Duality as an Invitation to Multiplicity

Other works also connect to the desirous body, both in terms of pleasure and pain, or as a way of mediating social contact. Luke Ching, in the video Narcissist, creates a mold of his own anus, which he uses as a kaleidoscope to view the sky. In the video installation Fireflies, Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative present a sensorial video with trans sex workers who move between the profane and the sacred in a beautiful and dreamlike universe. Two stacked and partially melted red chairs, in the work Double Happiness, by Ocean Leung, crystallizes in aesthetic form this relationship between body, desire and dominance, in addition to highlighting the loss of something that cannot be recovered. The culmination of this theme is in Xiyadie’s work, Kaiyang, a panel in which the artist uses traditional Chinese paper cutting to create an orgy in a men’s sauna located south of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The political and social power of this work invites us to think about the control exercised by different powers—governmental, private or economic systems—on people’s desires. If we annihilate desire, we will have better workers and consumers, which translates into a more functional society in neoliberal terms. Lively and active desire carries the danger of an empowered and less productive subjectivity.

Continuing in the political sphere, colonization and economic domination are themes dear to both continents and take on various tones in the exhibition. Mimian Hsu presents No. 1674, Sección Administrativa, Versión 1&2 (No. 1674, Administrative Section, Version 1&2), a work that points to the history of exacerbated racism, part of Latin America’s colonial heritage. The work consists of a red silk sheet, on which is embroidered a letter from Chinese workers to the governor of Costa Rica, sent at the time of the enactment of anti-Chinese immigration laws. In the letter, they request family reunion with their wives, despite belonging to “una raza generalmente no querida” (a generally undesirable race).

The title of the exhibition also bears echos of the book How to Live Together, by Roland Barthes, in which the author reflects on ways of living in groups, based on cohabitation models that do not deprive individual freedoms. Literally at the center of the exhibition is the work Juntitud, by Abraham Cruzvillegas, developed especially for the exhibition. The title’s neologism points to a way of being together, or Togetherness, a word with no direct translation into Portuguese or Spanish, but which invokes a sense of collectivity. Cruzvillegas builds his installations with materials provided by the gallery, based on a protocol he sends in advance, requesting materials that can actually be used. On location, the artist creates from what he was given, without excluding anything, seeking harmony in difference and non-exclusion. His works allude to the precariousness of housing in several countries around the world, such as the favelas of Brazil or the self-built construction systems in Mexico, where community work, inventiveness and improvisation, although marked by necessity, create the possibility of housing, even if temporary. The work also makes reference to Helio Oiticica and the Mangueira samba school, using the colors green and pink.

One of the problems of living together, according to Barthes, is what he calls finding and regulating the critical distance, beyond and under which a crisis would occur. If a person must travel to an antipode in order to find themself and, within an almost radical difference, find profoundly similar aspects, the exhibition proposes that the idea of real and physical distance can be rethought from another perspective that involves affectivity and desire, a subjective distance that, depending on the discourses of power, can be shortened or widened.

In this sense, it is no longer a question of seeking an ideal of unity, but duality becomes a call to multiplicity. Only when multiplicity and difference are celebrated in living together, maybe some moments of happiness, even if ephemeral, can be possible.

How to Be Happy Together? is on display until April 13, 2025 at Para Site.

Camila Gonzatto is an editor at C&AL.

Translation: Zoë Perry