The art of the irreparable in Fernando Foglino’s the burial

Abstract

The work of the Uruguayan artist Fernando Foglino (Montevideo, 1976) revisits the past and confronts it with the iconic materiality of the sculptures of the urban landscape where he updates, in a playful and ironic way, a critique of the construction of national memory. The articulation between history, memory and urban monument raised in its installations questions the circulation of the past in the local imaginary. Coming from architecture, the artist is accustomed to working with computer models, which allows him to make 3D formalizations of the monuments that he intervenes a posteriori.

This proposal, which has been going on for more than a decade, would seem to be attentive to the temporalities that cross the particular iconography of the identity construction of a country seen from the perspective of contemporary art. The work that concerns us is the work El Entierro, exhibited in 2016 in the Hall of the Lost Steps of the Legislative Palace, within the framework of the 3rd Montevideo Biennial. My hypothesis is that Foglino manages, by giving volume to an ominous and inaccessible photograph that is in the archives of a newspaper, to transform its reception through fantastical visions that promote a reflective distancing.

The operation in this work, then, consists - through a distancing that in the words of Didi-Huberman would confront us with the notion of survival understood as "a specific expression of the footprint" that would be located "between ghost and symptom" - in bringing the two dimensions of the plane to the volumetric representation of 3D printing and then flattening them again on the screen of a closed circuit television (CCTV) and in a fairly simple a priori articulation, to open a wide associative constellation that transform the view of both, historical and contemporary events. This artist works on the trauma of the dictatorship and the multiple social violences of democracy, through the discursive deconstruction typical of the distancing caused by the gaze in the intervention of the well-known -and therefore invisible- in the city.