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English texts —p
WITHIN THERE IS BUT ONE ABODE
Acknowledgments
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The sudden closure of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires on 19 March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic marked the advent of a new stage in its history. It began with a swift diagnosis: there was a need to get across to society that our institution had in the last seven years become so much more than a showroom for exhibitions. By March 2020, it was already a permanent space for research, a generator of excellence in the fields of art history, conservation, curatorship, production and reconstruction of works of art, and in book publishing. The Museo Moderno was also active in society, with a far-reaching network of links to educational institutions, health institutions, foundations and NGOs dedicated to people with disabilities and people on the autistic spectrum, on the one hand, and to the most diverse social organisations, public and private, on the other. This powerhouse of research and creation was already well-prepared to support the artistic and educational communities it interacts with daily to provide the general public with concrete responses through art, and to offer spiritual and symbolic refuge to a society in crisis. The groundwork was done, the professionals were in place; all we had to do was coordinate a convincing array of concrete, easy-to-access proposals. Faced with this challenge, we quickly recognised our shortcomings: the full scope of our institution was not reflected on its digital platforms. On top of this, we had to coordinate, motivate and protect a team of 130 professionals sensitive to isolation and working remotely. Nor did we forget our core beliefs: art is a tool for raising human awareness and transforming the world, and the artist is a powerful
agent of change, capable of conceiving the changes needed to bring about a better economic and social life.
We decided to put out some sensitive thinking amidst all the crisis and uncertainty, so we invited artists from the widest range of disciplines to draw up artistic responses about what we were living through in that unimaginable present. We also sought to activate concrete economic support strategies for the artistic, intellectual and educational communities so deeply affected by the crisis. #MuseoModernoEnCasa, the programme we launched on 6 April 2020, was conceived as an archive of the present, whose mission was to communicate and disseminate in real time content, ideas and works created by the artistic and educational communities in response to our invitation, reflecting on topics, ideas and situations we had identified as being urgent. Through this programme we called together – and paid for commissions with funds raised for that specific purpose – more than 400 artists, writers, actors, musicians and intellectuals, not just to share their thoughts and design workshops, courses, actions and debates, but to develop artistic content and create what we might conceptualise as a new kind of native content, generating more direct communication and greater participation and interaction across diverse audiences. We endeavoured to respond to the experiences of the new situation: confinement, screens, the disruption of time, environmental crisis, exacerbated racisms and discrimination, the need for silence, the links between art and health, and between art and the community, were some of the more than 25 digital content programmes we have since developed. 2020, then, was a year marked by trust: the trust of the Museo Moderno in Argentinian artists and the importance of communicating the ideas and propositions of the artistic community in the face of an experience of crisis, and the trust of every one of the 400 artists in our institution, whose professionals dedicated themselves to supporting, producing, financing and disseminating each idea and each project. The task was titanic, the result unimaginable, with more than eight million people actively involved in the Museo Moderno’s contents. It was an overwhelming joy to realise that, thanks to the digital universe, the physical walls of our Museum had become porous and permeable, and that we were gaining more and more ground across the country.
It was against this background of heroic efforts, trust and gratitude that the germ of the exhibition Adentro no hay más que una morada [Within There Is but One Abode] portrayed in this volume came into being between August
and September 2020. Our Directorate and Curatorial teams imagined an exhibition that would bring visibility to the vast production taking place behind closed doors in workshops across the length and breadth of Argentina. We set about devising an exhibition to say thank you and give the artists who had supported us when the museum faced closure a space to share their work with the public in our San Telmo galleries.
With matchless generosity and courage, the curator Alejandra Aguado took up the reins of the project and launched an exhaustive Zoom survey of hundreds of artists from all over the country. Ultimately, she selected thirtyfour Argentinian artists, with whom she followed up the works’ creative and constructive processes, and later worked with the museum’s Production team on their staging and installation.
Adentro no hay más que una morada is a collective exhibition that brings together the recent work of artists from Argentina’s different regions, whose works manifest the desire to channel and strengthen their personal links with the environment, whether these be material, intangible or even spiritual. These are all young artists, and their works, steeped in the experience of pandemic and isolation, mostly belong to the recent past. They form a varied and enriching group that opens the doors to each artist’s own world for us, but also gives us a glimpse of the context they come from, how they affect that environment and are affected by it. Inherited, learned or intuited knowledge and the use of technology are interwoven in new and highly personal plastic worlds; the particular features of this historical moment leave exposed the most simple and everyday, and work carried out in solitude proves to be part of a vast community fabric that touches us all.
So, I would like to offer my special thanks, first, to all thirty-four artists involved in this exhibition. It is the Museo Moderno’s wish to become a benchmark institution for modern and contemporary Argentinian art, but above all it is its strong desire to be the home of Argentinian artists. We would therefore like to say a huge thank you for letting your works dwell in our galleries and for sharing your gazes and your worlds with such immense generosity.
To successfully carry through a participatory collective project with artists from so many provinces of our country is always going to be a difficult task. More challenging still was to do this in the context of the pandemic, which for a long time prevented any physical movement, personal contact and, in many cases, even contact with the material presence of the works. For accomplishing this feat and leading it with
such enthusiasm and joy, I would especially like to thank the exhibition’s curator, Alejandra Aguado. Her warm and careful look at each work and her patience in countless visits and virtual conversations made it possible for all these sensibilities to come together to form a whole as varied as it is coherent. I am also grateful to the exhibition’s assistant curator, Clarisa Appendino, without whose help it would have been impossible to assemble this immense wealth of works and information, and to keep up such close dialogue with the artists. My special thanks also to the museum’s Temporary Exhibitions team, who took on the overall coordination of this exhibition from the furthest-flung corners of the country: thank you Micaela Bendersky, Paula Pellejero and Giuliana Migale Rocco.
Within the Museum’s team, I am also grateful to Iván Rösler, Almendra Vilela, Agustina Vizcarra, Gonzalo Silva, Rocío Englender and Manuel Maquirriain for their endless dedication to achieving a perfect installation design overall and for each selected work, and to Leo Ocello for coordinating the installation, along with his team: Fernando Súcari, Germán Sandoval and Andrés Martínez. And to Guillermo Carrasco, Soledad Manrique, Claudio Bajerski and Jorge López of the Technical team, without whose tireless work in overcoming the multiple challenges imposed by the pandemic, it would have been impossible to make this exhibition a reality.
It is for us crucial that this book be made available to the public. In it, we wanted not only to document the works that formed part of the exhibition, but to dialogue with them through a literary text. For this, I am enormously grateful to Federico Falco and his poetic prose, which also graces these pages. Also to the Museo Moderno’s entire editorial team for their committed work ensuring that this publication finds its shape and sees the light of day. Their sensitive and painstaking work was also fundamental to the development of the exhibition, allowing us to find, as on every occasion, the right words in which to communicate it to our public.
This and all the exhibitions the Museo Moderno presents to the public would not be possible without the support of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires. We are deeply grateful to the Head of Government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and to the Minister of Culture, Enrique Avogadro, for their unconditional support over such a complex and critical period as we have been through over the last two years. My sincere thanks, above all for supporting the tremendous team of professionals at the Museum, securing jobs and so honouring the knowledge and experience of an institution that
has succeeded in positioning itself at a level of excellence on both the national and international stages.
I want to thank the Moderno’s magnificent team for their instrumental dedication, their boundless commitment to excellence and their amazing generosity: these are the traits that allow us to build together, day after day, a great cultural institution grounded in values and actions that affirm the relevance of museums as fundamental actors in the community, capable of imparting health and well-being, and, through art, of pointing the way to a better life in society.
I also extend my thanks to our Friends Association and its Board of Directors, who commit to the projects we propose daily in order to make the Moderno an inclusive, federal, accessible institution. Thank you for your steadfast commitment and enthusiasm during such challenging times.
I would like to express our deep appreciation to the Banco Supervielle, the Estudio Azcuy and the Fundación Medifé, our strategic allies, who collaborate with us generously and tirelessly in materialising our projects. I am also grateful for the support of the Fundación Banco Ciudad and Grupo Teka, and of our strategic partners Flow, Plavicon and Fundación Andreani.
For this project, we were also lucky enough to have the significant collaboration of the galleries Constitución, El Gran Vidrio, Nora Fisch, Fuga, Intemperie, Isla Flotante, Moria, Piedras, Selvanegra and Alberto Sendrós – who, as representatives of several of the artists, expedited countless arrangements and information – as well as of a large number of private collectors. To all of you, thank you so much.
Finally, my special thanks to the museum-going public who visit us in different ways and from different places. You are the driving force behind our day-to-day work. I invite you to browse these pages and our galleries on all their platforms. It is our wish that the Museo Moderno’s projects reach out to each and every one of you, for you to get involved with them and adopt them as your own.
Homemaking
Traslasierra. Behind the Sierra. The wall of mountains as a rampart and protection and prison, the people who come to stay it, we all leave something behind, we’re all running from something, all looking for something, orange sunsets and their subtle difference with golden ones, having to see a hundred and fifty-three sunsets to be able to describe just one, step by step, the difference between what those who live a nomadic life can see and what those who live their whole lives, always in the same place, the same village, the same house, can see. The difference between a broader, more general view and a highly specific, particular view.
To own every place you reach, unpack, arrange the clothes on the shelves, pick a few flowers and put them in a glass, pretend everything has a history and has been used before. To put a house together. When I lived in Brazil, when I lived in Thailand, I never used to know where I was going to sleep next day, next week, I used to live on the beach, this tall woman with a soft smile who’s just beginning to age tells me. She says, all I needed was a couple of rags here, a couple of rags there, some candles, a little music, and I could make any space my own. Now she lives on the outskirts of the village, a long, not very well-kept stone path leads to her house. It’s an adobe building, north-facing, and inside it’s spacious and very uncluttered, not much furniture, a few cushions for sitting on the floor, a rocket stove: she spends quite a while trying to explain to me how it works and what its advantages are, but while I am interested in the subject, I soon get lost and
distracted. I gaze at the walls. The house reminds me of some pictures I once saw of Georgia O’Keefe’s house in the New Mexico desert, dry twisted sticks motionless in the sun and the wind, which have leached the colour from them till they’re white and full of long cracks, as if for years and years they’d been carried to and fro by the tide and bleached by the saltwater of the sea. The woman’s still talking. Efficient combustion, saves wood, retains heat. On one of the house’s red adobe walls there’s a large tracery of white lines. The lines form an unfolded web, a mesh. Now the woman’s saying she’s fine on her own, she’d never go back to being a couple, she can’t even think about it, she likes it this way, she likes living in her house on her own, there’s no need for another man in her life, that’s all behind her now, there’s no need for it. By the skirting board, beneath the painted web, there’s a plastic bottle cut in half that holds a paintbrush and is full of white paint. When she realises I’m not listening to her, the woman approaches the wall and explains to me: the house had a problem, the plaster cracked, the mix of clay, prickly pear sap and horseshit wasn’t quite right, it happens sometimes. So on long winter nights she entertains herself by drawing lines on the chapped wall, to disguise the cracks. In some areas the paint follows the cracks to form a mesh that covers the craquelure; in others it’s just a pure line imitating the strain of the adobe as it cracks.
The most terrible thing about winter in the Sierras is getting home late one night to find there are no matches in the box and you’ve left your lighter somewhere and there’s kindling, paper, firewood, paraffin, cardboard, twigs and straw to light a fire in the wood stove but nothing to start it with.
