Revolutionizing contemporary art in Junín

The experimental poetry biennial that revolutionizes contemporary art in Junín

The exhibition burst onto the art scene by uniting poetry, conceptual art and mail art.
Artists from Latin America, Europe and Turkey converged on this platform of creative resistance.
Installations, performances and multisensory exhibitions opted for visual poetry.
One of the most curious and welcome phenomena in the context of the growing decentralization that Argentine culture has revealed post-pandemic, was the holding of the first edition of the International Biennial of Experimental Poetry of Argentina Posverso, in Junin, province of Buenos Aires.
Organized with sheer effort and scarce resources by the artist couple Ana Montenegro and Silvio de Gracia, it experienced a notable participation of artists and attracted a cult audience.
The enigmatic title Postverse, taken from the Brazilian poet and theorist Omar Khouri, evokes the forms of Brazilian poetry of the 1970s that referred to a type of unconventional, resistant poetry, open to expressions from different disciplines.

“Today poetry is not a territory restricted to verbal forms but a fluctuating and dispersive zone in which creators move, incessantly and cumulatively promoting intertextual overflows between different arts.”

Based on this declaration, the biennial inaugurated at the end of October developed throughout the last months of the year exhibitions, actions, performances and various debates that brought together prominent artists from our country, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Chile, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Turkey.
Figures of conceptual art

Among them, eminent figures of Latin American conceptual art such as the Argentine Marie Orensanz, the Brazilian Paulo Bruscky and the Uruguayan Clemente Padin, the latter two celebrated representatives of mail art, who on different occasions supported with their presence or from a distance, the activities generated in Junín by Hotel Dada, the exquisite space that Montenegro and De Gracia created, designed and programmed.

Together with the MACA Museum of Contemporary Art and the Casa Pronto space, Hotel Dada was the hub of a series of activities. One of them was the Capsula Sonora exhibition, curated by Ana Montenegro, which brought together international artists under the common denominator of research into sound. Another, of great importance, was Poetry Bank, which showed 10 boxes of the 30 that make up Paulo Bruscky's work related to the Banco de Ideias Project that in 2023 was exhibited at the prominent São Paulo gallery Nara Roesler.
The Posverso biennial is organized with sheer effort and scarce resources by the artist couple Ana Montenegro and Silvio de Gracia. Photo: social networks.
The central core of the biennial was the exhibition Poéticas de la resistencia (Poetics of Resistance), which took place at the MACA, Museum of Contemporary Art, which since 2022 has been named Víctor Grippo in homage to the conceptual artist born in Junin. Different works, by Orensanz herself, Gabriela Golder, Rosana Fuertes, Daniel Ontiveros, Daniel Sarobe and Silvina Torviso, Lucas Di Pasquale, Luis Pazos, Marcel Astorga, Matilde Marin, Claudia Del Río and Teresa Pereda, were brought together around a disturbing question: in the face of a contemporary world where death unfolds assuming multiple faces, what can poetry do in the face of all this?

Marie Orensanz's work "Interior…mente" (2023), which was donated by the artist to the museum and was installed more permanently in the entrance courtyard, can be thought of as a hopeful response to the current times.

It is a small open metal house, without doors or windows, that houses five pairs of significant words carved into the ceiling: moment-instant / time-create / make-pleasure / think-gather / unity-share. It is necessary to enter inside to read them. From there it is possible to get closer to both the sky and the surrounding trees. A house specially conceived to open up to thought, desire and the possibility of creating.

Both the diversity of the pieces exhibited and the expanded set of works that were part of the Biennial in its different locations were responsible for reaffirming the guiding principle that contemporary art and experimental poetry are articulated as complementary territories destined to rescue forms of resistance of thought and creativity.
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