A trade becomes art in “Persona” to represent Uruguay in Venice

Montevideo, 18 Mar Honoring the craft of tailoring until it becomes art is what Uruguayan Gerardo Goldwasser has done, who, with his project “Persona”, will represent the South American country at the 59th edition of the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The relationships of the body and the participation of tailoring, patterns and molds focus its design, as the artist explained to Agencia EFE on Friday after giving a press conference at the Uruguayan Presidency's headquarters in Montevideo, together with officials from the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC). “The project basically consists of an installation of four works. Two works already belong to the repertoire of my work all these years and two works are new and are designed specifically for the pavilion,” said Goldwasser, born in Montevideo in 1961. The artist, known for combining tailoring, violence and contemporary art in his work, told about his relationship with this craft, which, through his creations, allows us to see tension and normative depersonalization in a line of reflection. “My grandfather was unlucky enough to spend 16 days in the (Nazi) concentration camp in Buchenwald in 1938. Luckily, at that time, an aid agency leaving the country had already allowed him to process the exit papers. But for 16 days he was able to survive by being a tailor and making Nazi uniforms at that time,” he said. Finally, he explained that he still remembers when his father and uncle made clothes and stressed that, from the starting point of that trade in his project, he found it very interesting that this is “the structure” to be able to say something in the field of art. For his part, the Minister of Education and Culture of Uruguay, Pablo da Silveira, celebrated during the press conference that the South American country will be back at the Venice Biennale and stressed that it “has the privilege” of being one of the three in Latin America that have a permanent pavilion there. “I personally love that this is what we are presenting, because I think that in some way it is, not only the presentation of a work of great quality, but the presentation of something that is very Uruguayan,” he concluded. “Persona”, the work of Goldwasser, goes to Venice under the curatorship of Pablo Uribe and Laura Malosetti, and was selected through an open call in 2021 by the National Directorate of the MEC, the National Institute of Visual Arts, the National Commission for Visual Arts and the support of the Department for the Internationalization of Uruguayan Culture. The fifty-ninth edition of the Venice International Art Exhibition is curated by Italian Cecilia Alemani (Milan, 1977) and is entitled “The Milk of Dreams” for the book by British artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), who emigrated to Mexico in the 1950s. CHIEF scr/cmm/laa (photo) (video)