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Book launch: The Words of Others

  • The Gallery at REDCAT 631 West 2nd Street Los Angeles, CA 90012 (map)
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Book Launch: The Words of Others at REDCAT
Sunday, October 22nd
4:30pm
REDCAT
631 W. 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

"The Words of Others" ("Palabras ajenas") is an anti-Vietnam War literary collage published by León Ferrari in Buenos Aires in 1967. Ferrari composed the piece by cutting and assembling texts and quotations from history books, literature, the Bible, and articles from newspapers and magazines. Written in the form of a dramatic script, "Palabras ajenas" is a fundamental piece of political art that attempts to mobilize the audience's political consciousness, denouncing the complicity between the major political players of the 20th century and the history of colonialism.

Ferrari's literary collages attempt to undermine the progressive and linear construction of history in an experiment that recalls the work of authors like Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.

Ruth Estévez, director of the gallery at REDCAT, and curator of the exhibition "The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War," will lead a discussion with Jen Hofer, translator, and Carmen Amengual, researcher, about the process behind the making of this piece, as well as the practice of collage as a political strategy in the work of Ferrari, and in the broader context of the 1960s and 1970s.

This lecture is part of the public programming for the exhibition "The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War."

The exhibition is part of the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

Major support for this exhibition is provided through grants from the Getty Foundation.

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