Page 95 - Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!

Emergency! Let us drink the new wine, together! Catalina Mena
The twenties of the 20th century, end of the first war. Moment of uncertainty and fall. The anachronistic echo of a now is heard. The world has collapsed and the hope of a possible future is still fragile in the air. Ten million dead weigh on recent memory, then they will multiply. They are numbers. (The images are under threat).
A group of artists, under the label of Surrealism, join forces with the desire to survive the mad rationality of war. The urgency is to unite to generate a collective work that is a game, a poem, a provocation against the prevailing logic and its destructive mandates. It is about trying out other ways of saying, combining phrases and drawings according to random mechanisms, obeying the rhythm of the unconscious. Each one performs his creative action hiding it from the next one, so that no one is conditioned by the previous gesture. In this way, actions are added to form a larger work, chaotic in its structure. From there emerges a first phrase with no apparent meaning, but full of resonances: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”. (The evangelists are heard retelling The Last Supper).
Language builds the world. Poetry is its raw word.
André Breton, who carries the rod, says that the extravagant fun has allowed them to “escape from self-criticism and free the metaphorical activity of the mind.”
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March 2020. (The number 20, which is repeated in this story, is the number of the end). The artist alys longley, from New Zealand, and the artist Máximo Corvalán, from Chile, are planning to develop a project together.
A global pandemic is declared, confinement is decreed, the project is suspended. Time stands still, uncertainty settles in, the idea of an end looms. The dead are numbers (the images are under threat).
alys and Máximo continue the dialogue at a distance; their messages cross the space. They think of the others, of all those artists with whom they have maintained an affective bond, who are scattered in different parts of the world, each one locked up at home. Staying in touch is a form of resistance.
This is how this fiction begins. They rehearse modes of connection mediated by artistic desire. More than 60 artists, from all continents, are linked to create a series of analog and digital works, crossing borders and circumventing controls. The gesture summons the emergency. Art as a utopia of communion. Bodies are saved from absence.
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