I once met this lad who’d split up and spent nearly four years without a home: he took all his stuff to his parents’, slept at a friend’s place for a while, then at another friend’s, being an actor some days when rehearsals finished late he could sleep at the theatre, he went on the road, slept in hostels and weekend homes, in the winter he stayed in empty summer houses and in the summer he stayed in flats to water plants and feed cats he could never quite remember the name of. I told him I wouldn’t have been able to keep up that lifestyle for even a couple of weeks: it takes me three or four days to settle in, I need some kind of routine, I sleep badly the first nights, I’m alert, I need to wake up for several mornings in the same room, in front of the same window, and only then do I start feeling the house has become a refuge, a safe haven, a protection. How did you manage to stay sane, going from one place to another like that, for so long, four years, I asked him. The lad just shrugged his shoulders, said he was a Pisces with the ascendant in
Pisces and the moon in Aquarius, that it had just panned out like that. When he asked me what sign I was, I had to tell him I couldn’t remember the ascendant, but that I was a Virgo with the moon in Capricorn, and he said of course you’d never be able to, you’ve got too much earth in your chart.
For a while I led a pretty nomadic life, temporary houses, for six months, for a year, desks improvised with a wardrobe door and two trestles from the local DIY, as there were no drawers I had to keep my socks in a shoebox, wash the dishes in the bathroom sink, learn to live with room-mates, learn it’s your turn to clean on Wednesdays – the communal areas one week, the kitchen the next, the bathroom the next – know you should never empty the fridge of others’ leftovers, know you can borrow pasta and rice from the cupboard but they have to be returned or their owner informed, code of honour, never stolen. Now and again I’d move flat, country, city. It was all ‘for a while’, a couple of months, a couple of years. There was no point accumulating stuff. Life was portable. Life was reduced to the simplest essentials. Then I met someone and we made a home together, then we separated, then I didn’t know what I wanted for myself, or where, or how, but it didn’t matter anyway because you always have to live somewhere.
When I came to the valley, I started fantasising about staying. We all come here running from something, a girl told me one afternoon just a few days after I arrived. That’s what we cross the mountains for, that’s why we’re ‘on the other side’. The Sierras are a wall that divides and separates, waking up every day with that plummeting wall of stone there brings a feeling of shelter. Then she took a good toke on the joint and passed it on. Until you realise it’s full of runaways here, and that us runaways aren’t the easiest people in the world to relate to, said the girl. Because, where that wall of stone’s concerned, from protection to confinement there’s just a slight change of perspective.
Go with the flow, I was told by a man who’s been living here for years. Go with the flow and see where it gets you. Each to their own, you’re the one who has to make the decisions. Go with the flow and pay attention to how the valley acts on your body, how the air suits you, how you settle in to your breathing, your wheeze, your stride. And don’t try to impose anything. Let the valley do what it does. It’s like trying to stop water, better to let it come in and take what it has to take and bring what it has to bring. It’s a bootless task to try and stop water, it involves a lot of effort, a lot of energy, and you’re fighting a losing battle before you start.
I was surprised at his aquatic comparison, here of all places, where
everything’s so bone dry, where the watercourses are barely more than streams that don’t even qualify as rivers and more than half the year runs dry.
Ah, sighed a girl after dancing alone for a long time, twerking in the sunshine, among the stunted, thinning trees of the monte scrub in winter. We were at a birthday party one cold dry sunny Saturday with perfect blue skies. A little further on, laid out on a colourful aguayo mat on the grass, were a sponge cake and cookies and a raw vegan cake. Ah, sighed the girl and sat down next to me, closed her eyes and smiled almost nostalgically. What a lovely moment to be in, it’s lovely when you’ve just arrived. Nothing better than a good geographical cure, she said. Did you know ‘all forms of landscape are autobiographical’?
No, I didn’t.
The girl smiled: it’s a quote from a poet, she explained. Can’t remember his name now.
I rent this tiny little cabin, small but cosy, in the middle of the monte, with a grand view of the valley and the mountains watching my back, and on winter nights, after the sun sets over the valley, I fall to fantasising about wanting a house for keeps, to come and go, to travel, to spend time in other places, other cities, but a place of my own, somewhere to keep my stuff, somewhere to come back to and settle in. I tell this to Ana, who lives on her own further up the monte in a small house with a big carob tree out front, a fig tree and two carasucia apple trees with tiny little apples, an old local variety adapted to life in the valley. Ana tells me it’s normal after a certain age to want to have a place of one’s own, to want to have a house. So I buy a blank school exercise book at the newsagent’s and on the first page, centred and in large letters, I write: Cuaderno de la casa [House Notebook]. Then, sitting before the perfectly aligned lines on the page, I shut my eyes and, one by one, run through all the houses I’ve ever lived in, slept for a night in, spent my holidays in, spent a couple of weeks in. I jot down what I most liked about each house and assemble this imaginary Frankenstein of what I’d like my house to be. A wood-burning aga at the end of the worktop to make stews and soups in winter and cover with a floral oilcloth in summer; a white-tiled bathroom, the usual tiles, fifteen by fifteen with black grouting, like the bathroom at my grandparents’ in the country; a pantry with absolutely no windows, plenty of shelves, and dark and cool to store jars of jam and pickles and hang a string of garlic from the ceiling and stack an entire crop of pumpkins on the floor by the wall; a polished concrete floor in the kitchen, pine floorboards for the bedroom;
a wood stove in the middle of the living room; a comfy armchair for reading by the fire; an integrated kitchen, dining and living room, a single separate bedroom; a small house, well-heated in winter; double-glazed, north-facing, good exposure to sunlight, hermetically sealed openings, no draughts, better hot in summer than cold in winter; a broad verandah with columns perfectly spaced to sling a hammock, lots of cupboard space to store lots of things and forget where they are for ever; a full-wall bookcase with shelves exactly seventeen centimetres deep, because there are hardly any books with covers wider than seventeen centimetres, and I don’t want too much space over at the front: no more standing ornaments on the shelves, no more gaudy Mexican alebrijes, no more shells from the beach, no more translucent sealion souvenirs from Mar del Plata forever condemned to predicting whether it’s going to rain (pink) or if it’s going to be changeable (purple) or if it’s going to be a day of radiant sunshine (blue), no more photos leaning against the spines of the books, no more cards, no more postcards from other countries: it’s been years now, centuries, since anyone sent postcards. Now all I want is books, one next to the other, from floor to ceiling; and another bookcase, lower but deeper, for art books, or books in landscape format, or books whose covers are over seventeen centimetres wide.
Every house I set foot in, every house I’m invited to, every house I pass, I study its orientation with utmost care. As a general rule the house has to face north so that it’s cool in summer and warm in winter. Ideally the kitchen should face east so that it’s lit by the early-morning sunlight, which at breakfast-time shines on the hobs, and you can see the steam rising from the cups against the light. It’s better to have shady trees protecting the west side from the fierce suns of summer, and these trees should be deciduous so you can lie back and enjoy all the afternoon warmth in winter. The southern flank should never receive direct light, because they’re the walls that are prone to damp, and it’s the side worst hit by chill winds, so it’s better to have few openings to the south and all the rooms that don’t need heating: the laundry room, the pantry, the bathroom.
And yet everything’s the other way round in Oscar’s house. Oscar’s house is east-facing, the bathroom looks north, and there are no windows at all. The wall facing west has a small window, just enough to provide ventilation. The only larger window is south-facing. If you designed it, if you built it with your own fair hands, Oscar, why did you take such odd decisions? Because I don’t like the summer, there’s too much light, it’s too
hot here in summer. Oscar doesn’t like having all that light and sun inside and he built his house facing east: an east-facing house is always cooler and has less light.
I like being outside, I like being in the monte, to see the sun, I go out, says Oscar, but when I’m inside I need a house that soothes me, that brings me back to myself, contains me. That’s why I kept the windows small. I like the house in darkness, kind of dimly lit. Somewhere I can find myself, says Oscar, and I jot down in my notebook: ‘A house that soothes me, a house where I can find myself.’
A comfortable, shady house to invite friends, who come for the weekend and sleep on a pile of mattresses just thrown on the floor. A house shaded in summer to spend siesta time in and go outside to watch the sunset late in the evening. Loungers and hammocks and plenty of space to stretch out. Nice crockery, all different and all a little chipped. No worries if someone drops a glass, no worries if someone breaks a plate. Lots of vases in all shapes and sizes: large, small, medium, clear glass, coloured glass, opaline, ceramic, earthenware, porcelain, brass, tin, sheet metal, plastic. Plenty of space to store them. A river or a creek nearby. Lemon and apple trees. A peach tree, two plum trees, three fig trees, four walnut trees. Mandarine and orange trees. A garden with autumn chrysanthemums and summer dahlias. A Japanese quince that flowers on bare branches in winter and fills the garden with pink. Irises, Guaraní sage, amistad, greggii and leucantha. A couple of bridalwreaths, a ton of rose bushes.
It’s drizzling as the sun comes up, I put the notebook aside, stoke the wood stove with firewood, put the news on the radio, wash the dishes, make the bed, tidy things up a bit on the worktop. Outside it sometimes clouds over completely, a leaden sky, at times the clouds shroud the cabin and I’m inside them and you can’t see past the stick fence, I can even see the clouds, patches of clouds, gossamer wisps floating across the patio, then it opens up again, the valley below appears again. A big slick of sunlight, far down the valley, where the sun manages to slip through the clouds and it’s bright and clear.
In Sobre cosas que me han pasado by the Chilean writer, Marcelo Matthey Correa, there’s a quote I’m very fond of, apparently from a book by Pío Baroja. ‘Do you see in the morning, when the light begins to shine, atop the mountain, a small house with a white frontage, standing amid four oak trees, with a white dog at the door and by it a little fountain?
There I live in peace.’ My copy was given to me by Diego Zúñiga, when I was in Chile once, and I guess Diego must have bought it in a preloved bookshop, because the book hasn’t a scratch on it, but that quote – the only one in all its hundred and thirty-eight pages – came underlined in thick, faintly trembling pencil with a little star drawn next to it. That unknown reader and I clearly share a desire to own the same dog, rest beneath the shade of the same trees, look down upon the same valley, live both of us in the same house. We might be ‘room-mates’, if we weren’t both so complicated to live with, so full of bad habits.
Ruth’s very young, she had her house built before her thirtieth birthday. Ruth’s house is small, with stone foundations, adobe walls, pine floorboards and a wooden roof that’s like an upside-down boat. The adobe bricks are very old, they were from an abandoned village that was being demolished in slow motion by weeds and vines, shoot by shoot, spring after spring, year after year. Ruth bought them from the owner of the land for a song and spent a whole week lovingly and carefully dismantling bricks and selecting and separating all the ones that weren’t broken and could be used for her new house. Then she hired a lorry and they went to load them up one afternoon.
Originally, Ruth tells me, this house was just four stakes driven into the ground. Four stakes joined with string outlining a perimeter, and me pacing from one side to the other thinking: this is where the door goes, this is where a window goes, this is where the bed will be, this is the way to the bathroom, and me walking around between the pegs rehearsing the movements, the most usual routes: from table to sink, from desk to bookcase, from bed to bathroom, me imagining what my rituals and routines would be, what I’d do in the morning, what I’d do in the afternoon.
She tells me how she imagined her house, and me meanwhile imagining Ruth walking carefully between stakes and strings, her arms open as if balancing, her fingers barely brushing the fantasised walls, repeating to herself over and again, still not quite believing it: this is where the door will be, this is where the bed will be, this’ll be my house, this’ll be my house.
