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In the setting of this now disused military fort, which in the 19th century formed part of the defenses of the city of Lyon, we have been invited to develop an exhibition relating to the contemporary art scene in Argentina.

The military architecture of the Fort is a signal of both entrenchment and the frontier, with its connotations of isolation and confinement. This site made us think of the Argentinean artist Graciela Carnevale and of her action Encierro1: At the official opening of her exhibition at Rosario in October 1968, she locked the public into the gallery premises for over an hour. This militant action came to an end thanks ... to outside help, in the form of a passer-by who broke the window. Once the public had been set free, the artist handed out a pamphlet to them recounting the experience of imprisonment and participation they had been forced to undergo, while at the same time clarifying the aim of her action, namely to heighten awareness on the part of the public of the violence that is practiced daily: 'We passively submit through fear, connivance, complicity to every level of violence', from the subtlest and most degrading - the media influencing our thinking - to the most deplorable acts perpetrated by 'a society directed at creating passive creatures' and 'denying the possibility of change'2.

This artistic action echoed the Argentinean situation and the political instability of the southern part of the American continent, then under the yoke of dictatorial governments 3, as well as the wave of popular protest marking the end of that decade in the West, which spread opposition to authoritarian regimes.

The special identity of the location and this outstanding event in Argentinean artistic life are the basis for our line of thought about the changes in the power structures that continue for a large part to govern our daily lives; as Gilles Deleuze put it in an article dating from 1990, disciplinary societies have been replaced by societies of control 4. More than forty years after that event, we feel it is relevant for us to question the forms of resistance and criticism that persist and are evident within contemporary artistic aesthetic attitudes in Argentina, and South America more generally. Today these territories are mostly weakened by North-South bipolarity and the vertiginous gulfs between the wealth derived from the dominant economic paradigms. It is our intention here to describe how contemporary South American artists look at things, while elucidating what these unique territories enable us to perceive of the world, and what it is in personal stories that runs through collective history. Links and implicit correspondences are woven between the many different artistic approaches, so highlighting the signs of our contemporaneity.

Coup d'éclat makes reference to an unrehearsed decision to speak up that attracts attention; to be more precise, in the context of what we are offering, the expression is a reference to the gesture of that passer-by who freed the people shut in by Graciela Carnevale by breaking the gallery window. The artists brought together in this exhibition in their turn take up the baton to give us their view of the world, the coercive powers of political and economic issues, and the models the latter impose on individuals.

Ivan Argote, Carlos Garaicoa and Wilfredo Prieto, sometimes with irony, criticize the workings of the dominant systems and uncover their contradictions, through shifting the relationship to the power structures, diverting their symbols and decontextualizing their functions. Sebastián Díaz Morales and Mónica Heller set out to distance themselves from the media-influenced archetypes that govern the collective imagination and tend to deprive us of our own point of view. Marcela Armas, Aníbal Parada and Judi Werthein question the ambiguous role of the frontier and the separatist entrenchments that result from it, as well as the inequalities they guarantee. Juliana Iriart, Amalia Pica and Lorena Zilleruelo for their part question otherness, and the collective memory through which each person fashions his or her own identity.