Suite Panamericana

In the summer of 2006, artist Pablo Helguera drove from Alaska to Chile as part of an art project entitled The School of Panamerican Unrest. The four-month journey included a wide variety of activities ranging from pedagogical experiments to activist gestures, resulting in collectively written declarations, a video documentary, and multiple other works. Out of its various outcomes, Suite Panamericana remains the most personal account of the artist’s journey. This collection of collages made out of images and texts of education manuals and history books oscillates between an image poem and a cryptic travelogue. Helguera regards the suite as operating with the internal logic similar to a dream sequence with fragmentary, if recurring, questions, affirmations, and obsessions. Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living in New York. He is the author of several books including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, The Boy Inside the Letter, The Juvenal Players, Theatrum Anatomicum (and other Performance Lectures) What in the World, and UrA?onstelaii.