My favourite poem of James Schuyler’s is called ‘June 30, 1974’. It’s a kind of letter or thank-you message to friends who invited him to spend a weekend with them at their house in the country. One Sunday morning in early summer, Schuyler wakes up early while his friends are still asleep or lying in bed. All is very still, and Schuyler makes himself some eggs for breakfast, ‘coffee, milk, no sugar’. He describes the house in a few very brief images: the view of a lake and dunes on the other side of the window, a cosy
house ‘alive with paintings, plants and quiet’. Whenever I read that line, I always imagine that as the kind of house I want: comfortable, full of light, with wooden floorboards that creak and plants and paintings and friends who wake up early and go down to breakfast and know which shelf in the cupboard things are on and make themselves a coffee on their own, make themselves a slice of toast, then leave the dirty mug in the sink and go out for a walk, down to the creek, down to town and back with pastries and a hot loaf of bread under their arms.
At one point the poem says: ‘Home! How lucky to / have one, how arduous / to make this scene / of beauty for / your family and / friends. Friends!’ The first time I read it, I underlined the word ‘arduous’. The second time I read it, I underlined ‘scene of beauty’ in a different colour.
The clay-rich earth has to be gathered on the banks of the creek, in a gully where there’s plenty, and everyone goes and takes it, and then they have to go out into the open country and reap the paja brava and harvest whole sheaves, which accumulate in bags and are later crushed with a shovel till the blades are no more than five centimetres long. The straw’s mixed with clay, sand, gravelly soil, and water’s carried from the stream in buckets and added, then trodden down until it’s all properly folded in to form a mud that sticks to the hands: they call this ‘pastón’ and it’s used to hold the adobe bricks together, which are laid one after the other upon the stone foundations, and so the courses start to rise, inchmeal, one atop the other, to knee height, to waist height, to the chest, shoulders, head, until the walls are done, and it’s time to start scrimping together the money for the sheet metal to be able to put the roof on and finish the house.
There’s a difference between being ‘transplanted’ to the valley and being ‘assimilated’ to the valley. Someone transplanted tries to make things work the same here as in the city; someone assimilated knows the valley has a different rhythm, a different timing, different ways of doing things.
You still need to spend time here, you do, Ana tells me. I nod and ask her if she never gets bored, if being there, on her own, in the middle of the monte doesn’t scare her.
Does it scare you? she counter-attacks.
Of course it scares me, sure, of course it does, what am I going to do here on my own all the time? I’m afraid of becoming a bitter loner, the hermit who never sees anyone, the crazy old man kids come to steal lemons from at siesta time and shout things at him as he walks down the street.
Ana shrugs. I’m never alone, she says. I’m here with myself, she tells
me. I’m my own best friend, my own best company. I have to be a little patient with myself sometimes, but no different from anyone else. Then I go for a walk in the monte and I tell the monte my things, I give them to the monte, and if you know how to listen, the monte answers you: you see a twig, a flower, something that catches your eye, something that distracts you. The monte gives back, it keeps you going, says Ana, and then she smiles and looks at me almost pityingly, as if I haven’t quite understood something that to her seems almost foolish, something too self-evident, too easy.
She says to me: you still need to spend time here, you do. You still need to assimilate.
Why did you come to the valley, were you running away from something too, I ask Ruth one cold winter afternoon. We’re drinking camomile and lavender tea she’s picked herself, and on the table are the crumbs of a coconut and dulce de leche cake I bought at the village bakery and brought her as a gift.
Ruth takes a while to answer me. Then she says: I like the monte, I like it here, I like the mountains. I chose to stay.
I nod and say nothing. Around us the dark draws in and the embers crackle in the wood stove. Ruth’s house is nice, it feels good to be there, the two of us sitting warm and cosy, the monte outside so close that, when the wind blows, the branches of the manzanillos and falsos talas brush against the tin roof and it sounds like the scratching of cat’s claws.
It’s nice being here, I say after we’ve both been quiet for a while. I like it for now, for now I feel it could really be here, but who knows. What if later on I stop liking it?
If later on you stop liking it, you’ll find out later on, says Ruth.
Let’s hope this time lasts a while. It’s nice being here, I say again softly.
Ruth bursts out laughing.
Time changes all the time, amigo.
It does, I say, that’s the problem.
Or that’s the whole point, says Ruth. Or that’s the whole point.
ALEJANDRA AGUADO
1
Far off, from heart to heart, beyond the peak of mist inhaling me from the depths of vertigo, I feel the rumble of the call to no-man’s land. (Who rises within me? Who stands at the site of their agony, their mat of thorns, and retraces my footsteps?)
Olga Orozco, “Desdoblamiento en máscara de todos” [Unfolding into Mask of All], 1962
One after the other, the artworks that make up the project Within There Is but One Abode offer proof that even during periods of extreme stress and disorientation we are capable of creating moments of genuine communion with our surroundings, looking for something that seems written ‘on the other side of the soul’ of each and every one of us, as Olga Orozco writes in a verse later on in her poem. It is a form of communion that has the ring of truth to it: the discovery of a kind of shared essence, an instinctive approach to the things of this world, whether that be the Earth, our objects or those close to us. Perhaps it is a communion that can undermine the automated ways in which the hegemonic social and economic orders decree we live.
During these moments, which sometimes don’t last very long, the world seems familiar. The forms of the world, their material nature and scale, do not seem strange to us even when we’re encountering them for the first time. Time doesn’t threaten to hurry us up or delay us, somehow its rhythm and ours feel in step. That sensation of continuity between what we are and what is around us is powerfully evoked by the artworks in Within There Is but One Abode, an exhibition featuring pieces by thirty-four artists from all over Argentina. Their artworks, all produced recently or made especially for the exhibition, focus our gaze back on the bond between ourselves and everything that is, or that we feel, close by. They remind us that we both are and inhabit at the same time, that we develop in accordance with that conjunction and in harmony with what we find around us – be it material or symbolic, outside or deep within us – and that our identity is indiscernible from the way in which we experience our days and leave our mark upon them, just as the outside world leaves its mark on us.
The experience of connection conveyed by the artworks is also an act of withdrawal – of concentration within one’s private world – and transcendence when the value of said act projects an individual experience outwards, even if this occurs unconsciously. In their methods and processes, which can be both mechanical and intuitive but are always the result of unconditional dedication to the work, contact with materials and research, these artists connect bodies, territories and time periods. Their artworks may arise out of the meeting between their process and a universal geometry, of the embracing of constructive methods in danger of being forgotten, of interaction with natural materials to expose our imprint and memory, of restoring meaning to objects and words that preserve evidence of their existence in the world, of creating forms to an almost ritual beat, of establishing a space in which the invisible is made tangible, or close examination and profound interaction with the territory they inhabit. Because their output is part of the living experience, the imaginative worlds they create and share with us reaffirm the value of art as a means of symbolic expression, and artistic output as a path into the unknown. They show that there is no difference between the corporeal and immaterial realms, the physical and emotional worlds; to the contrary, at a time when the culture of dichotomous concepts is being challenged, these artworks make clear that they are vessels of communication and discovery between the two extremes. As images that seek to bring us closer to something that is both very nearby and far beyond, these artworks champion the awareness
that the subject is able to project themselves outwards and that the beyond or exterior can be felt within them: the self encompasses the world.
Mostly made between 2019 and 2021, these exhibition pieces – and our perception of them – reflect the experience of isolation that the Covid-19 pandemic forced upon us, keeping us in one place for a prolonged period of time. These unavoidable circumstances, which kept us apart, locked up, made us stay still, but also allowed us to sink roots deep into the most intimate experiences of our everyday life. The artworks that make up Within There Is but One Abode stand as a declaration of existence. They are ways of showing that we’re alive through the production of signs, symbols and actions related to things and the surrounding space. Within them the material environment becomes a field of meaning, a zone in which a subject can make statements, revealing their energy, their weight, their emotional nature, their will and their need to identify with and compose their environment, to recognize themselves within it and identify codes and common patterns, as well as dilemmas and preoccupations. Dedicated to the production of symbols rather than meaning, to the communication of existence rather than its narrative, the artists reveal in their works their willingness to evoke and summon a living power.
The title of the exhibition paraphrases a verse by the Argentine poet Olga Orozco, part of the poem quoted at the beginning of the text: ‘From inside of us all, there’s nothing but an abode.’ A sensitive, powerful statement, the verse states that it is impossible to distinguish between existence and habitation, a notion explored by the artworks in the exhibition, reaffirming the value given to that which makes up identity and a sense of belonging. Even in the geometric or otherwise abstract, apparently universal pieces, the suggestion of a specific location or private realm is maintained.
Bearers of experiences, energy, exercises, labour and messages, the artworks of Within There Is but One Abode express desire and the supportive power of our methods and the way in which we decide to stand firm in the world, a place where we can belong, that offers potential for discovery. The title refers to the reciprocal relationship between inside and out, a relationship that the artworks explore by revealing that the world, a broad exterior expanse, is also immensely private and even a kind of shared intimacy that can be encompassed and reflected by the artistic experience. Instead of representing an imposing world, the artworks give us the chance to think of ways to inhabit it on an intimate scale, ones that don’t force or hasten the arrival of the inhabited space. When the artworks present
an encounter with something deeper, more specific and detailed, they also address an open, expansive, infinite interior that can be accessed through an attentive gaze, touch, or ear or by searching for the images and experiences that impact on us as if they were a channel connecting energies and matters. The bridge that the artworks build between the interior and exterior expand our abode. It can be what is always inside or it can be what is outside because the process can convert anything into an abode. The artworks, messengers of that power, show that it is from an intimate place that we are able to transform our reality, inviting us to think of sinking roots as a means of resistance.
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From the interior of inhabited spaces, making use of everything of which they consist, several artists have left inscriptions and symbols on their artworks that function as testimony to their existence and private world. Domestic tasks and everyday objects are repurposed to create emotional landscapes. This panorama of the elemental – made of basic routines and needs, ordinary objects and procedures learned as part of a community, natural acts of care for the things in the home – expose how our identity is defined as a means of being and being in, a negotiation between body and space that is partially one’s own and partially imposed by the material conditions of the environment. These artworks, made of cuttings, simple texts and sensitive documentation of things that usually attract no attention because of their volatility or minuscule size, show that every action, image or voice harbours potential to open a channel through which one can immerse oneself in another state or world.
From out of this specific combination between automated tasks, dedication of time and even the beautifying of the objects around us, grew Calendario abstracto [Abstract Calendar] by Lucrecia Lionti: a large black cloth on which a large number of stitches form a seven-column grid identifiable as a calendar. Inside them are other vertical and diagonal lines of wool that fail to cross off any discernible activity. As the marks accumulate, they interrupt the monotony of the geometric drawing with one or two bright threads and a range of colours that transforms the otherwise empty scene, using yellows, golds and fuchsias to embellish the rigorous minimalism. The straight lines and zig-zags of the threads and wool add a visual dimension
to the passing of time, measuring it and transforming it into a kind of ‘chronograph’, a soft diagram constructed from a ritual exercise in which the stitching, the clearest demonstration of the passing of time, is built up as a structure with a skeleton and form.
This stripping down of processes and languages, returning means of expression back to an elemental state, reappears in the enigmatic, suggestive messages of the artworks of Florencia Vallejos and Daniela Rodi whose bareness also includes the use of anonymous voices. Their ambiguity and abstraction allow these words to be filled with their own meanings and desires, introducing interpretation, or a conversation with the infinite. In Vallejos’s Mis documentos [My Documents], the messages open up in endless processions of computer folders while Rodi’s small format canvas banners – one of which suggests creating a mental image of the phrase ‘In the coincidence of the beautiful’ – they multiply, as do the appropriations that each reader makes of the text. Imbued with a poetic, emotional, even hypnotic tone, this projection of voices beyond the physical space they inhabit or the time when they were created reduces the distance that separates us from others, emphasizing the ability of words to keep us connected.
This inclination for contact is shared by the series Selfins, by Nina Kovensky, which grows continuously as it accumulates smartphone images – selfies – of faces of friends within the confines of small mirrors with whom she seems to be communicating from afar; the images are projected by both the mirrors and the phones. In her Pulmón de manzana [Light Well], another set of mirrors acts like interconnected screens recreating the view of city windows, openings into private worlds. Lights behind them define on the one hand the periods of consciousness and sleep – the time when everything wakes up, moments of activity and rest, glimpses of a circadian rhythm – and on the other reveal drawings etched into the surfaces that create an everyday world, now lit up and glowing.
Although in Vallejos and Kovensky’s work the use and representation of technology are not entirely divorced from the dystopian mindset that comes with their individual, solitary methods, or the threat of having our personal data intruded upon, both artists focus more on the emotional dimensions of their subjects. They use them as a means of giving form to poetic expression; technology as a producer of light, a space in which to keep the intimate and a channel to a possible encounter.
Created in many cases through the accumulation and repetition of the same form, object or situation, these artworks explore the social dimension of individual experiences. The use of formal modules that then vary slightly
echoes the shared rhythm and cycle in which each of these experiences takes place. The focus on the detail and tone of the artworks also brings to the fore the implicit sensitivity and delicacy of domesticity whose need for care and protection is uniquely explored in the work of Lucía Reissig and Bernardo Zabalaga, who were involved in the exhibition before it opened to the public, arranging a celebratory, ceremonial encounter with the artists. There, through multiple experiences in the cleansing of energy and spaces, each of those present – as well as the project we shared – was encouraged into a long-lasting state of wellbeing. The talisman in the exhibition hall is not just presented as memento of the ritual but also to empower the care of the artworks and the exhibition.
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Much of the output emphasizes the need to recognize and protect identity and focus on that which defines our personal worlds even when it is fragile and unstable. These creations are not, however, produced by representations of that world but by the uses the artists make of what they gather – small objects but also words, stories, experiences, ideas and images – and their reorganization into different forms, which enhance the value of these elements and turn them into the essence of new imaginative worlds. They thus reinterpret the personal universe and project it out into time, allowing it to leave a ‘message to nothing and everything’,1 as the Rosario-born artist Carlos Aguirre puts it.
These methodologies were used, for example, in the incredible “Altares portables” [‘Portable Altars’] in which Blas Aparecido suggests we take refuge. He transports us to the territory of popular altars and carnival traditions with clothing transformed by his loving embroidery into magnificent and very personal votive offerings featuring fragments from prayers, promises and poems, appliqués of religious and devotional figures and very personal, emotionally significant objects.
The series of small paintings entitled ‘Messy Tables and Collages’ by the artist and researcher Santiago Villanueva, meanwhile, indiscriminately
1— Correspondence with the artist, 12 September, 2021.
combines incense, insect repellent spirals, a range of texts about artistic practice, club tickets, mate gourds, empty blisters of pills and strips of bark stuck onto surfaces painted with flat, organic shapes. The randomness with which the objects appear to have been scattered creates fantastical landscapes made of the trashes that one might find in drawers or boxes, combining episodes from his personal life with events from the history of local art. They thus create a new kind of visual archive that links aesthetic theory and emotions.
This recapture of the things we can’t get rid of but have yet to find a place for is also present in the paintings and sculptures of Carlos Aguirre. In his work, discarded things are removed of their status as waste or the ‘end’ to instead become the beginning of a conceptual adventure that draws on the formal spirit of modernism, lending meaning to the elements – be they a piece of polystyrene or his daughter’s hairpin – in addition to their personal value. In each of these practices the creative act takes on vital meaning: there is an emphasis on purpose, a yearning to bring together the ingredients of these personal worlds within the framework of constructions, images, landscapes, still lifes or abstractions in which the artistic gesture can house them in a natural way.
Meanwhile, the clan of soft companion figures created by Dana Ferrari is also based around the re-use of materials that she kept in her studio for film pieces that, in an act of reinvention become the floppy bodies of “Los mareados” [‘The Dizzy’]. They spend their time in her studio and the homes of friends or ‘guardians’ whom she has allowed to adopt them (an act of generosity and humour during the pandemic by which the artist was able to have a presence in the homes of her loved ones). With them, Ferrari is looking to stimulate emotional bonds ‘to conjure through imitation a turning away from verticality’2 and return to a focus on our everyday spaces, which they observe with their clownish faces, offering caricatures of horrified reactions to the present.
This kind of hybrid body, made of fragments, which is sometimes warm and sometimes raw, also appears in the work of Gala Berger. By combining fabrics to make clothing and domestic accessories with others printed with digital images, her textiles explore the creation of new organizational
2— Correspondence with the artist, 19 August 2021.
structures and models for humanity. Said models, far from presenting themselves as cold and machine-like, exude warmth thanks to a quilting technique common in the homes of Costa Rica, where the artist was living when she made the pieces. Berger is thus able to bring a new sensibility to the political institutions referred to by the titles of each fabric.
These artists value the emotional processes of collage and assemblage, returning to traditional artforms and occasionally what is almost craft output. Avoiding contradiction – quite the contrary in fact, reclaiming occasionally production methods that had been neglected for a long time – the material and technical roots of their works suggest that a large part of the authenticity and originality of the artwork and its transformative capacity arise from out of private, local experiences as well as the use of the resources, tools and methods to hand, which are both simple and within their economic means. Through these new associations, the elements brought together from their passage through the world reveal their potential for beauty in addition to their artistic, historic and social value.
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Contact with materials allows for exploration of how they affect the power of the bodies that surround them or how the passage of time leaves its mark. Working with clay, plaster, paraffin, rubble or images of target places, or the observation of the material when still and in movement, some of these artists have explored primary forms of documentation and expression that channel the ability to understand and construct symbols while also opening up to the unknown.
Nacha Canvas explores evidence of continuity between time and organisms. In her clay forms – spread out over a surface of dust that takes them back to an ancient state of pure creative power – she demonstrates bodies’ infinite capacity for mutation and also rediscovers the sensuality of pure, organic figures without altering the essential characteristics of the material. Even though they haven’t witnessed the forms being produced, the viewer can reconstruct the tactile sensation evoked by the installation through which it is possible to reconnect with the modes of craft that were responsible for the rich surprises and formal elegance she achieves in each of her small pieces. The latent intelligence and energy of the inorganic world is also a feature of many of the other artworks: the material, stimulated
by the gaze or touch, presents itself as a living being capable of projecting memory of other entities or times, becoming residual or ghostly, monstrous or totemic.
Benjamín Felice’s artistic gesture involves engraving drawings onto a paraffin surface that can only be seen clearly when dust is sprinkled over them and settles into the lines. His graphics thus become like spells that combine both gesture and geometry, abstract codes and extremely personal symbols that link access to the psychological world with the production of knowledge. Enigmatic but suggestive, his images reflect episodes from his life such as scars and tattoos, representing a search for knowledge that is only possible in the coming together of the body and the material.
In her ‘The Language of Stones’ series, Florencia Palacios also explores ways of making ephemeral symbols permanent. She has carved emojis into stones she gathered on the shore of a lake in Santa Fe that represent moods or stories linked to her experience of the pandemic. As she does so, she imbues permanence and continuity to a mode of communication that developed through use of technological devices defined by their immaterial character. The artist seeks to eliminate the transient nature of the messages through use of a material that, as she points out ‘has always been here.’
The desire to make a mark on landscape and architecture, to make contact with stable, noble surfaces is also a part of the work of Florencia Caiazza. In it, traces of her fingers appear in dozens of plaster pieces stuck to the wall like ceramic tiles. The ornamental, repetitive motif characteristic of said cladding is replaced here by unrepeatable gestures that are preserved by the plaster. The exploratory nature of the act is revealed by the coming together of two forces – the artist’s hand and the matter into which the fingers are pressed – echoing the use of touch as a means of learning.
In his small sculptures – made by slotting together discarded iron bars found in piles of rubble from construction sites on the coasts of Buenos Aires – Francisco Vázquez Murillo presents sensitive reflections of the ways in which we write: the things we do to the landscape as we inhabit it, one that is firm and vertical, and another of symbols from which it seems we can’t escape. In the latter case, they are made by an almost intuitive form of interlocking pieces with a penchant for order. Lined up on a shelf to produce a horizon, the figures – small buildings – act as antennae that connect heaven and earth but also as an alphabet of forms moulded by humans, time and nature. These three spheres also converge in the work of Juan Gugger, whose compilation of videos 2020-2021 offers an opportunity to explore stillness and the absolute
present through observation of immense rocks which he even tried to make himself in order to understand from whence their unique expressiveness arises. These imposing shapes, representations of the immobility we experienced in the last couple of years, allow the artist to explore different forms of habitation far removed from the constant need for movement, information, production and consumption that dominate contemporary life. Although the inability to move can also be understood as an obstacle to our development, the sight of these rocky volumes, which impose themselves with totemic authority, makes it possible to enter a non-human time of transformation and take part in the ways presented by these forms through stillness and a full dialogue with one’s surroundings. Air, light, vegetation and water rise up and come alive before returning to their indivisible nature.
Although the sheer bareness with which most of the artists present their materials delivers a sensation of universality and permanence, it also gives them the air of ruins. This atmosphere reappears in a threatening manner in the video by Agustina Wetzel, who has compiled scenes of demolition from the internet which she then plays in reverse. What we see, then, is a monstrous show in which buildings that have lost their status as homes rise up monumentally from the dust, Wetzel is thus undermining our urge to build and destroy created by our thirst for perpetuity and offers a warning about the violence and clashes that can arise out of commercial and political policies of gentrification.
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The stillness imposed by the pandemic brought with it renewed awareness of our body and our capacity for self-perception. Limited by the restrictions placed on circulation in public spaces, the body travelled within itself; either our senses were redirected infinitely inward or its functions and qualities were projected outwards.
In Gonzalo Beccar Varela’s paintings – almost entirely abstract planes with the exception of synthetic eye or ear shapes – the senses expand to offer both the artist and spectator the opportunity to be seen, touched or heard by another. Painting ceases to function as a window and becomes a surface that looks, challenges and reaches out to us. This is achieved by copies of the artist’s body or its proportions, placing him in the position of creator in its broadest sense.
Similarly, in the work of Eugenia Calvo, these pieces invite one to consider the importance of coming together with others, recognizing oneself in a like-minded figure, as a means of support to soothe anxiety or feelings of loneliness and bewilderment. Calvo’s installation, in which ordinary furniture and appliances are taken apart and rearranged on the floor to form the bodies of an adult and child at rest, also reveals an obsession with seeing faces everywhere, the need to see ourselves and our experience multiplied and also offers a caricature of the experience. In that regard, Calvo shares a sense of humour with the figures made by Dana Ferrari in terms of sweetness, absurdity and sharp insight. Her worn out, listless bodies’ only signs of life are the faces of bananas and apples, taps or children’s paraphernalia which she filmed as though casually coming across them at home.
Other artworks have sought to use images to represent the formless or immaterial aspects of the body: its energy, memory, unique rhythms, status as a living organism and its capacity to bring us together. The watercolours by Carolina Fusilier begin with her interest in archaeological figures and objects, which she reimagines in silhouettes of landscapes and architectures that function as windows into other worlds. In her work, archaeological pieces take on the status of a device: entities whose materiality can inspire unpredictable uses and imaginative worlds. This is also true of the small bricks painted obsessively by María Guerrieri: a simple element that gives her imagination free rein. She uses them to build an infinite number of free, organic forms that humanize a fundamental building block of a house, alleviating its weight and transforming it into a module capable of building mobile homes that change shape with ease, adapt to the outline of a leaf or come free from the walls to float in the air.
