1968: The Fire of Ideas

 

Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina, 1954) recovers photographs of social mobilisations of the 1960s, which he subsequently intervenes through painting and writing. With the exhibition El fuego de las ideas (The Fire of Ideas), Brodsky aims to bring the great social storm of that decade closer and more tangible to a wider public. The aura of the archive and the recovery of memory are two constants that run through Brodsky's work since his beginnings, when he presented the ESMA archive at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. The artist's strategy of intervention of archive photographs has its origins in the work he produced in 1996 entitled The Class, which has become an iconic work in his career and was recently exhibited at the MET in New York. It is a work based on a 1967 photograph of the artist's class at the Colegio Nacional in Buenos Aires, which he resized and wrote some texts on, thus pointing to those classmates who disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship.