Artista contemporaneo Elartista contempordneo suele interpelar imagenes que sobreviven del pasado y que estén atravesadas por un sentido enigmtico. Imagenes que no necesariamente son parte del mundo del ate, o que lo fueron y han quedado desplazadas. Imagenes que flotan entre universos visuales, que no viven en la sala del museo, que han sido olvidadas, pero {que son, en verdad, depésitos, lgares en los que sedimentan sentidos, tramasde la historia que han perdido visibilidad, cotidianeidad, pero que siguen, sin embargo, activa Hay que nombrar el horror para no olvidar. El art, los artistas, han hecho de los dispositivos del recuerdo un campo cextenso de indagacién. Los retratos y losnombres son los lugares en los que se inscriben cuerpos, personas, identidades sumidas en la ausencia de la desaparicin. Ausencia de cuerpos, reconstruccién de archivos. Las ciudades contemporéneas, algunas més que otras, estin atravesadas por las marcas del pasado. Es imposible caminar por Berlin o por Buenos Aires sin que se nos lame a recordar. Ciudades cuyos rastros y huellas se dispersan por las calls y los edificios. La marca del muro de Berlin cruza la ciudad; los nombres de quienes desaparecieron junto con un edificio fueron inscritos por Boltanski en las medianeras de las construcciones laterals (The Missing House, 1990); los nombres de los desaparecidos se esparcen en las baldosas de Buenos Aires a partir de la iniiativa de las comisiones de Memoria, Verdad y Justicia de los barrios porteiios (Baldosas por la memoria). ‘The Arte destructivo (Destructive Art) exhibition was held in Buenos Aires in 1961 It was held at the Lirolay gallery, which actively sought to identify and exhibit art’s most experimental instances. It was organized by a group of artists ‘with tes to Informalism (1959), that other form of abstraction that eliminated the human figure and all representation of objects through brushstrokes and textures. Two years later, this group of artists subjected the physical material and textures, left on their canvases to a process of laceration. Arte destructivo used violence like an art material. The artists had gathered objects from the street in the port area and zones ‘where garbage was incinerated. Ship horns, a bathtub, wax heads, coffins and bottles were presented, dripped all over ‘with paint and showing signs of time’s wear. One coffin even, had a bullet hole. Some had included their own informalist paintings, similarly destroyed. The references to death and destruction with traces of black humor were palpableMail art allowed these artists to setup international networks for exchange that managed to filter through the control the dictatorships held over citizens even while using one of the state's institutions to do so. In 1970, Felipe Ehrenberg carried ‘out a postal intervention that he articulated through Britain's and Mexico's postal services. The envoy that Ehrenberg sent to participate in México’s Salon Independiente was Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante. y sino pues también (Work Secretly Titled Onward and Upward... and If Not, Also, 1970) It consisted of two hundred postcards that formed the image ‘ofa pin-up girl holding the World Cup—which took place that year in Mexico—soccer ball between her breasts when arranged and viewed together. The image was taken from England's promotion of the championship. Each fragment could easily evade controls prohibiting pornography. The phrase was taken from Luis Echeverria’ electoral campaign speeches with their developmentalist leanings. Echeverria was, minister of the Interior in 1968 and considered to be the one responsible for students being killed during the Tlatelolco massacre, after which Ehrenberg decided to leave Mexico Globalization transformed how art was produced. ‘The “biennialization” of the art universe contributed {to a standardization of determined formats in contemporary. art. Biennials are a way of putting diferent metropolises on the map and increasing their visibility in cultural terms. They establish flexible models for making artists more international and they generate criteria to make the filigrees of contemporary art more legible. From the 1990s onward, biennials ceased to be exhibition spaces tied to countries. They became seismographs for the world of global art. During the 1980s, the Venice Biennial inaugurated its Aperto section, dedicated to showing the work of young artists. Inthe Latin American sphere, the Havana Biennial also pushed aside a criterion based on national representation—especially following its second edition in 1986—in order to pass the decision-making regarding which artists to invite over to the shows curators, ‘who worked on the basis of a central theme established for ‘each biennial. They chose to adopt a Third World biennial ‘model that emphasized a South-South axis, concentrating on art from Latin America, Africa and Asia asa response to the power that traditional biennials had in terms of legitimizing the European North American axis in art The role played by the Havana Biennial could be thought oftoa certain extent in terms ofa transformation in the criteria used by the established biennials, which are now much more open to researching and exhibiting artists from other parts of the world,