Uruguay: A South Balcony

Mauro Arbiza - Untitled (2016)

Following the end of the dictatorship, over the past decade in particular, the libertarian and populist administration of the Frente Amplio has brought with it an awakening of consciences, and introduced a profound process of democratic transformation within Uruguayan society. As a result, Uruguay is today an example to the entire continent, wounded by economic and moral crisis. Almost a utopian land, where it is possible to be bold. In addition to the most striking measures – such as the legalization of soft drugs and the authorisation of gay marriage and abortion, still impossible in many Latin countries – many other reforms have been introduced, albeit with less media impact.

Carlos Seveso - South Cross (2016)

The country provides an outstanding model in a Latin America characterised by social inequality, and this prompted the The Economist magazine to name President Mujica’s Uruguay ‘country of the year’ in 2013, in recognition of its significant achievements and advancements in the field of human rights and democracy, and the economic progress it has attained. By guaranteeing freedom of expression, women’s suffrage, divorce, free and compulsory education, Uruguay is today at the forefront of civil rights legislation.

Marcelo Carrasco - The time in the south (2016)

Furthermore, Uruguay has a long history of struggle for independence against colonial powers and the intrusiveness of its two large, incommodious neighbours. Inhabited mainly by nomadic indigenous tribes, the current Uruguayan territory was explored for the first time in 1516. By the early seventeenth century, bandeirantes, Portuguese adventurers from Brazil, arrived with increasing frequency in search of labour for their plantations. The Jesuits stepped in to defend the natives, and their support proved decisive. However, many bandeirantes chose to stay in Uruguay to run smuggling operations, to the detriment of the Spaniards who occupied Argentina. Smuggling became so prosperous that the Brazilian authorities decided to protect the trade in 1680 by building a fortified settlement facing Buenos Aires, called Colonia do Sacramento. The settlement was the cause of violent clashes with the Spaniards and was ultimately returned to Portugal under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

Virginia Daglio Ksiazenicki - Cause (2016)

In a land inhabited by millions of sheep and cows, the country’s population is concentrated mainly along the coast, where Uruguay offers world-famous resorts such as Punta del Este and La Barra. It also boasts several cities like Colonia do Sacramento, whose Historic Quarter, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city’s narrow cobblestone streets include Calle de los Suspiros, said to be the most photographed street in Uruguay, whose sighs, according to different legends, either refer to the brothels located along one side of the street, or to the cries of the condemned who were led along it to the gallows.

Elsa Trolio Bertullo - Water of words (2016)

Enterprising and creative, Uruguayans share with the Argentineans the honour of inventing the tango, and contend with them, and the Brazilians, supremacy in football, having twice won the World Cup in 1930 and 1950. A passion that writer Eduardo Galeano explained in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow (El fútbol a sol y sombra, 1995): “The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a runty, bowlegged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”

María Teresa Ramos Reggi - Ombú (typical tree of South America) (2016)

A phenomenon of democratic unpredictability and creative madness whose influence can also be seen in Uruguayan art. Evidence of this can be found, for example, in Casapueblo at Punta Ballena, a few kilometres from Punta del Este, where the impressive architectural complex built by the painter, sculptor and ceramic artist Carlos Páez Vilaró is located. It includes the studio of the artist who died in 2014 at the age of ninety, a museum and a hotel, in a mix of styles, ranging from the whitewashed walls of the houses of Greek island fishermen to the fluid and modernist forms of Gaudí.

Federico Osta - We are all works (2016)

But Uruguayan contemporary art is also capable of interpreting and reinterpreting its colonial and rural past, as the country’s pavilion at the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2017 shows. The artist Mario Sagradini uses an ethnographic approach to reassemble fragments of Uruguayan history. His exhibit represents a cattle pen called funnel, used in Uruguay since the nineteenth century, which he reconstructed from a barely decipherable old photograph.

Leonardo Gularte - BASQÜADÉ SEPÉ (In charrúa language: GET UP SEPÉ) (2016)

In this Imago Mundi collection dedicated to Uruguay we can also attest, as Professor Carlos Seveso writes in his introduction to this catalogue, to the “diversity of simultaneous or parallel visions on the metaphorical building of contemporary art.” The 154 10x12 cm works that make up the collection testify to Uruguayan society’s investment in art, where artists are given a central role. “Creativity and imagination are not only encouraged as cultural resources” – writes, in turn, the artistic curator of the collection Maria Laura Mascelloni – “but also supported and socially promoted. Art is a profession like any other, and the artist is asked to create art and amaze, to provoke or reflect, but always for the sake of art, and, of course, of the community.”