Ramiro Chaves & Manimas

The starting point for my recent work is a collaboration I started with a collective. We call ourselves Manimas. María, Daniel, Bernardo, Eduardo and I.

They are four siblings between 8 and 13 years old. I am the only adult of the group.

Sometimes I work as a teacher, other times I serve as the spokesperson of the group, but we almost always understand and treat one another as peers. María, Bernardo and Eduardo are deaf. Daniel and I aren’t. Bernardo and Eduardo are twins. Our main activity together is art. Our media include drawing, photography and sculpture. Parallel to our practice we do other activities together: playful, pedagogical and social activities, as well as sports — archery in particular.

Sometimes we collaborate with other artists and cultural and pedagogical institutions. We’ve worked together since 2015.

Nieso Niesotro is a veiled reference to two terms used by Saint John of the Cross in his work, The Ascent of Mount Carmel. These words are presented as marks in this symbolic, mystical and mountainous landscape and they also work as negations to earthly and heavenly possessions in relation to the choice of a central spiritual path. This allusion to the mystical is also a vehicle and an excuse to propose a secular playfulness with a child-like approach to reality in order to collaborate and work as MANIMAS. The poetic reference is then an attempt to find words and images that can guide the spirit of our work as a group.

Nieso Niesotro is also a conceptual game that represents different dualities, tensions and in some cases, nothing at all. The result is a brute visual exercise influenced by multiple relations, references and interests; the individual and the collective, adulthood and infancy, siblinghood, feminine and masculine, the conscious and the automatic; it can be a river or a lake, or a lake that might become a valley, a hurricane and an earthquake, the beginning of language but also the limits of language, the constructive and the destructive, control and chaos, history and form and all that is full and also emptiness and whats empty in others.

The work itself oscillates between drawing and photography, exploring the relationship between materials, techniques and gestures that creates all sorts of potential haptic possibilities within our practice.

As a group, we haven’t determined the reach or scope of our process, but we understand that in the worst case scenario, the work we develop serves as a document and as evidence of our own learning process, our collective un-learning and our coexistence; our togetherness, one in which all of our personal imagery blends and is populated by monsters and cochlear implants, fish and architecture, hands, dreams and random non sensical abstractions. We believe that in this continuous exercise of ideas and self references lies a strong political tool.

Ramiro Chaves Feb. 2018

Presented by Galería Agustina Ferreyra