Prologue to a precarious monument. Carlos Basualdo and Octavio Zaya

More than two years ago, the Reina Sofia Museum convened a group of curators to invite us to design the project for an exhibition aimed at mapping the vast territory of art produced in Latin America in the twentieth century. (…)

Sleep eztétyka is the title of the second manifesto by Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the founding members of the so-called Cinema Novo in Brazil. The manifesto was written in 1971, to be presented to students at Columbia University in New York.

Like Rocha's previous manifesto Eztétyka del hambre (...) Rocha expresses in his text a profound distrust of instrumental reason, formulating the need to conceive a thought capable of integrating in its positivity what is commonly known as irrationalism. In his text Rocha affirms, among other things, that the true enemy of revolutionary art is Cartesian reason and therefore his objective will be to transcend it into the space of the oneiric. "Revolutionary art must be a magic capable of bewitching man to such an extent that he can no longer bear to live in this absurd reality." (...)

Rocha embodied like few others the ideology that this exhibition intends to honor: he was at once an avant-garde artist, a political activist, an ardent defender of the integration of the subconscious, and, above all, a visionary for whom there were no boundaries between art and politics, between the public sphere and his private life, between his country and his person. (...)

The story of another of its protagonists was chosen as a guiding thread: Enrique Dussel, the Argentine philosopher and member of the group of intellectuals who formulated Liberation Theory at the end of the 1970s, perhaps one of the most powerful philosophical movements produced in the subcontinent in the entire century. Liberation Theory emerged in the context of a materialist and existential reading of the New Testament. Enunciated by a group of thinkers from several of the subcontinent's countries, it crystallized in part the intellectual aspirations of many of its most progressive cultural producers. Its original materialistic eschatology, its mystical resonances and its existential anchorage were incredibly seductive and stimulating for a whole generation of artists and thinkers. (…)

If an art exhibition could be considered a kind of precarious monument, we would like to think that the "Eztétyca del sueño" is our succinct homage to that generation that conceived politics in aesthetic terms and aesthetics in existential terms. (...)

Eztétyka del sueño. Manifesto. Glauber Rocha

(...) The Indian and black roots of the Latin American people must be understood as the only developed force of this continent. Our middle and bourgeois classes are decadent caricatures of the colonizing societies.

Popular culture will always be a relative manifestation when not only inspiring an art created by artists still suffocated by bourgeois reason.

Popular culture is not what is technically called folklore, but popular language in permanent historical rebellion.

The encounter of revolutionaries detached from bourgeois reason with the most significant structures of this popular culture will always be the first configuration of a new revolutionary sign.

Sleep is the only right that cannot be prohibited (...)

Borges, overcoming this reality, wrote the most liberating unrealities of our time. His aesthetics is that of the dream. For me it is a spiritual illumination that contributed to expand my Afro-Indian sensibility in the direction of the original myths of my race. This race, poor and apparently without destiny, elaborates in mysticism its moment of freedom. The Afro-Indian gods will deny the colonizing mysticism of Catholicism, which is the sorcery of repression and moral redemption of the rich.

I don't justify or explain my dream because it is born of an increasing intimacy with the subject of my films, the natural meaning of my life".