This exhibition by artist Fredy Rangel (Guatemala, 1977) brings together the results of an artistic investigation he has been conducting since 2014, inquiring into the power relations that become visible in urban spaces, where paths are articulated and behavioral patterns are created based on, as Foucault would say, restrictive biopolitics of behaviors and psyches.

Fredy Rangel's praxis has always been characterized by a profound analysis of psychosocial phenomena and the different ways in which people interact with urban space. Using the idea of "drifting", understood as the displacements that the artist makes through public spaces, streets and neighborhoods of the city, always in a state of activated consciousness, Rangel creates poetics based on journeys where he collects information, takes notes, photographs and subtracts objects and other abandoned materials.

Through small assemblages, graphic works and diverse installations with a high level of abstraction, the artist's strategy consists of disarticulating the visible signs of authority, those lines demarcated to control both vehicular traffic and the behavior of local inhabitants, in order to construct new devices that subvert the old, already internalized and normalized meanings. From the red lines of the curbs or sidewalk edges, these limits are blurred, sometimes clear, sometimes blurred and many times, destroyed in the materiality of its medium. It is important to point out that these demarcation lines are part of an international signage, with a conventional use of color, where red indicates absolute prohibition, in contrast to white and yellow, which indicate more open or partially conditioned operations. In a country with a history of great repression and violence, the predilection for red on the streets indicates the existence of an exertion of authority focused on restriction, even for something so banal and quotidian. However, these demarcation lines, which are proposed as disciplinary forms of the body and the psyche, are fragile, ephemeral and transitory.

 New epistemologies are always proposed from the field of art, alternative approaches to disarticulate conventions and look through the surface of reality. For this exhibition in particular, the works on display are based on a displaced and deterritorializing gaze, which seeks to question the operations that are produced on urban space from institutional powers, showing new lines of flight for thought. Fredy Rangel introduces us to a dissident psychogeography, proposing alternative cognitive and sensorial maps, alternative possible readings, and alternative frameworks for the collective imaginary. From an archeology of recovered objects and red lines, those notations of power that are disjointed and fractured, Rangel invites us to realize that the space of the city is also a psychological and emotive space, with a cartography in which nothing is neutral or casual.

 — Gladys Turner Bosso (Panamá, marzo de 2023)