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Title: Petit Larousse, o los ciegos y el brontosaurio (Petit Larousse, or The Blind Men and the Brontosaurus)
Date: 2018
Medium: digital collage
This is a collaborative work by Yamandú Cuevas, Julia Cuevas, Marta Villa, Mariana Fossatti, Mauricio Planel and Marcia Albuquerque. The work traveled online between Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Playa Verde and Solymar (Uruguay). Was made using analogue and digital techniques.
As collagists, we work with preexisting material extracted from diverse sources, like encyclopedias, dictionaries, popular magazines and illustrated reference works. It is a fascinating material to work with, but specially interesting for this exhibition, because it allows us to play with the traditional senses about what knowledge is and how it is represented, modifying the classic narratives that have been used to transmit it, in different times and contexts.
Our main source of images was a Larousse dictionary in Spanish, from 1985. Like every dictionary, it follows an alphabetical order, but such order is at the same time a disorder. When turning the pages we see countries, machines, animals, plants, symbols and maps mixed in a fascinating chaos. It's like a great collage.
This work is also a reference to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Different parts of the body of a brontosaurus (instead of an elephant) appear in each collage: the head, the trunk and the tail. In the same way that the blind men do, we perceive different parts of an unknown animal. Then it is necessary to share our individual perceptions in order to reach an agreement about what that animal is. And like the blind men in the parable, we tried, although will never be possible a single interpretation.
This work was created for the Wikimania 2018 "What is Knowledge?" Art Exhibition, curated by Siko Bouterse and Johnson.