Medio: Zafira MAG
Autor: Zafira Ais
Fecha: 26/07/2025
Fundación Larivière once again turns its focus to what is essential: the intersection of art, memory, and identity. Starting July 26, two exhibitions are presented in dialogue with one another, even though they come from different times and territories.
On the one hand, My Country Isn't Greece, the first anthological exhibition of Peruvian photographer Juan Enrique Bedoya, curated by Alexis Fabry, brings together more than 250 works that document and poeticize the marginal, the popular, and the vernacular. On the other, Archive 1995. Buenos Aires, Encounter with Thirty Artists, by Swiss photographer Gian Paolo Minelli and curated by Laura Buccellato, recovers a visual record of the Buenos Aires art scene of the 1990s.
Both exhibitions unfold a visual power that transcends the image: they are social essays in a poetic key, witnesses to a living archive.
My Country Is Not Greece: Bedoya’s Peru
With more than 250 photographs, Juan Enrique Bedoya’s exhibition (Lima, 1966) offers a sensitive and fierce journey through more than four decades of production. From his portraits of marginal figures in the 1980s to his essays on popular architecture and roadside signage, Bedoya records the world from an ethics and aesthetics of the periphery.
The exhibition’s title, taken from a poem by Luis Hernández, also gives its name to the bilingual book published by Ediciones Larivière, which includes texts by Oscar Malca, Rodrigo Quijano, Jaime Bedoya, and the artist himself. Organized into twelve chapters, it combines photography, memory, and critical engagement with the present.
Bedoya grew up in 1970s Lima, surrounded by Mexican comics, matinee monsters, and coups d’état. His first camera was a Kodak Brownie Fiesta 3, a childhood gift that sparked his desire to document the invisible. Later, together with his brother, he worked at Caretas magazine, photographing impersonators, child bullfighters, and figures on the social margins.
Many of his images, developed in his own darkroom, bring together the popular and the fantastic: collages, oil bromides, dioramas, shields, nocturnal portraits, and photo-novels. Among the highlighted works is his 1989 series where bolero and the law, police officers and showgirls, shadow and desire coexist.
1995 Archives: portraying a scene
In Hall 2 of the Foundation, Archive 1995. Buenos Aires, Encounter with Thirty Artists, by Gian Paolo Minelli, is on view. The exhibition reconstructs a Buenos Aires summer three decades ago, when the young Swiss photographer portrayed artists such as Pablo Suárez, Marta Minujín, Pablo Siquier, Marcelo Pombo, and Miguel Harte.
He photographed them in their studios or in spaces chosen for their symbolic power, using a 10×12 cm plate camera and exposures lasting two to three minutes. The result is a series of performative and intimate portraits that not only document key figures of the 1990s art scene but also capture the pulse of a city between two centuries.
Laura Buccellato’s curatorship—a key figure in Argentine art—highlights the intimacy of the archive and the political gesture of recovering the collective through the visual.
The camera as a sensitive archive
In times when everything is recorded but little is remembered, the cameras of Bedoya and Minelli once again offer us a lucid, human, and poetic gaze.
Between portraiture and denunciation, between the intimate and the epic, these two exhibitions offer an opportunity to think of art as a mirror of our cities, our bodies, and our histories.