The situation can be understood not as censoring an artwork, but as denying its very existence. This is how “Homage to Latin America,” the collaborative work by Alik Cavaliere and Emilio Scanavino for the 1971 XI São Paulo Biennial, can be re-examined today. From April 14th in Milan, the Emilio Scanavino Foundation and the Alik Cavaliere Artistic Center, in collaboration with Prometeogallery, are presenting this work during Milan Art Week.
What transpired in 1971 was more than just a missed exhibition. The artwork, duly shipped to Brazil following the official invitation from the Venice Biennale, was withdrawn before its opening. It was excluded from the catalog, and the artists’ names were removed. This act went beyond mere visibility; it aimed to erase its historical record, as if its presence needed to be neutralized before it could even become public.
In this context, the work by Cavaliere and Scanavino occupies a point of tension between artistic practice and the institutional system. This was at a time when the São Paulo Biennial, despite presenting itself as an international platform, operated within a climate marked by the Brazilian military dictatorship and diplomatic sensitivities. Italian participation, especially after their absence in 1969, was far from neutral.
It is significant that the artists were fully aware of this and chose to accept the invitation nonetheless. They created a work that sought no mediation but instead took an explicit stance from the outset. Cavaliere’s notes attest to this, stating that their action was correct and that the withdrawal of the artwork only confirmed it, shifting the work’s meaning from its exhibition to its political function.
The artwork itself is a large wall, approximately five meters by three, divided into 156 panels. It embodies the tension between Scanavino’s painterly grid and Cavaliere’s tangled bronze vegetal forms. These forms not only emerge from the surface but also break through and interrupt it, introducing a sculptural dimension that destabilizes the very structure of the image. However, the textual element is what determines the breaking point. Inscribed on that surface are the names of men who died for Latin American freedom. These names, gathered through a network of associations in Italy supporting political refugees and provided to the artists, transform the work into a concrete list, with each name marked by a trace of blood.
It is precisely this precision that made the work unacceptable. To name is to assume responsibility and make any form of neutralization impossible. This is why the decision to withdraw it was made within Italy, citing the avoidance of content deemed “extra-artistic”—a phrase that appears revealing in its ambiguity today.
The artists, moreover, were not interested in the work’s visibility or success but in its political function. Therefore, exhibiting it in a neutral setting like a gallery made little sense, as the work was conceived for a specific place and a precise situation: the São Paulo Biennial. It is from this awareness that the exhibition curators have questioned how to reactivate the work today, over fifty years after its withdrawal, without reducing it to a mere historical testament.
The Milanese project addresses this by introducing an additional element: a site-specific performance by Regina José Galindo, titled “Homage to Latin America – Veiling.” Scheduled for April 14th at 5 PM in the spaces of the Scanavino Foundation, access is by reservation, with limited entry in groups of forty people every five minutes for a total duration of approximately one hour. The exhibition will continue until June 14th and will subsequently host video documentation of the performance.
Galindo’s presence, whose work has consistently focused on the body as a site for the exposition of political violence, particularly in relation to the Guatemalan dictatorship, does not introduce a simple update. Instead, it brings the work back into a tension that still resonates today, connecting the names inscribed in 1971 with contemporary forms of violence.
In this way, the artwork ceases to be just an episode from the past and begins to question the present. It does so not so much for its content but for the gesture that generates it: the decision to name what could not be named.
However, a question remains open regarding the artwork’s location. While “Homage to Latin America” was intended for exhibition in South America, its current placement is inevitably provisional. This underscores the project and the hope of returning it to Brazil, restoring it to the context for which it was conceived and reopening a narrative that has never truly concluded.
