CONTEXT COLLAPSE
On Ana Gallardo’s “Tembló acá un delirio”
Artforum,
2025
By Fabiola Iza and Florencia Portocarrero
LAST YEAR’S COMMOTION surrounding Ana Gallardo’s exhibition “Tembló acá un delirio” (A Delirium Trembled Here) at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) demonstrates the challenges caused by the continued absorption of socially engaged art into the public sphere. Participatory art has always had to contend with risks in its orchestration and its reception—a function of its character bridging (or confronting) various publics. Today, these hurdles are now compounded by the circumstances of a mediatized, globalized present in which artworks are readily circulated and recontextualized online—made hyper-visible through social media and simultaneously flattened by the internet’s immediacy.
Gallardo’s work begins with the personal stories, both others’ and her own, that she collects to reveal the structural violence woven into the lives of women in Latin America. She focuses on emotions—anger, shame, resentment—that have been historically punished, suppressed, and deemed counterproductive by capitalist society. Her works, often multimedia projects incorporating oral and participatory research, are the result of a deep investment in local feminist movements and her commitment to shedding light on women’s inner lives as embedded within family, work, and artistic constellations.
Over the past fifteen years, Gallardo—an Argentinian transplant to Mexico City—has enjoyed considerable recognition in the Spanish-speaking realm, showing in biennials and receiving accolades from organizations in Mexico, Argentina, and the United States; in 2022, she was awarded the Julius Baer Art Prize for Latin American Female Artists. The esteem in which she is held, along with her rigorous commitment to feminist causes in her region, made it even more surprising when, last year, her exhibition unleashed a wave of collective outrage after it was shown in Mexico City. The clamor speaks to broader issues, such as the pitfalls of experiencing works online without adequate contextualization, which exacerbates a tendency for durational projects, such as Gallardo’s—whatever flaws they have—to be simplified and misjudged.
Around 2010, Gallardo, who is sixty-seven, started to self-identify as an “old woman,” using the term consistently and publicly. Since 2003, she has been collaborating with elderly people to confront the many anxieties of old age, such as death, loneliness, social alienation, and invisibility. For instance, in Escuela de envejecer (School of Aging), 2008–24, she sets up temporary encounters among retired or retiree-age women, often from working-class backgrounds, who impart skills that are (for most) usually relegated to hobbies, such as gardening, singing, and dancing. After a life devoted to (re)productive labor, it’s empowering to do something as an amateur—to learn to sing, or take painting lessons—beyond the dictates of utility demanded by society. Indeed, for many of Gallardo’s participants, motherhood and other versions of feminized labor were what got in the way of nonproductive work; old age was the only remaining time for them to realize aspirations that previously had been discouraged or discarded.
For Gallardo, School of Aging—an informal, temporary, and roving “school”—has involved years of sustained community-building. The intergenerational import of this project (exhibited within the public programming of cultural institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires [2015–16]; Centro Cultural Parque de España, Santa Fe, Argentina [2016]; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City [2018], among others) reflects Gallardo’s aim to politicize old age instead of conceiving it as a disempowered state of disability or decay.
In March 2024, Gallardo opened “A Delirium Trembled Here” at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid. Here, Gallardo’s work was represented eclectically: Clay sculptures stood alongside paintings with muted palettes and mournful figurations focusing on her mother’s unsuccessful ambition to paint professionally. Videos documenting Gallardo’s participatory initiatives across Latin America were shown with short films, sound works, and text-based pieces. According to the press release, the exhibition arose from the artist’s desire to catalyze a public grieving process related to the open wound of gender violence, and to channel the resentment and vengefulness that Gallardo faced and witnessed during her years of collaborating with women in the Spanish-speaking world.
The Madrid show opened and closed without incident, but two months after the show’s August 2024 arrival in Mexico City, a barrage of collective rage was unleashed: In October, Casa Xochiquetzal, a shelter for elder female sex workers located in a disadvantaged neighborhood in the Mexican capital, issued a statement criticizing the piece Extracto para un fracasado proyecto, 2011–24 (Excerpt for a Failed Project, 2011–24), for revictimizing the women in the shelter’s care.
Excerpt for a Failed Project originated from an open-ended collaboration that Gallardo sought to establish with the shelter-cum–nursing home in 2011. As the title hints, the relationship was plagued with disagreements, and the artist soon abandoned her original idea for a collaboration with the organization. But Gallardo clandestinely documented her experience there; in the exhibition, a short, lo-fi video shows her hands slowly caressing those of Estela, an ailing senior citizen and former street worker who lived at Casa Xochiquetzal. The video was paired with a monumental text piece, hand-chiseled on a wall by Gallardo: an autobiographical testimony in which she acknowledges the limits of her practice by confronting, with striking intensity, the contradictory emotions—sadness, rage, and even disgust—that arose while Estela was in her care.
Physically demanding to execute and cathartic in its effect, the wall piece relates the story of Gallardo’s going to the shelter to help sex workers, then realizing she was in over her head after observing the abhorrent conditions in which Estela lived. The text contains many nuances; it is confessional and performative, with notes of affection and intimacy. But palpable is the artist’s visceral anger at the entire situation, culminating in her overwhelmed body’s physical reaction to what she saw. Throughout, Gallardo refers to Estela and to the director of Casa Xochiquetzal with loaded terms such as vieja puta (old whore) and hija de puta (bitch), respectively. While both terms are clearly derogatory, Gallardo uses them rhetorically: to unburden her rage and transfer it, unfiltered, to the audience, and to criticize (via that same rage) the normalized violence enacted upon people who make sex their trade.
