The North will not be above, everything will be South (2011)

​

These banners were not fleeting. They remained hanging for months, sometimes years, until new elections covered them or made them disappear. They were the political skin of a university building: layers of slogans, frozen shouts, struggles sedimented. A material palimpsest where the remains of a community’s recent history could be read.

​

My gesture was to peel off a fragment of that skin and displace it into another context. I interrupted the institutional cycle in which, after each election, the student groups would tear down their posters or they would be removed by cleaning staff. I collected those traces before their disappearance and installed them in a museum, dislocating their original function.

​

Exhibited in Oslo in 2011, during the bicentennial celebration of the University’s foundation, these student banners from the Global South became an inverted mirror: they reminded us that universities are not only temples of knowledge but also arenas of conflict, where democracy is written not in marble but on painted paper, pasted with glue, torn down and rewritten again.

​

The work does not transform slogans into art: it displaces them. What was destined to be hallway noise becomes a monument. What seemed local, minor, and circumstantial becomes universal, major, and enduring. In this way, the banners speak not only of a faculty in Buenos Aires: they speak of politics as endless writing, of memory as overlapping layers, and of art as the place where those traces can become visible to other worlds.