“Manifestación” has a metaphysical significance for Malba, an institution dedicated to Latin American art. In the 1930s, Berni opened a new horizon for Argentine art with the New Realism. This theoretical support sustains and links “Manifestación” to a large part of the works exhibited in this museum. In Paris, Berni had found a personal style within surrealism. He was only 25 when he returned to Argentina and discovered the crisis, unemployment, and misery. He then rethought his position as an artist. The dramatic experience induced him to found the New Realism, a movement connected to social events.

Ninety years after the first public appearance of Antonio Berni's “Manifestación”, the Mondongo duo presented a remake in plasticine, together with a tondo and a site-specific installation. It is a tondo de la Villa II, a circular piece, also in plasticine, two meters in diameter that deals with scenes from the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Dharavi (Bombay, India), and Rio de Janeiro. To reach the works, first, you can cross or go around a site-specific installation, which recreates the aesthetics of precarious housing, made of sheet metal and wood, more in the style of emergency settlements like those that today are built in the land seizures than in a villa, but in this case, they refer to the houses that were built in the first half of the twentieth century.

This decision of aesthetic proposal does not go unnoticed and is proposed as an invitation to debate. The fact that it takes place in a private museum and not in a public one, in one of the most expensive areas of Buenos Aires, will be an argument for both sides because while some will see it as a dispiriting gesture at a time of enormous social injustice, for others it will be precisely these characteristics that make it the ideal space to highlight an inescapable reality.

This exhibition goes beyond the commemorative, as it once again brings into discussion the role that art can play. The theme of Manifestación continues to be valid, and that is beyond discussion. One only needs to go out in the street, be attentive to the news, or even scroll through that construct of subjectivities that are the social networks, to understand that the piece was extended in national history until the present. And this remake of Mondongo, at this moment in history, proves it. Due to the cyclical nature of Argentina, the reversion of the duo formed by Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha, made in high relief format, is presented in a social context with points in common with the original: with half of the country under the poverty line, protests and violence in front of Congress, to name a few.