, how to protect people.

He is highly critical of same-sex marriage, which in Spain is considered one of the great milestones achieved in LGBTI rights.

— There is a resistance current queer global in relation to assimilationism and the notion of equity in institutional terms mainstream. Many people have been paying attention to how the LGBTI and identity movements mainstream They have put marriage in a position of primacy. It is as if it were the great right that we should have from LGBTI perspectives. But why should marriage be the one that gives you tax rights or health rights or the right to visit your partner? We thought it would be more interesting to break with these institutions that do nothing but continue to propagate the idea of the centrality of the man-woman couple or a couple of two, that these are the great heterosexual achievements. So, how could we break with these established institutions from a truly human perspective? queer? We would consider what family really is, how it can be considered a family, how one can consider having rights that are not based on marriage. The same goes for war, imperialism, and access to the military. All of these things are foundationally opposed to an ethical queer, in a way queer to see life.