The Foto Colectania Foundation presents "Marcelo Brodsky. Poetic resistance"

The Foto Colectania Foundation, thanks to the main collaboration of the Banc Sabadell Foundation, presents the Marcelo Brodsky exhibition next February 2. Poetic resistance, curated by Irene de Mendoza.

Artist and activist, Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina, 1954) is considered one of the most relevant authors working on the recovery of private memory and its intersection with collective histories. His work is based on a process of revision of images: taking as a starting point archival photographs of historical events, Brodsky updates them by incorporating text and strokes of color, thus extending their meaning. In general, his works are part of conceptual essays around social events and lie between photography, installation, performance and memorial.

The subject matter of Brodsky's work spans the entire world. It starts with the fight for human rights in Argentina and extends to many other countries in its later works. The review of the events of the year 1968, showing images of global protests, has become one of his most ambitious projects to confront us, in addition, with other interconnected realities of the time, such as colonialism, capitalism, racism or patriarchy. He has also vindicated movements for civil rights or the Black Lives Matter of the United States, and more recently, highlights the search for restorative justice for the victims of genocide in the colonial state of South-East Africa (present-day Namibia ).

In recent statements by the author: “Photographs are always open to multiple interpretations, and my interventions in the images suggest a direction. The added texts and colors construct an alternative form of language, a poetics of resistance. What I try to do by intervening historical images and recovering their context is to throw arrows into the future, which is our present.”

The Poetic Resistance exhibition is one of the first monographic exhibitions dedicated to Marcelo Brodsky in our country. It brings together some of his best-known series, starting with a selection of five photographs taken during his exile in the late 1970s in Barcelona, and a section dedicated to his project "Bona Memoria", in which he investigates and documents the consequences of the Argentine dictatorship over his schoolmates. This work would become the starting point for interventions with text and color on photographs that he would apply in his later projects.

Other series presented in the exhibition are his emblematic 1968. The fire of ideas, which shows the movements unleashed around the world in 1968, the photographs of the fight against Francoism or apartheid in South Africa (which together with the photographer Gideon Mendel), National Shutdown on the recent revolts in Colombia in 2021, and the shocking Rastres de violencia, which shows the first genocide of the 20th century through the colonialist photographs of the German Empire in present-day Namibia