The desire to give shape to the course of thoughts and emotions is a common denominator of all these works, complemented by their painstaking formality, attention to detail and the use of warm, noble and often shiny materials that lend the pieces a sacred quality, once again emphasizing the need to treasure personal experiences. Hidden in the middle of Federico Roldán Vukonich’s solid, iridescent paintings are seemingly abstract symbols that represent his emotions: shapes that summarize an element or situation with which he identifies that appear to have been made in such solid material that one can always return to them without fear of the wear of time or memory. Like Palacios’ emoji rock carvings, the artist uses stable materials to ensure that his marks and symbols will last like time capsules.
The sending of a message that allows us to be recognized and activate new forms of communication is also a fundamental characteristic of the piece by Jimena Croceri. Her Trapo sonajero [Rattle Rag] was created by stitching tiny bells into ordinary dishcloths. Set out as musical notes in lines that represent an immense pentagram, the bells draw attention to generally overlooked work (domestic labour), which Croceri has adorned and made musical. Ennobling materials to offer a connection with the intangible is also a fundamental goal of the work of Denise Groesman. Her golden cabinet was made from empty tomato cans that she gathered from local restaurants, cleaned, hammered, fused and decorated until she had created a ‘rocket/tree/sound shower/crazy rattle/shack/oven/smoker’. Beneath its shiny surface, an interior lined with branches of bay leaves invites us to let our imagination soar and to get in touch with our senses.
A similar inner journey is also offered in the work by Erik Arazi. The collection of A4 geometric drawings that makes up his installation Sistema nervioso central [Central Nervous System] seeks to represent the energy one feels moving through the body, which only seems still from the outside. These drawings consist of diagrammatic representations of two bodies seen from the front like a pictogram with full layouts of their inner workings. The paintings by Ana Won are also cartographic in style. Although her conceptual language is more gestural, dense and intense, her forms and geometries arise out of the repeated lines with which her body seeks to channel and make visible its vital energy and other invisible dimensions.
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The individual universe offers multiple ways of expressing the relationship it establishes with a given territory, the communities that live within it and the knowledge they develop and have inherited: unique forms of cultural and natural heritage that artists have used to generate personal and poetic means of expression that reveal the degree to which the material and symbolic environment has shaped them. This knowledge – the ways in which we work the earth, as in the work of Florencia Sadir, for example, or embroidery as in that of Alejandra Mizrahi – are fully adopted as means of finding new forms, materiality and images. And although it can be argued that their practices are reaffirmations of traditions and world visions pushed to one side by industrial production systems and ways of life, they aren’t
presented exclusively to encourage their study or warn over their possible disappearance: in these artists’ pieces, they are fully alive.
Resorting to these traditions represents a return to modes of production that involve direct connection with the earth, its cycles and the communities that live within it. Their incorporation as a technique answers the everyday needs of the artists, furthers their human development and expresses their concern for the environment. As the Salteña artist Soledad Dahbar puts it, she sees ‘a work of art as a residual effect of an experience’,3 with the distinction between artistic practice and one’s personal life growing ever finer. These tools operate as part of an ecosystem that links practices of learning, construction, supply, consumption, sharing and relation to create methods that channel creative expression and link the functional, domestic world to more universal, abstract visions. The use of craft techniques also produces unique, characterful pieces that remind us of the importance in conservationist terms of reducing automation and mass production in our everyday lives.
In the case of Lucrecia Lionti, whose work has already been described, the use of weaving and sewing shines a light on the potential of procedures neglected by the art academia to produce images. Her artworks bring a new sensibility to the practice of painting, undermining its foundations and infusing knowledge acquired in a familial environment with meaning. Similarly, Alejandra Mizrahi incorporates what she has learned from traditional weavers for non-functional purposes, making her work into a form of writing that opens windows in her textiles. The practice allows her to experiment with an act of creation that provides a space and a medium and to leave behind traces that become evidence of her everyday life and surroundings, especially the way she dyes her textiles with the locally produced fruits and vegetables she consumes. Meanwhile, the inks, foods and objects used by Florencia Sadir arise from out of a plane of earth that recreates her own lot in San Carlos, Salta, reflecting the work she has done in her own garden, whose products she consumes. The objects seem to be set out like an offering or gesture of thanks for what the earth provides and also those who know how to work it (the large ceramic bowl was made by her teacher).
3— Correspondence with the artist, 19 August 2021.
The large mobile sculpture made by Antonio Villa, mostly out of incense burners but combined with other knowledge he learned from his community of artisans, has the power to cleanse and protect the inhabited space, making the burning of incense part of the everyday routine. He has also brought to the museum gallery information about the landscape where he grew up by gathering dried branches found in the Esquel region, adding a dramatic dimension that evokes a vast, vigorous landscape and contrasts with the festive, almost psychedelic colours of the burners.
The private, domestic and personal world reappears powerfully in the work of La Chola, for whom the process of learning to make bread – which involves learning how to transform matter so as to produce food – functions as form of self-knowledge, renewal and reconnection with the symbolic artwork of indigenous peoples, a part of the artist’s heritage. In her bread masks and accessories, which are presented like archaeological pieces, the artist doubles out into his identity once and again, creating a transition between different genres and symbols that seek to link the past and present.
The work of Soledad Dahbar also features an exploration of inhabited territory and origin. Her geometric copper, silver and gold placards, when superimposed, form the profile of a mountain range on the museum’s walls, calling attention to the physical make-up of the territory and the fact that it is subject to ongoing productive and commercial exploitation. She offers an examination of the situation in the northwest of Argentina where there is a great imbalance between extractive industries and regional neglect, production and scarcity. The geometric summations seen in the banners – equilateral triangles, circles and squares – inspire us to focus on the essential and to recognize these basic proportions, which she presents as an authentic way of keeping her grounded.
Landscape is present more explicitly in the works of Agustina Triquell and Matías Tomás, which record the experience of entering into a territory. Triquell’s work is directly immersed in the consequences of habitation in its most basic sense: travelling around a space, identifying it, fencing it off, building, treading paths and occupation. His combination of images, texts, elements of nature and pinhole photography encourages reflection on the fundamental acts of appearance and transformation, creating a narrative about the problematic historical conflict that arises between the need for habitation and restricted access to land, a right riven with complexities, obstacles and unequal distribution of power. Triquell’s images explore the experience of harbouring and expelling, creating an arc from the utopia
of the ideal community to the dystopias established by the restrictive impositions of capital and the law.
Meanwhile, the mural by Matías Tomás reflects his journey through the landscape: a jungle in which he immerses himself for hours before subsequently drawing it in wild, gestural strokes that depict a space that is not just a territory to be looked at but rather one that he allows to wrap around him, sensitizing him and helping him to expand his vitality. His work is thus an extremely clear expression of communion with a territory, a goal to which many artists aspire.
The need to find meaning in one’s intimate, immediate surroundings, to imaginatively rediscover the familiar, to make use of craft and gestural output to experience the creative act or to bring technology into the poetic realms of one’s personal universe all feature in the practices of the artists who have taken part in Within There Is but One Abode. The fact that they have achieved their goals so successfully and that their processes build universes of meaning that surprise us with their empathy and intimacy, or that answer questions we never even thought to ask helps to open a broad, generous door to many paths of creation – or the different ways of travelling through and inhabiting a space – attentive to the specifics on a local and individual level but also, precisely because the focus is so strongly inward, to the shared and universal. It presents a world of possibilities to discover and develop whose methods are dictated by the time and space of which we all form a part, which our action can transform without any danger of deformation. Therein lies a great part of the power of these artworks: a reminder that even when faced with major challenges we have answers nearby that can release us from impositions, automation and immobility.
pp. 62-63 ‘Often, my two-dimensional images are openings into the physical space I inhabit. I think of them as an extension of the architecture itself. Windows, doors, columns, distant horizons, microscopic landscapes are recurrent features in the construction of my paintings and installations. The cutting of the paper or fabric is a peephole through which to spy on a spatio-temporal otherness. These expanded possibilities for painting and drawing are places of containment, longing and projection.’
CAROLINA FUSILIER
pp.82-83 ‘When I moved to Santa Fe, I fell in love with the banks of the Setúbal Lagoon, a place in the city you can easily reach on foot or by bike. I go there whenever I can. Its biggest draw is that I discover something different every time. Last year, with the ebb, I started finding stones I liked for their shapes and colours. They’d always been there, but with the waters receding so far, they were more visible. I instantly imagined emojis carved on them. I thought that, if we should suddenly disappear, those stones would be left behind, and whoever found them in the future would decipher a kind of message.’
FLORENCIA PALACIOS
‘The main motivation behind these works was the desire and pleasure that building brings me, an act that leads me to bring order and meaning to the materials, a sense of beginning without end, continuity, movement, an exercise in resistance to inclement conditions, a trench for often difficult days. Leaving a message to the nothing and to the everything, to one and to all. A sense of temperance in my personal universe. Skill and heroism. I often think my motivation is an inheritance, a sense of belonging to a lineage of artists and craftsmen who came before me. So practising art moves me and fills me with joy; it’s the sense of fulfilling a universal design.’
CARLOS AGUIRRE
pp. 106-107 ‘Walking, collecting, moving, superimposing, assembling, contemplating, venerating are all important actions in my practice: they establish a relationship with the earth’s surface, and with the elements and changes of the landscape. I’m interested in the histories of certain actions, like driving in a stone, moving an object, superimposing it, making a tool, looking at the sun, trying to understand what it is that moves. I’m interested in the forms we create in order to approach the gigantic.’
FRANCISCO VÁZQUEZ MURILLO
pp. 122-123 ‘Practising art is a way of interrupting life, a very real way. Cutting that rhythm and sacralising a moment. It allows us to aim towards uselessness, absurd processes of pure faith. It connects us to a personal pulse and empowers us as we materialise something purring in our heads. For me, it’s a way of holding ourselves in the imagination and of making that a way of life, without taking it somewhere idealised or romantic: it’s still a trade like being a plumber or a carpenter. The advantage is nobody expects what we do, nobody needs it, and it has that force of materialising out of nowhere.’
ANTONIO VILLA
pp. 138-139 ‘For all I try and don’t succeed, I’m more interested in inventing sensitive practices that function as experimentation and are aimed at dismantling my own conventions than in ‘making work’ per se; in thinking from the perspective of the territory with my body about relations with what exists and with others. I see the work of art as the residual effect of an experience. At the same time, I do everything as an artist, in solution, in flight.’
SOLEDAD DAHBAR
pp. 154-155 ‘The function of producing work is the way I’ve found to be able to interact with the concrete, palpable, perceptible world. To tone down my thoughts – verbal language – for a time while something immaterial in me communicates with the tangible. It’s a relationship that allows me to connect the tangible with the intangible.’
MARÍA GUERRIERI
‘To inhabit is, among other things, to grasp the language of architecture. To incorporate its taxonomy. To assimilate the protocols of a space and behave in accordance with its precepts. It’s a negotiation between the body and the predesigned space. A dialogue between the organism and conventions. Between the present body and history. Much of my work in recent years has been to do with ‘counter-inhabiting’. Reading the protocols of infrastructures, which are the foundations of the performance of living, and using them as materials.’
