COLLECTIVE STATEMENT
The works featured in BARRIOS invoke, reclaim, and explode the notion of the “barrio” in order to reflect on community as experience and metaphor in Latino and Latin America. The exhibit focuses on a diverse social geography that has been shaped by empire, colonialism, race, and social inequality, and on the ways that language, religion and politics invite us to imagine and question lo común. The idea of ‘comunidad’ is an integral part of the Hispanic/Latino diaspora in the Americas. But community is often built in the tension between home and diaspora, between stable bonds and social precariousness, and representations of Latino communities are often composed through problematic frames. The exhibit, then, is conceived to reflect Latino subjects in the work of Latino photographers and interrogates how Latino and Latin American subjects are perceived, both within and without extended forms of community. The repertoire of images offers a two-tier visual tableau that encompasses work created in the U.S. and internationally, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti. BARRIOS also includes the vintage black and white work the collective’s members created in the South Bronx during the 1970s through 1990s, offering a unique look at the early formative work of these six accomplished visual artists. BARRIOS represents the largest selection of the collective’s work shown together to date.
The South Bronx. Known to all, understood by few. From the flickering mayhem of “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” in 1977, to the chants of “The South Bronx! The South South Bronx!” of KRS-ONE. The borough has brand recognition. But what’s being sold? We have all seen the images. Hell, back then, buses used to roll up Charlotte Street to show off the rubble to curious tourists. Hordes of shooters came up, too, making their reputation on the run. You can debate whether or not they discovered some essential visual truth during their forays into the Bronx. Some did. And some stayed, too, chronicling the borough’s rebound from despair and neglect. But some of us were here all along. These pictures are our history, told from inside the neighborhood and our hearts. They cover the borough and our emotions. They reflect the world we knew as home, a complicated place we tried to chronicle as best we could. Most of these images were shot in the early 1980s. Some were even shot in the same neighborhoods and blocks. For some of us, we crossed paths back then and did not even know it. But as luck – or fate – would have it, we met as adults, six Puerto Rican men who survived the crucible of our youths. And we have the pictures to prove it. This is our story, reclaimed. El Bron’, told by Seis del Sur.
— Conzo, Flores, González, Franco, Pagán, Reyes
Bronx, NY, 2015