Soon after the work was shown in Mexico, sex workers and activists mounted protests and graffitied MUAC’s entrance and esplanade. User-adjudicators took to social media, coming down against Gallardo with a polarizing logic of denunciation. The situation soon went viral and escalated, leading to the exhibition’s temporary closure; eventually, Excerpt for a Failed Project was de-installed. The case was written up in the Mexican media with indignation (primarily highlighting the work’s political incorrectness), and countless local outlets derided Gallardo with xenophobic condescension. In a single swoop, the artist’s several decades of work were reduced to one cause célèbre, condemned as an infelicitous and abrasive example of social abuse put down to, among other reasons, Gallardo’s ignorance of her privileged place of enunciation within the complex Mexican social fabric—as a foreign, white, heterosexual, cisgender woman. In the process, her work was stripped of the many layers of contextualization that institutions provide through curatorial texts, adjacent artworks, and their broader programs.
Much of the criticism voiced by the staff of Casa Xochiquetzal is valid. For over eighteen years, the shelter has struggled to provide former sex workers with decent living conditions. The artist’s work insulted their labor through a deeply partial account that misrepresented their commitment. In addition, Estela apparently had never given her consent to be filmed (she died before the video became part of the artwork). These ethical missteps were aggravated by Gallardo’s artistic choices, and by the way she uncritically blended artistic strategies of social practice, autofiction, and autoethnography. Each mode was central to the artist’s practice at different stages of her career, but here it led to a jarring result: Gallardo mistook her real-life collaborators as characters within an autofictional narrative. This approach overstepped the crucial boundary between artistic representation and the realities lived by the people she hoped would be her collaborators.
Still, there’s a sense in which much of the furor has less to do with Gallardo than with a viewership that, turning against the artist and unfamiliar with her work’s context, denounced her based on a partial misunderstanding of social practice art. The work’s rhetorical undertones were lost after an irascible public (including many people who had witnessed the outrage through social media but had not themselves seen the work) reduced the project to an instance of defamation stemming from the power imbalances between the artist and Estela. Scattered images filtered through social media obscured Gallardo’s real history of sustained engagement with some of the demographics that now turned against her.
Social practice art is a relatively new fixture in Latin American museums. Rooted in activism and a tradition of political dissent, social practice art has historically been made and shown far afield from the region’s large public institutions. As a result, museum viewers still tend to lack a generally accepted, legible criterion by which to judge art like Gallardo’s. Many visitors remain baffled by such art and could make sense of Excerpt for a Failed Project only as social work tout court—expecting the project to measurably improve the conditions of the collaborators but disregarding the work’s aesthetic component and its use of fiction and performance (however problematic). Because of such misreadings, even well-intentioned artists are accused of reaffirming an asymmetry of power between themselves and the marginalized groups they engage, allegations against them fanning the fire of outrage.
This is not to say that such works lack precedent. Key studies of socially engaged practices have identified early examples across Latin America from the 1960s onward. In her 2012 book Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop delves into the avant-garde circuits of Buenos Aires, finding examples of what she calls “antagonistic” encounters. Alexander Alberro’s Abstraction in Reverse (2017) also explores the spectatorial reconfiguration of a new kind of nonfigurative, interactive art in Latin America at the mid-twentieth century. But in the 1990s, when social practice art was gaining traction within European museums (especially in the United Kingdom), most Latin American institutions were ignoring that development, which remained limited to underground networks. Social practice art in Latin America existed mainly through the efforts of small, noncommercial, artist-run initiatives within the fractious context of political agitation and protest. These militant and self-organized practices often left behind only scant documentation. At the same time, the region’s large museums mainly focused on works that still remained rooted within a modernist, object-bound tradition. Social practice art never found fertile ground within the region’s state-run institutional landscape. What happened at MUAC may well be a belated, yet somewhat unsurprising, outcome of that history.
How can we reintegrate the different genealogies of social practice art? In her 2019 book L’Art en commun: Réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique (Art in Common: To Reinvent Collective Forms Under a Democratic Context), Estelle Zhong Mengual proposes the phrase “art in common” to sidestep the anglophone world’s understanding of participatory and social practice art and emphasize that art’s double scope as both aesthetic and political. The promise of successful social practice art is the creation of collectivity via the sharing of knowledge, experience, symbols, rituals, communities, goods, and spaces managed collaboratively. The irony is that Gallardo’s career has many positive examples of what Zhong Mengual calls “art in common.” If Gallardo’s Excerpt for a Failed Project went wrong, the key question is on what grounds: it was unsuccessful as an artistic collaboration, not as social work, because it did not deliver on its promise of collectivity. That might be why Gallardo titled it a “failed project.”
It is easy to adopt a politically correct stance from behind the protective veil of a screen, engaging with the world only digitally. In contrast, for decades, Gallardo has ventured into the messy, uncontrollable political realities of Latin America. The exaggerated backlash she faced underscores the current simulacra of political action: symbolic, often inconsequential gestures of “clicktivism,” such as sharing socially conscious posts, adopting specific icons, or policing others’ behavior. This theater of appearances gains legitimacy by appropriating the language of identity politics. The Gallardo case is emblematic not only of how art is now consumed—fragmented, decontextualized, and subject to algorithmic distortion and amplification—but also of a conservative turn disguised as political correctness.
The digital age has reconfigured the reception of all art, but perhaps socially engaged art most of all. While painting experiences a boom thanks to its shareable nature, other practices are suffering from hermeneutic reduction as images and words are taken at face value. Gallardo’s political aim—turning art into a form of direct participation—was deployed against her. The fracas around Excerpt for a Failed Project points to the grim current state of the internet—in particular social media, which reveals itself as a flawed participatory medium.