We have never been modern, but modernism haunts us everywhere. Belonging to a destiny that we could not avoid, dominated by the technology that inhabits us, we are perpetually questioned by the modern spirit on the possible ways of being in the world. For the artist, modernism has meant the need to comment and speak on the void left by modern ideology, by the death of God, an impossible task that no one has ever assigned to them, a self-inflicted punishment, a voluntary exile in an unknown land that makes them perpetual strangers, a condition in which they survive with creativity. For the technocrat, expert in administration and control, modernism has meant prosperity, opportunities for expansion, for appropriation of public territory, for extraction of wealth from privileged panoptic control posts, being able to reign freely in the context of the new organizational and institutional order, in the context of alienation that the modern condition has produced. If for the artist modern reason is dialogue, correspondence, listening, for the technocrat it is classification, order and control, two rationalities that have given birth to two different legacies of European culture, creative critical thinking, and managerial bureaucratic thinking, which has often prevailed in the moments that matter. Modern technological superiority, which has fed the European delirium for a universal order, has configured the world in the form of a Cartesian plane, whose distinctive feature has been the straight line of demarcation, the same one that at the beginning of the 20th century traced the borders of nations, and consequently determined the destinies of peoples, decided at a table on the pages of atlases. These inorganic straight lines have cut the bodies of entire peoples into parts, according to the criteria of a geometrization of reality that in a few years would have become the most profound engineering of society operated by regime technocrats who, instead of operating on reality, have operated on language, signs and narratives, creating those monsters, paranoid consequences of the Enlightenment, in art personified by Greenbergish authoritarian modernisms. It is in the lineage of this ratio, paranoid and irresistible to the first-level technocrats, obsessed with the desire to categorize and control history, that has survived postmodernism and reincarnated in the decolonialism of recent years, that the exhibition Foreigners Everywhere wants to inscribe itself. A return to the solidity of modern classifications that, denying the liquidity and slipperiness of the surplus of meanings of reality, seek to configure an order defined by unassailable boundaries using the privileged position of the curator to influence and sediment it.

The representative cages are proudly presented, despite an increasingly fluid and mixed reality, crooked and complex. The concept of foreigner brings together in a coherent framework all the categories chosen in Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition. The curator proposes an interpretation of the word that includes all human beings, and then favors his own selection of specific categories presented in the exhibition, folk art, outsider, queer, indigenous. The categories folk and outsider art, historically imposed by Eurocentric cultural oligarchies, appear, in the context of contemporary art in 2024, reactionary. Recent chronicle has taught us how the personal, unique paths of artists who grew up outside of academies and on the margins of the market and institutions, from different social, mental and knowledge conditions, have been and will always be of a value that transcends the categories in which they have been relegated, useful only to stigmatize and reaffirm their subordinate status. Recognized by institutions and rewarded by collectors, they are today the undisputed protagonists of contemporary art, no longer called outsider or folk artists, but simply artists. Pedrosa’s gesture of recognition therefore, instead of emancipating, reaffirms, on the great cultural platform of the Biennale, ancient stigmas that time and tireless community work were slowly erasing. The queer category is called into question for its literal meaning, ‘strange’, which originates precisely in the word foreigner. This etymological connection offers reason for reflection and analysis. As always, all words acquire different meanings depending on the time and space in which they are used, depending on the context, and if queer was an offensive term in England in the 70s, at the same time in Germany it might not have been and if over the years it has been a symbol of gender inclusion, until recently gay was not considered queer, today there are those who imagine even cisgender people sensitive to the cause of fluid gender identity, worthy members of the queer community.

This inclusive fluidity is a precious characteristic that contrasts with a curatorial classificatory flatness that refers to a banalized common sense, driven by the desire to impose on reality that pre-established order on which it feeds, rejecting the evidence of the permeability of the concepts regimented in the proposed theses. I asked myself what the curator really wanted to affirm, beyond his good intentions, when he dedicated a section of Foreigners Everywhere to queer abstraction, yet another useless category, both a modernist and identitarian legacy, which summarizes the double ideological prison that produced in his thought the absence of relevant perspectives. His privileged institutional position brings with it the responsibility of his power, of his role as an influencer that is a reference for many, as is his narrative, a classificatory cage, in response to which I am reminded of the dissonant words of Paul B. Preciado in his famous speech Yo soy el monstruo que os hable, informe para una academia de psicoanalistas: «By freedom we mean going out, glimpsing a horizon, building a project, having the possibility, even for brief moments, to experience the radical community of all that is alive, of all energy, of all matter, beyond the hierarchical taxonomies that the history of humanity has invented». In these words, imbued with the traumas generated by modernism and the desperate attempt to escape from their consequences, there is all the emancipatory spirit of the subaltern. Art is a form of pre-categorical knowledge, its capital is of a symbolic order, it speaks of what we are not capable of precisely thematizing, which escapes the ideological scaffolding that wants to lend works meanings that are not there, artificial functional characteristics and access keys that reduce the potential for entrance and interpretation, which tend to transform them into market categories ready for immediate consumption.

Redemption comes from everything that artists put on display, their biographies that reveal to us how, in a world in which the self-subject is a social product of others, a personal path that does not coincide with the expectations of the other is always possible and necessary, and from their works, capable of resisting and transcending the ideological pressures of curators and the fetishizing ones of merchants. The artists present in the exhibition remind us that the courage of dissidence is recognizing the value of the real discard compared to the ideal image, an identical copy of an original that never existed, an identity chimera of lost paradises. An example for all is Manauara Clandestina capable of putting into play her being a body, in the name of the father and daughter, and her having a body, in technological and aesthetic expansion. A Migranta always in motion beyond herself, between the explosion of desires and the intimate embrace with the forest, between immersion in the liquid body and the thirst for the body’s liquid. In the face of the ahistorical narcissism of identity constructions that claim cohesion of absolute values, the artists’ response is infidelity to such values and the cultivation of the creative capacity to escape from these cages. To each new canon, expression of the pressures of nationalist, supremacist, racialized, geopolitical identity narratives, always corresponds alternatively a hidden treasure which resides on the margins, a lesson that is born in the resistance that refuses to conform to the imposition of the new order. The continuous struggle is against conforming to the expectations of the other, and passes through the acceptance of the constant state of inadequacy with respect to the (falsified) identity models in vogue at the moment. From the same text by Preciado: «We all have an identity. Or rather, no one has an identity. We all occupy a different place in a complex network of power relations. To be marked by an identity simply means not having the power to define one’s identity position as universal». Freedom is being in defect in the presence of the faith you don’t have, the desire you can’t afford, in defect with respect to the lack you should feel, the guilt you should have, the being you should become. The unbridgeable inadequacy of those who resist is a resistance that makes invisible, in an era in which is visible only the trait that traces those maps drawn in straight lines on the Cartesian plane within the invented boundaries of a reality made of pre-established forms, made to be forgotten.