Sergio Vega and the vibrant experience of the south

In 1924, Walter Benjamin was attending a chaotic conference on the island of Capri when he crossed paths with the distinguished Russian actress and philosopher Asja Lãcis. The romance was immediate, and together they wrote Naples , an essay that inspired the video that Sergio Vega , an Argentine artist living in the United States, is presenting in the exhibition Labyrinths of Memory, at the opening of Bienalsur 2025 at MAMBO in Bogotá, Colombia.

Walter Benjamin in Naples is an audiovisual piece that explores “how the very idea of ​​the south is created from the perspectives of the north,” the artist tells Ñ .

–Why is this work relevant to Bienalsur?

–It attempts to establish axes between the different realities of the South, and doing so was an interesting challenge, which consisted of tracing the routes through Naples of Benjamin, known for having established the notion of profane illumination , that is, urban situations in which a phenomenon of synchronization of different historical and philosophical realities occurs, leading to a conclusion that is experienced as an illumination .

–Was your meeting with Asja Lãcis an enlightenment in this regard?

–Yes, they met by chance, had a romance, and wrote this text together, in which they mount a critique of everyday, urban life in Naples. They are two thinkers from the north who articulate an idea of ​​the south and pass through channels that we already know today, but at that time. The ideas of the exotic, of a kind of liberation in the experience of being in the south. It's interesting how they articulate the notion of the porosity of the city in relation to the volcanic territory . Porosity articulates an urbanistic and critical vision of poverty, between day and night, between sleeping and being awake. In a way, all existential spaces are permeable, and that is very powerful when you are in Naples.

–There is another text by Benjamin that is inserted into the narrative of your work.

–Within this argument, there's another text, Hashish in Marseille , which he wrote as travel notes. When he was in the Mediterranean, he allowed himself things he wouldn't have in Paris or Berlin . When he went south, "the Indian" awakened in him, we would say; he allowed himself to experiment with drugs or spontaneously fall in love with someone and write a text with that person. A search for an almost mystical liberation that he found in the south.

–How do you read it from the perspective of prejudice?

–Yes, there are also stereotypes, traces of everything being chaotic, of nothing ever ending, of how these people live, how everything works, that question that people from the North always ask themselves about the South. But I also saw great admiration and respect for the freedom of being , of thinking, that people from the South have, which is not restricted by Protestant ethics or the philosophical visions of Nordic cultures.