"In Spanish, the word “mondongo” means tripe, or the lining of a cow’s stomach. The word “Mondongo” is also a stew we love, and we are like three witches stirring it up in a cauldron: revolving and expecting and trying and experimenting; attempting to alchemize, to distill, and ooze all the chaos, and the all possible “all-ness” in it . . . " — Mondongo, 2008 (from the Mondongo Manifesto)
Mondongo is the internationally recognized Argentine artist collective comprised of Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Agustina Picasso. In their transgressive yet celebratory work, Mondongo explore the mystery and depth of the human psyche as a way to break through chaos to creativity and unfettered imagination.
In Mondongo’s world all is up for deconstructive terrorism—the miserable ambitions of the ego, social hypocrisy, the slight satisfactions of sex, what’s left of the family, the murderous ideology of a victim satiated world.
The amount of work Mondongo put into each piece is extensive, and both intricate and beautiful. They are literally paintings without paint—using such materials as thread, beads, plasticine, cookies, and glitter, to name of few. Production is slow and deliberate as the material and concept are intricately jelled: the materials used as metaphorical adjuncts to the concepts.
As critic and author Kevin Power comments in his essay, “Mondongoing the World,”
Formed in 1999, Mondongo have since earned their particular place in the ebullience of Argentinean art: an iconoclastic, punk, imaginatively inventive, sharply particular, personal, laid-back look at life—a “do what you like” situation from a ground zero world loaded with elements from a grotesque farce.
Mondongo’s work is a dark vision but not a moralistic one. They are
laconic commentators who like the rest of us have taken about as much as they can and who seethe inside but without burning up their energies since there is a long day ahead. All of us need to find the measures of his or her own dance, stretch out in time, fill the curve, smile. There is an ethical positioning but no attempt at facile solutions, no belief structure to hold on to, and as a result the work becomes even more desperate, and often the vomit surges up and explodes as a calculated image, suspended in time, but ready to melt or quickly consumed like everything else, yet at that last minute it twists away and sticks in the mind.
