ARCOmadrid | “La orilla, la marea, la corriente: un Caribe oceánico” Section, Booth 7B24_01 | Madrid, España

_VIGILGONZALES is pleased to announce its participation in ARCOmadrid, where it will present pieces by Karlo Andrei Ibarra (San Juan, 1982) in La orilla, la marea, la corriente: un Caribe oceánico Section, curated by Sara Hermann, chief curator at Centro León in the Dominican Republic and Carla Acevedo Yates, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

To circulate reflections on political and symbolic identity through the art of our cultural region is the main mission of _VIGILGONZALES. In this sense, the work of Karlo Andrei Ibarra functions as an evaluation, as a step where the social being stops to reflect on what we are building as a whole. Without evading the evidence of translucent defeats and pessimisms, the artist synthesizes in the reflexive register his own weight of politicization. This participation, sustained by questioning, encourages us to allow questions to be a daily exercise.

Karlo Andrei Ibarra somatizes a systemic malaise in the midst of an abundance of resources: the transversal trace of Latin American identity. In Fractured Atlas, Ibarra explores the category of map as a membrane that continually mutates. 

Everyday life presents layers of politicity apprehensible by our attention; by being permeable to the environment, Ibarra synthesizes the reflection he chooses to elaborate. In this way, his essay is the simulacrum of a political reflection based on a forceful denunciation and sensitive visibilization.

The photographic series entitled Cuerpo brújula (2018-2024) is articulated from the interest of working with the idea of the Caribbean body. In this series, the body serves as an oracular container to indicate orientation by housing magnetized needles. The compass, known to be a very old tool for territorial orientation, seems in this case not to reveal any direction. This psychological shipwreck is related to the concept of a limbo typical of the colonial political context. The idea of a non-place, that non-place called Puerto Rico, where otherness is in charge of meaning.

Each of Ibarra's works delivers a balanced and elaborated political appreciation so that the spectator can perform a simile exercise. In this way, an aesthetic statement is an allied mirror power that mediates a vivid political perception of the intricacies of society.