EL CÍRCULO DE LA ROSA (ENGLISH)
THE ROSE CIRCLE is a historical essay, an speculative fiction and the assembly of an archive to tell an unpublished story of contemporary Venezuelan art. It is an experimental book about the Venezuelan artist Roberto Obregón —the man of the rose— and his circle of artist friends during the emergence of conceptual practices in the seventies.
THE CIRCLE OF THE ROSE
Has had performance presentations at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City and at the Sala Mendoza in Caracas.
"The Circle of the Rose was the performance of an author who flees from traditional ways of approaching the archive, for the presentation of a book that also deliberately flees from those forms. The archive is built with pretensions of erecting a monumental discourse in relation to art, a particularly contradictory task in a problematic and difficult to reconstruct historical context like the Venezuelan one, especially when it elaborates compensatory and even amnesiac narratives as a strategy to revisit the past. Instead, Torrivilla preferred to 'erect an offering as a vertiginous way of making the wound speak' "
Sonia Sofia Quintero, Artishock
THE CIRCLE OF THE ROSE
For its presentation in Caracas, together with the social innovation platform Labo Ciudadano , we visited universities based on the provocation "The history of Venezuelan art does not exist" , with the idea of promoting a conversation around the relationship between history, identity and nation, to ask ourselves about the meaning of the narratives of art history and diversity in the context of institutional precariousness in Venezuela.
One of the central themes was to address the diaspora: How do we begin to tell stories at different distances from Venezuela? How do we reconcile the gaps in memory and documents with imagination? How do we reveal the complex relationship between art, documents and life?
THE CIRCLE OF THE ROSE
presents
Speculative intervention within the history of Latin American art, as a political stance towards the narratives of the archive and the nation
Historical rigor, experimentation through documentary fiction , unpublished material and literary rhythm
Collaboration with visual artists for the intervention and reconstruction of archival images
Contextualization and divergent testimonies to understand the emergence of conceptual practices in Latin America
THE CIRCLE OF THE ROSE
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"The circle of the rose Using an experimental writing that mixes art criticism, journalism, fiction and documentary, Torrivilla's work makes visible the practices of artists who have not been part of the canon of the country's contemporary art history. It also works, due to its design that plays with the image and the archive, together with a language in which the author sometimes blends into the main character, the artist Roberto Obregón, as an artifact that aims to represent a period of 20th century Venezuelan culture.
With the figure of Obregón at the centre, Torrivilla shows the conflict between canonical discourses such as the monumentality of kinetic art, which reflected the optimism of a country with modern pretensions that never became such, with the conceptual language of a group of artists who preferred to look inside themselves when producing their works .
Isaac Gonzalez Mendoza, The National