JUAN GUGGER
Artists’ Bios and Work Reviews
LUCRECIA LIONTI San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, 1985 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
A graduate in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Lucrecia Lionti went on to study on the Artists’ Programme with the YPF Scholarship (2010) and at the Film Laboratory of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2012). She was awarded the cheLA Residency (2019), the Argentinian government’s BEC.AR Residency at the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Uruguay (2019), the Nacional de las Artes Creation scholarship (2018), the El Ranchito/Matadero Residency, Madrid (2017), the scholarship granted by the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, Argentina (2016), and the Alec Oxenford scholarship, Paris (2014). She was awarded the May Salon Stimulus Prize by the Museo Rosa Galisteo (Santa Fe, 2019) and the MUNT First Prize (Tucumán, 2018). She has exhibited in several cities around Argentina, as well as in Montevideo, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid and international venues. Her work features in such public and private collections as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, and Le 19 CRAC Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain de Montbéliard, in France.
Calendario abstracto [Abstract Calendar], 2020
pp. 42-43
In her artwork Calendario abstracto, Lucrecia Lionti explores the lengthening of time that occurred during the pandemic through a system of personal symbols. Discarding the conventional references of empty months and days, the calendar grid is filled with scores of vertical and diagonal lines lovingly sewn by the artist. With a nod to minimalist and conceptual traditions, order and repetition of information and pure, modular forms take on a phenomenological, existential dimension. Lionti injects feeling into the piece through the use of sewing, a constructive language learned in a feminine family environment that requires strength and patient bodily effort. It thus establishes the rhythms of life as a natural means of establishing the dimensions of the artwork.
Employing the same strategy, she has built another series of works that adopt familiar forms from the history of modern abstract art. These are homages to artists such as Joseph Albers and Lucio Fontana, which combine Lionti’s love of the pictorial tradition with her need for the construction process to be governed by the fabrication methods and the tecniques to produce images learned outside of artistic institutions, but which she has made her own.
NINA KOVENSKY City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), 1993 – where she lives
Nina Kovensky studied on a Proyectarte scholarship directed by Eva Grinstein (2011) as part of the Artists’ Programme óf the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2017), and at the crits given by Aníbal Buede (2016). She presented her first solo show, Mi primer trabajo, mi primera muestra [My First Work, My First Show], at the Isla Flotante gallery, Buenos Aires (2011), where she also held the exhibition Klapaucius:;::;:; (2014), curated by 141 people. In 2016, she staged the exhibition Equilibrio inestable [Unstable Equilibrium] with the artist Martín Kovensky, her father; in 2018, Realidad disminuida [Diminished Reality] and, in 2020, Ojo de cabra [Goat’s Eye], both at the El Gran Vidrio gallery, Córdoba. In 2017, she was awarded a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Argentina, to film the documentary Que aparezca Maresca [Let Maresca Appear], with the aid of Mic Ritacco. Pulmón de manzana [Light Well], 2020 pp. 46 — 49
In the work of Nina Kovensky, technology operates as a magical device capable of projecting our humanity and emotions and establishing a connection free of the filters and falsities of others. She achieves this through the creation of new functions for communication devices. The abstract appearance of Pulmón de manzana, which consists of a collection of rectangular mirrors, reproduces a typical night-time view from a city building. Intimate spaces both nearby and remote are linked together as a map of symbols through ‘coordinated lighting’, which the artist says ‘evoke a shared synchronicity between every window/screen of the present.’ Each mirror, like an intimate capsule, contains a series of tiny etched synthetic images ranging from a cellular organism to fruit or a constellation. These images create an imaginative world of parallel private realities with multiple times and spaces. Along with these images, the photographs grouped together under the title ‘Selfins’ form part of a continuously growing series of portraits of the artist’s friends and family. The faces are projected and transformed like a light signal when they are reflected in small round mirrors held by each person, as though they were trying to protect their identity.
FLORENCIA VALLEJOS Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, 1993 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
A graduate in Audio-Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Florencia Vallejos is co-founder of the CORAL collective and La Baranda gallery. In 2018, she was selected on the artist programme of the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (CIA), run by Roberto Jacoby. She has exhibited her video pieces at different festivals in Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Uruguay, the United States and Canada. In 2019, she received First Prize at the Patio de Salvataje Festival, at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, and in 2021, a second honourable mention at Bunge y Born’s call for entries entitled Nuevas Normalidades [New Normalities]. In her group projects, she received the award for Best Short Documentary at Fiver Dance, Spain, and Second Prize at the LAB International Videodance Festival for her short film Territorios [Territories].
Mis documentos [My Documents], 2018 pp. 50 — 51
In the work of Florencia Vallejos, personal technology – which has become a kind of private archive – takes on a life of its own and reveals its emotional side. Mis documentos presents a computer desktop in which files open automatically, subtly revealing the presence of subjectivity. Made by the artist at night as a means of calming her daytime anxiety, the video creates a written dialogue about the overhead image of a desert backdrop. These elements are accompanied by the hypnotic movement of an organic shape that is both soft and mechanical, and a soothing melody. The artwork thus exposes the tension between a landscape that offers the opportunity to take a break from the heady stimuli of the screens and the automatic appearance of a sequence of symbols and forms that introduce an unsettling uncertainty over whether the images and digital files are being controlled by a human or a machine.
LUCÍA REISSIG City of Buenos Aires, 1994 – where she lives
BERNARDO ZABALAGA Cochabamba (Bolivia), 1978 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
The collaboration between the artists Lucía Reissig and Bernardo Zabalaga began in 2018, when they developed an integral service combining household cleaning with energy cleansing, based on their experience in other fields (Lucía cleaned houses and Bernardo scented them with incense), methods they have developed throughout their careers as artists, and their research into the traditional ceremonial practices of different cultures. Lucía Reissig studied Art at the University of the Arts and, in 2017, was part of the Artists’ Programme of the Torcuato Di Tella University. In 2018, she won the Young Scholarship Prize of the Kenneth Kemble Visual Arts Award. Her solo exhibitions include Fight or Fly, at the Ray Gallery, Brooklyn (2016), and El trabajo invisible [Invisible Work], at the Selvanegra
gallery, Buenos Aires (2018). She has also taken part in such collective exhibitions as Extraña posesión, lugar a dudas [Strange Possession, Room for Doubt], Colombia (2018), Negra [Black], at Munar Arte (2019) and Bombastik, at the Nora Fisch gallery (2021). Bernardo Zabalaga is a Social Communication graduate from the UCB, Bolivia, and holds an Acting degree from the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. He has earned a Master’s degree in Advanced Theatre Practice from the Central School of Speech and Drama, London. In 2017, he was part of the Artists’ Programme of the UTDT. In 2014, he participated in the URRA residency in Buenos Aires, and in Kiosko, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His first solo exhibition was held at the Manzana Uno gallery, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in 2016.
Chilkeadas las lenguas que vuelven del humo [Chilked the Tongues that Return from the Smoke], 2021 pp. 52 — 53
Interested in learning how to protect the invisible – the things that generate specific emotional terrain and shape the ways in which we inhabit a space – Lucía Reissig and Bernardo Zabalaga made an intervention to enhance the wellbeing of the artworks in communion with the exhibition space and the artists. They put into practice an artwork that consists of a series of rituals carried out before the exhibition opening that, Reissig and Zabalaga say, ‘examine the collective body and connect us with the territory of the gallery that we inhabit with our work.’ One of the witness-elements for this work was a talisman that remained inside the gallery to protect it.
BLAS APARECIDO Sauce, Corrientes, 1976 – where he lives
A graduate in Advertising and Strategic Communications, a Graphic and Advertising Designer, Blas Aparecido began making artistic interventions in unconventional settings in both public and private spaces in 2013. These have addressed spirituality, religiosity, the diversity of faith, the ritual action of religious syncretism and its manifestations in artistic practice. Among other activities, he has worked as an assistant to Santiago Bengolea on the Gallery Web project and has participated regionally and nationally in solo and collective exhibitions. He currently works in cultural management as coordinator of the El Quiosquito space, in Resistencia, Chaco Province.
Serie “Altares portables” [‘Portable Altars’ series], 2016
pp. 54 — 57
Blas Aparecido’s “Altares portables” are items of clothing embroidered with devotional images that arise from out of what the artist calls a ‘frenzy of faiths’. Sacred and pagan figures that evoke the presence of the Virgin of Itati, Gauchito Gil and Gilda cohabit with numerous other symbols and ornaments to create a kind
of shield with which to protect oneself from misery and express faith. Sequins, embroidery, fake pearls, beads and discs combine with personal and found objects and are exhibited with fragments from prayers, poems and thoughts. This vast range of materials and references is sewn together by hand by Aparecido, for whom the embroidery process is also a period of devotion. The coming together of these elements creates desires and promises that transform the clothing and accessories we wear into ‘towers of cosmic energy’ built from out of genuine, personal belief.
DANA FERRARI City of Buenos Aires, 1988 – where she lives
She studied Stage Design at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes and Characterisation at the Colón Theatre Advanced Institute of Art, while attending stage design workshops. Since 2012, she has taken part in crits and received scholarships from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes/Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, the Film Laboratory and the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Since 2016, she has been attending the workshop of the artist Diana Aisenberg. Her main exhibitions were: Diana, at the Isla Flotante gallery (2013), El divismo y lo divino [Divaism and the Divine] (Naranja Verde, 2014; Munar Arte, 2018), both performance/installations, and the show La época de los perros flacos [The Age of the Scrawny Dogs], at the Quimera gallery (2018). She is currently a member of the La Baranda group and has, since 2014, been developing the RICAS Studio, a commercial project and art collective, with Clara Campagnola, which is dedicated to artistic ambiances and scenographic productions.
Serie “Los mareados” [‘The Dizzy’ series], 2020-2021 pp. 58 — 61
The characters that make up the group of “Los mareados” are disconnected bodies filled with a variety of mostly soft waste materials that can be used as cushions to lean on. Although the despairing faces and worn-out bodies appear to be a grotesque mirror of the fear and uncertainty of contemporary life, their function is to stimulate a caring bond. That was how they were used during a large portion of 2020, during which Ferrari offered them up for adoption by different guardians. As companion objects, the artist says that their shapes encourage ‘rest from verticality and stillness’. Additionally, the adoption dynamic in which these artworks circulate and the construction of a catalogue of personal experiences that the guardians construct during their relationship together keeps them separate from the logic of the commerce in artistic objects.
SANTIAGO VILLANUEVA Azul, Buenos Aires, 1990 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
An artist and curator, Santiago Villanueva was in charge of the extended area of influence of the Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo in Buenos Aires from 2011 until 2018 and was curator of the Bellos Jueves [Beautiful Tuesdays] cycle at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires from 2014 until 2015. From 2016 to 2017, he was pedagogical curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. During 2012, he was curator of Public Programmes and Education at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). With Fernanda Laguna and Rosario Zorraquín, he coordinated the ‘2019 Spazio de arte’. His publications include: El surrealismo rosa de hoy [Today’s Pink Surrealism] (Iván Rosado), Las relaciones mentales. Eduardo Costa [Mental Relations: Eduardo Costa] (Museo Tamayo), Juan Del Prete. Pintura Montada Primicia [Novelty Mounted Painting] (Roldan Moderno) and Mariette Lydis (Iván Rosado). He was co-curator of the exhibition Traidores los días que huyeron [Traitors the Days That Fled], by the artist Roberto Jacoby, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario. He formed part of the editorial group of the Mancilla journal and is currently editor of the Segunda época magazine. He teaches Curatorial Studies at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes.
