Carlos Capelán’s installations include texts expressed as proclamations presented under the acronym PCLA (r): Post Colonial Liberation Army (re materialización). The Uruguayan artist’s work alludes to and emulates manifestos produced by critical and aggressive socio-political movements. In his written analyses, Capelán expresses his thoughts about the contemporary world as they apply to his art. In this case, he refers to the middle classes and the world-wide reach of our globalized technocracy.

This document by Carlos Capelán (b. 1948) is part of an extensive series of proclamation-works in which the artist uses written language (including substantial doses of absurdity, irony, and humor) to express his critical view of contemporary reality. He focuses on the poor and the needy, a segment of society that is marginalized from the multicultural migrations and movements taking place in the globalized world, and on the middle classes’ ignorance of this situation and selfish response to it. Beginning with the title of the work, “Ética y los Otros” [Ethics and the Others], Capelán is in sync with modernist philosophical ideas when he lays out moral challenges that pit personal interest against encountering “the other.” He implies that personal identity and otherness must be integrated, and suggests that, rather than striving for some kind of fusion with others, an overall union should be fostered, one that can dismantle the current (and historical) relationships that govern power and submissiveness. In his critique, the Uruguayan artist describes art as a highly visible agent of that widespread world platform.

As he did in all his previous proclamations—still using the acronym PCLA (r): Post Colonial Liberation Army (re materialización)—Capelán advocates assuming and transforming old interpersonal canons via deconstruction or re-materialization. His proposal hints at a humanizing trend toward a new beginning, which includes all forms of life on the planet. The document voices a harsh critique of contemporary self-satisfied societies, with a special focus on the middle class that does nothing but gaze at itself. Capelán describes that class’s remaining conformism, using the local meaning of the word “mojigatería” [straitlaced], a term that connotes a conventional morality devoid of principles. He is highly critical of middle classes of that ilk, and insists, almost obsessively, that that segment of society’s only goal is to acquire and possess things. He ends by saying that middle classes everywhere in the world have no empathy toward others and are solely focused on their single goal of acquisition and distraction.