Memorial for intersection #2

Amalia Pica

year born: 1978

gender: female

nationality: Argentine

Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013). When read as A intersection B intersection C, this piece references the fact that, during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83), the military junta forbade Venn diagrams, and the related concept of intersection, from being taught in elementary schools, because they were viewed as potentially subversive. In A ? B ? C , Pica invited performers to manipulate translucent, colored Perspex shapes, producing new configurations that used the idea of intersection to reimagine collaboration and community. This work enacts the very role that its title suggests, asking how a performance can become a sculpture. The structure transforms the original human performative gestures into cold, stylized frames that indeed memorialize something that was once living. If most memorials are monuments—that is, embedded in rich substrata of symbolic references—then Memorials for intersections are delicate and literal tributes to the truisms of math. Borrowing from minimalist and constructivist traditions, the memorials are simple, almost sophomoric, in the directness of their shapes and colors. While fixed in place, the transparent geometric panels hanging on the frame shift in tone throughout the day, responding to changes in light and reverberating with the live actions that led to their conception.

Amalia Pica describes herself as an outsider, in the sense that she is an Argentine artist living and working in an art world that is still largely dominated by the same nations that colonized the globe centuries ago. But Pica is not the kind of outsider who stands by sullenly and criticizes; she’s more like the quirky character spouting wit and wisdom from the peripheries of the stage. Her works often engage with the idea of being out of place and out of time—staging the aftermath of a celebration rather than the party itself, for example—all the while maintaining an attitude of bemused observation.