Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, discusses the importance of modernist ideals in Latin America, relating their failure to solve its social and economic problems. He describes how, over the past ten years, artists such as Runo Lagomarsino have addressed these issues in their work. Lagomarsino’s exhibition work ContraTiempos features images of cracks in the pavement of São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park that suggest the outline of the South American subcontinent—a metaphor, perhaps, for modernism’s flaws. [June 2014]