Serie “Mesas revueltas y collages” [‘Messy Tables and Collages’ series], 2020 pp. 64 — 67 The artworks from the “Mesas revueltas y collages” series by Santiago Villanueva, were made between the months of May and August 2020 using the contents of ‘a series of boxes containing objects and papers that I didn’t know where to put, a kind of archive limbo’. Scattering these objects across small paintings of organic shapes that in some cases resemble landscapes, Villanueva builds collages that celebrate the crossovers between his personal history and the history of art, whose fabrication methods are made clear by the links defined by curiosity, sensibility, time shared with others and emotion. The elements spread over the canvas include fliers, collated texts and blisters of pills, locks, mate gourds and incense that lend a more ceremonial element to a collection of mementos that have been transformed into relics. Set out so that they appear to have been thrown across the surface, they present a delicate snapshot of the coincidences that mould the day to day emotional, intellectual and professional development of an artist.
CARLOS AGUIRRE Arroyo Seco, Santa Fe, 1981 – lives in Rosario, Santa Fe
A graphic designer from the Rosario Advanced School of Design, Carlos Aguirre studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. He trained with artists like Claudia del Río, Marcia Schvartz, Carlos Herrera and others. He has received several grants from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and the Ministry of
Culture for training and project development, and has been selected for various salons and competitions in Argentina and abroad. In 2017, he completed an art residency in Treviso, Italy. He has exhibited works in spaces and galleries in Rosario, Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and several Italian cities.
Templar la cuerda universal [Tuning the Universal String], 2021 pp. 68 — 71
The work of Carlos Aguirre is composed of a material universe of varied origin. The paper, boxes, metal, branches and wire that appear in his paintings and sculpture together with other more traditional artistic elements are the result a distinctive form of collecting inspired by the beauty of simplicity. This ongoing practice involves discovery, cherishment and reorganization, activity that brings an end to one life cycle of the materials and moves them on to another that lends a modern, compositional quality to his pieces. Infused with a creative, playful energy, materials from the artist’s world of everyday utility cast off their initial function and are reconstituted as colours and shapes in a conceptual order that places emphasis on the uniqueness of each object and their story, revealing an atemporal beauty.
Serie “No tengo fuerzas para rendirme” [‘I Don’t Have the Strength to Surrender’ series], 2017 pp. 72 — 75
GALA BERGER Villa Gesell, Buenos Aires, 1983 – lives in Lima (Peru) A graduate in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, in 2011, Gala Berger received a scholarship from the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas. She was awarded scholarships by the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the Laboratory for Research in Contemporary Artistic Practices (LiPac-UBA). In 2020, she was selected as for a residency at the Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark, and took part in the Para Site 2020 Workshops in Hong Kong. In 2019, she was an integral part of RAW Academy #6, mentored by Koyo Kouoh in Dakar, Senegal, and was co-founder of the Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo (2010–2020), and of the spaces Inmigrante (2012–2014) and Urgente (2014). Her work has been exhibited individually and collectively in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Argentina, Sweden, Peru, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, South Korea, Germany, Chile, Ecuador, United States, Puerto Rico, United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions in Argentina, Sweden, Mexico, South Korea and Costa Rica.
Made during the artist’s long stay in Costa Rica and inspired by the technique of quilting, the works in the series “No tengo fuerzas para rendirme” explore new organizational structures through images
that represent fetishes, desires and a new model for humanity forged by the manipulation of digital animation and 3D rendering as well as hybrids with animals and micro-organisms. Given the titles of different governmental departments, each artwork brings a new set of associations and sensibilities to the political imagination: from the warmth and decorative nature of popular traditional sewing techniques to what the artist describes as ‘cyborg, spectral, transcorporeal, transmaterial and, above all fragmentary’ qualities. Through them, she seeks to criticize the heteropatriarchal order and stimulate processes that reimagine our culture and institutions.
FLORENCIA PALACIOS Sunchales, Santa Fe, 1994 – lives in Santa Fe, Santa Fe
A graduate in Audio-Visual Arts from the Fernando Birri Advanced Film and Audiovisual Arts Institute, Santa Fe, Florencia Palacios continued her training in crits and workshops such as the ‘Workshop on the Analysis, Production and Accompaniment of Art Projects’, coordinated by Cintia Clara Romero and Maximiliano Peralta, or ‘PALA’, an artists’ training programme at LAVA gallery, coordinated by Nancy Rojas. In 2016, she participated in the El Pasaje contemporary art residency, in Tafí del Valle, Tucumán, and in the ‘2016 Biennial of the Moving Image’ residency, at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. She has staged the exhibitions: Paisaje sintético [Synthetic Landscape], with the collaboration of Renata Zas, at the Garra gallery, in Resistencia, Chaco Province, (2019); Futuro fortuito [Accidental Future], curated by Julio César Estravis, at the Centro Cultural Matienzo, Buenos Aires (2019) and Lo último que se pierde es la conexión [The Last Thing You Lose Is the Connection], at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of the National University of the Littoral, Santa Fe (2018). She has featured in group exhibitions in the Argentinian cities of Rafaela, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, as well as Madrid, Spain, and Kristiansand, Norway.
Serie “La lengua de las piedras” [‘The Language of Stones’ series], 2020 pp. 76 — 77
A set of stones gathered from the shore of the Setúbal Lagoon in the City of Santa Fe provide the medium for a series of images carved by the artist with painstaking craft. Using a bare minimum of tools, the archaic method contrasts with the images themselves, which are easily recognizable: icons inspired by digital emojis used on social networks in lieu of or as a complement to words. Using one of the oldest mediums known to humanity, the artist imprints contemporary ephemeral images that reflect technological change. In these carvings the emojis appear on their own or in groups to convey simple messages, moods and moments in the day that reflect the isolation during the pandemic that occurred in 2020. These
stones, grouped in different patterns, tell stories from a personal and collective experience that will potentially resonate with a vague past or a remote future.
NACHA CANVAS Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, 1990 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
Nacha Canvas studied Graphic Design at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she taught Morphology. At the same time, she trained in the disciplines of Ceramics, Drawing and Photography. Twice winner of the Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires in the Visual Arts category, she obtained a training scholarship at the Casa Tres Patios residency in Medellín, Colombia (2013) and a grant to develop the Friso project, curated by Lara Marmor, Marcela Sinclair and Patricio Larrambebere (2017). In 2016, she received an honourable mention in the Itaú Visual Arts Prize and was selected to participate in the Braque Prize, Muntref, in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in several cities around Argentina, as well as Miami, New York, Toronto, Lima, Brussels and Punta del Este.
Congénere [Congener], 2021 pp. 78 — 81
The artworks of Nacha Canvas arise out of her experimentation with clay: a material that is constantly shifting states between dust, damp, soft paste and dry, rigid objects. As a raw material, clay represents different temporal dimensions: it is an element that is thousands of years old but also projects infinitely into the future and always has the quality of potentially becoming or producing unexpected shapes. The artist explores this cycle of transformations and states in her models, a process in which faults or slight deformations arise out of minor mutations that perpetuate the production line of new forms. This process gave rise to the installation she called Congénere, a term that refers to the fact that in spite of their differences they are all different forms with a shared nature. The subtle, gradual transformation undergone by the pieces raises questions about time and the context of their birth and re-identifies them as objects that straddle the boundary between culture and natural organisms.
JUAN GUGGER Deán Funes, Córdoba, 1986 – lives in Paris (France) and Córdoba
Juan Gugger studied at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. His work has been exhibited in such institutions and spaces as the Espace Voltaire (Paris, 2021), Plateforme (Paris, 2021), the Koganecho Art Center (Yokohama, 2020), the Fiminco Foundation (Romainville, 2020), the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2019), the Monet Museum Gardens (Giverny, 2019), the
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA) (Buenos Aires, 2019), the Centro Cultural Kirchner (Buenos Aires, 2019), the NN gallery (La Plata, 2018), Sala de Proyectos (La Candelaria, 2017), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (Rosario, 2016), Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires (2015) and the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Contemporary Art (2014). His recent awards and distinctions include the Terra Foundation Fellowship (Chicago, 2019), the 69th edition of Jeune Création (Paris, 2019), the Láureat Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2019), the Kenneth Kemble Award (Buenos Aires, 2017), Roberts grant (Bogotá, 2017), a Creation grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2016), Project to Develop Award from the 4th Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires (2015) and an Oxenford scholarship (Buenos Aires, 2014).
2020-2021, 2021 pp. 84 — 85
With the purpose of questioning what he calls the ‘performance of living’, in the set of videos entitled 2020-2021, Juan Gugger juxtaposes images that document an almost absolute stoppage with natural sounds and ambient noise. Many of them refer to the demands of technology and the expectation of movement, information and production in contemporary life. Obsessed with the passivity of stones and the study of trovants – the only rocks that grow and reproduce discovered in Costesti, Romania, which are considered ‘forms of inorganic life’ – he presents the contemplation of these moments as a means of penetrating stillness. Distorting the primary characteristic of videos – the moving image – the shots appear to be still and to have been tampered with apparent faults or editing errors. These strategies allow the work to invoke the totemic power of natural forms – even where some aren’t – as the first monuments: memorials, sculptures or even architecture.
FLORENCIA CAIAZZA Olivos, Buenos Aires, 1982 – where she lives
Florencia Caiazza studied at the Regina Pacis Advanced School of Arts in San Isidro, and at the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2015). She has won the Kenneth Kemble Youth Scholarship Award (2017), First Prize in CALL XVIII, from the Luis Adelantado gallery in Valencia (2016), Second Prize in the Williams Foundation Competition (2015) and a Mention in the Rosario National Salon (2014). She was selected for the Federal Laboratory of the Museo Sívori (2021) and has participated in the Creative Ireland Program (2019), Espositivo (Madrid, 2018), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de La Coruña (Galicia, 2016), Achterhaus Ateliers (Hamburgo 2016) and the Argentinian-German project ‘Villa Panadería Dorada’ [Golden Bakery Shantytown], (Düsseldorf, 2016). She has held the solo exhibitions Mismatch, at the Pallas Projects Gallery, Dublin (2021), Color municipal [Municipal Colour], at the Hilo gallery, Buenos Aires (2019), ¿Cómo se conocieron? [How Did You Meet?], at the Luis Adelantado
gallery (2017), and El circuito de las formas [The Circuit of Forms], at the Big Sur gallery, Buenos Aires (2016). In addition, her works have been displayed in group exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba, A Coruña, Dresden, Rio de Janeiro and other cities.
Sin título [Untitled], 2021 pp. 86 — 89
Florencia Caiazza’s installation is composed of a set of plaster casts made during research into the production of ornamental motifs in ceramics. Contact with the clay, used in this case as a mould, led little by little to the artist discarding the construction of forms that generate motifs through reproduction and repetition in favour of making a surface that, although it may continue to use a fragment as a construction module, is the result of the exploration of touch as a unique and unrepeatable gesture. Without using any tools, the artist works solely with the pressure of her fingers – and occasionally those of her daughter – in an exercise of discovery and exploration of materials that highlights her movement, strength, rhythm and composition.
MARÍA GUERRIERI City of Buenos Aires, 1973 – where she lives María Guerrieri studied painting and print-making at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón. She was selected to participate in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2012). She received the Bicentennial Creation scholarship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (FNA) (2016). Since 2000, she has staged several solo and group exhibitions in spaces run by artists, galleries and institutions in Argentina and abroad. These include the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the Centro Cultural Recoleta, the Telefónica Foundation, the FNA, Diverse Works, the Espacio Duplus, Belleza y Felicidad, Appetite, Braga Menéndez, Ruby, Mite, the SlyZmud gallery, the River Paraná Editorial Club, El Bucle and Selvanegra. In 2016, she released Fuente de chocolate [Chocolate Fountain], a book of poems, stories and drawings published by Iván Rosado. She has contributed to publications on art in magazines like Segunda época and El suelo.
Serie “Ladrillos danzarines” [‘Dancing Bricks’ series], 2020 p. 90
Ladrillos camino [Road Bricks], 2020 p. 91
In the artworks of María Guerrieri, multiple rectangles – made from simple but precise strokes of brick-coloured gouache – become basic units of construction very different from traditional rigid, stable, architectural forms that come together to construct shapes dominated by a liberating, fantastical force on the paper plane. In their numerous configurations, the rectangles
form upright walking bodies or organisms that contract and expand depending on how the dimensions and shape of the surface on which they are painted inspires them. Made with no prior plan but rather built brick by brick like a kind of mantra, for Guerrieri, these drawings are a means of ‘removing the weight of the eternal and predictable that comes with all familiar things.’ While her images blur the boundary between representations of people and things, as well as people and houses, they also allow for the conception of living bodies full of creativity and impetus that offer a refuge where the imagination can roam free.
ERIK ARAZI City of Buenos Aires, 1990 – where he lives
Erik Arazi studied with the artist Eduardo Navarro. In 2015, he took part in the Cuaderno de apuntes [Notebook] workshop, given by Andrés Di Tella at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; in 2016, in the artists’ programme of Proyecto PAC; and in 2018, he was part of the Artistas x Artistas [Artists for Artists] Programme, at the El Mirador Foundation, where he attended a crit with Tomás Espina and Florencia Rodríguez Giles. In 2019, he was the winner of the Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires for a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, mentored by Alejandra Aguado, Pablo Siquier and Juliana Iriart. His works have been exhibited at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Award (2020), the 23rd Klemm Award (2019), the UADE Visual Arts Award (2019 and 2020), the Rafaela Biennial (2019), the National Salon of Visual Arts (2018), the Project A Award (2013 and 2017), the Tucumán National Salon of Visual Arts (2017) and others.
Sistema nervioso central [Central Nervous System], 2020 pp. 92 — 95
The drawings of Erik Arazi arise out of an impulse to channel his energy, thoughts and states of consciousness, i.e.: a desire to depict movements that exist beyond physical stillness and are thus invisible to other people. Inside, the artist feels as though ‘he moves like an athlete’ and these drawings, made with pencils, marker pens and coffee grounds, reconstruct the imprecise geometry of the circuits along which energy flows. On this occasion, the drawings are silhouettes of two human bodies that can take on multiple internal configurations: a diagram of a meditative order, a representation of the means by which the artist perceives his inner flow and a document of the link between consciousness and absolute forms.
FRANCISCO VÁZQUEZ MURILLO Rosario, Santa Fe, 1980 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
Francisco Vázquez Murillo studied Philosophy at the National University
of Rosario. He received the Creation scholarship in 2019 for the exhibition Los movimientos alrededor del sol [Movements Around the Sun]. In 2016, he was part of the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and, in 2015, received the Fondo nacional de las Artes (FNA) - Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti scholarship. He has attended workshops and crits with Diana Aisenberg, Silvia Gurfein, Mónica Giron, Santiago Villanueva, Graciela Speranza, Leticia Obeid, Diego Bianchi, Santiago García Navarro and others. He has undertaken projects and research in the following residencies: Kaus Australis (Rotterdam, Netherlands), RSDNART – Kankabal (Yucatán, Mexico), Nido Errante (El Chaltén, Argentina), Marble House Project (Vermont, United States), Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency (Shanghai, China) and Monson Arts (Maine, United States). He has staged solo exhibitions in Argentina, Mexico, the Netherlands, China and the United States.
Erosión [Erosion], 2020 pp. 96 — 97
Working like an archaeologist, Francisco Vázquez Murillo has gathered a series of eroded iron bars and rubble on the Costanera Sur in the City of Buenos Aires. An offshoot from his 2020 project Cruzar el río [Crossing the River] — an installation composed of similar pieces but on a larger scale that when laid out in a coastal setting look similar to Menhirs – the pieces in Erosión reflect on what the artist calls ‘a minimal archetypal, constructive gesture... verticality as a space one inhabits and where culture is created as well as our ongoing intention to construct meaning through their similarity with the letters of the alphabet. As an expression of the weight and fixedness of the act of habitation but inspired by the artist’s wanderings though his local environment in search of subtle forms, his works invite us to think about the consequences of our ways of life, focusing on the dialectics and coming together of stillness and exploration, between a sedentary and nomadic way of life.
BENJAMÍN FELICE San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, 1990 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
A technician in Photography Direction, Benjamín Felice holds a degree in Cinematography from the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (UNT). He also studied programming for artists at the Telefónica Foundation. He participated in the project ‘Artistic Practices and Digital Cultures, Convergent Technologies and Divergent Content in the Electronic Arts’, at the UNT’s Research Centre, and in ‘Boca de fuego’ [‘Mouth of Fire’], at Munar Arte, coordinated by Carlos Herrera. As a music producer and independent musician, he participates in the labels ABYSS (Buenos Aires) and Memory Number 36 (California). In 2016, he received the Bicentennial scholarship from Argentina’s Fondo Nacional de las Artes and,
in 2017, was part of the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He has taken part in crits with Verónica Gómez, Eduardo Stupía, Eduardo Basualdo, Lux Linder and Rafael Cippolini. He has had solo and group exhibitions at the Miranda Bosch gallery, the Virla cultural centre, the Piedras gallery, Panal, El Rancho Relámpago, the Casa del Bicentenario, Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires and the Espacio La Sala. He was part of the ‘La ira de Dios’ [‘The Wrath of God’] residency. He has collaborated with the group ‘La Onion’ and with ‘Proyecto Tetra’ for Plataforma Futuro. He currently directs the Ohno gallery.
Conjuros hiperboloides [Hyperboloid Spells], 2020 and others pp. 98 — 101
The images featured in the works of Benjamín Felice are inspired by diagrams from scientific publications of hypergeometry and terrestrial magnetic fields, which he then alters, tidies, deforms and combines with personal symbols and gestures to lend the pieces a hermetic quality. Hyperboloids, cones, and perspectives of geometric bodies appear from out of an artistic exercise in which they are carved with intensity from a paraffin surface: a process that combines the psychological gesture with modes of mathematical representation charged with the experimental and esoteric energy of physical phenomena. Reminiscent of ancient manuscripts, Felice’s artworks explore the magical nature of images that in this case appear slowly following the initial act of engraving and only become clear when dust and earth are thrown over the surface and fall into the grooves made by the artist in the almost transparent material.
AGUSTINA WETZEL Corrientes, Corrientes, 1988 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
Agustina Wetzel is a CONICET doctoral fellow in Gender Studies and Latin American Contemporary Art at the Centre for the Study and Documentation of the Image, Geohistorical Research Institute, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, where she researches intersections between art and monstrosity. Based on her researches, she has given seminars at Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos (LASA)/Barcelona, the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Universitat de Vic –Universitat de Catalunya (UVic–UCC) and others. In 2019, she participated in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) and, in 2020, in its Film Programme. Her videos have been selected for different national awards and festivals: Fuera del área de cobertura/ Outside the Coverage Area, at Visions du Réel (Switzerland, 2021); Estados del deseo [States of Desire], at the Federal Laboratory of the Dirección General de Patrimonio, Museos y Casco Histórico (Argentina, 2021); Mundos propios [Own Worlds], at the Exhibition Hall of the UTDT (2021); Amiga BBS [BBS Girlfriend],
at the 24th Klemm Award (Argentina, 2020); Satellite Heritage, at Panorama together with the Garra gallery (2020); Ruina vertical [Vertical Ruin], at the Félix Amador Salon (Argentina, 2019); and El idioma de los modos [The Language of the Modes], at the National Award for the Visual Arts by Universidad Nacional del Noreste (Argentina, 2019) and the Little Biennial at the Ruth Benzacar gallery (2019).
Vida salvaje [Wild Life], 2019 pp. 102 — 105
Vida salvaje is part of a series of videos in which Agustina Wetzel seeks to raise awareness about the effects of gentrification. In this case, a compilation of recordings of demolitions played in reverse depicts a succession of large buildings rising from out of a cloud of dust one by one. Through the use of digital and VHS archive footage – relics from the history of the moving image – her work highlights how casually our society creates its own ruins. Ferocious and nostalgic, Vida salvaje also leaves open the question of how these processes of gentrification affect the fabric of communities, which are invisible at the scale of these buildings.
DANIELA RODI Salliqueló, Buenos Aires, 1980 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires Daniela Rodi studied Museology at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in General Pico and Art at the Provincial Institute for Fine Arts in Santa Rosa, both located in La Pampa Province. She has received scholarships and awards from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and the Williams Foundation for crits, residencies and training programmes with such artists as Jorge González Perrín, Claudia del Río, Gabriel Valansi, Lucas Di Pascuale and Soledad Sánchez Goldar. She has received grants from institutions such as the Instituto Nacional del Teatro and the TyPA Foundation to study dramaturgy of space and museum management. She founded and co-directed the contemporary art gallery Vermú (2015-2017) in Santa Rosa, La Pampa Province. She held positions in the areas of museology and education at the Casa Museo Olga Orozco (2004-2015), which she directed between 2016 and 2020, and where she developed projects such as ‘The Travelling House Programme’, awarded a prize by Ibermuseos in 2018. In 2020, she founded and co-directed the publishing house La Ballesta Magnífica. She has been working independently on cultural management projects since 2009.
Serie “Artefacto de escucha” [‘Listening Device’ series], 2021 pp. 108 — 109
The set of soft signage made by Daniela Rodi feature phrases that she rewrites and squeezes until they break open. She thus gives language the opportunity to go on forever, to generously expand their capacity of speech and interpretation. The artworks arise, in the
artist’s words, ‘out of a process that begins with listening.’ Messages uttered out loud, other people’s words in writing, recorded or underlined in found or shared texts, are recycled and introduced to new mediums and contexts in which the goal is to emphasize alternative meanings so they end up speaking in different ways again and again. From humble banners, the phrases conjure images that seek to transcend themselves to build an ecosystem of new ideas that, Rodi says, ‘don’t come from me but are attracted by these hanging, flapping phrases.’
EUGENIA CALVO Rosario, Santa Fe, 1976 – where she lives
Eugenia Calvo is a graduate in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. In 2018, after her solo show El inicio del movimiento [The Beginning of Movement], at the Diego Obligado gallery in Rosario, she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation scholarship. In parallel to numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions, she coordinated the Education Area of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario and is currently a teacher of the project ‘Borrowed School’, at the Manuel Musto Municipal School of Plastic Arts, in Rosario. Among other awards, she received the Gasworks scholarship (2005), the arteBA-Petrobras First Prize (2006), the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants and Commission Program (2010) and Special Mention at the Bienal Internacional de Cuenca (2011).
Hecha para siempre [Made For Ever], 2021
pp. 110 — 113
The work of Eugenia Calvo is renowned for the way in which she uses unusual combinations, uses or organizations of domestic objects to expose the strength and fragility of domestic spaces that are always on the edge of revolt or collapse. Although most of her installations are full of tension – for example groups of furniture that appear in ambiguous states, suspended or subject to pressure – the artwork Hecha para siempre is in a state of absolute repose. The parts of a table and chair sit neatly, entirely disassembled, converting them into resting bodies. Camouflaged by the apparently natural way in which they have been set out, as though ready to be stored away or reassembled, the only sign of life appears in a television placed at their head. Its screen plays a series of faces made up of objects from a family environment that imprint their personality and sensibility on the scene.
CAROLINA FUSILIER City of Buenos Aires, 1985 – lives in Oaxaca (México)
Graduated from the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires in 2011, Carolina Fusilier completed the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella’s between 2016 and 2017. She participated in Soma in Mexico City and the Kunstakademie
Düsseldorf in 2018 and 2019. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Scholarship (2019–2020) and the support grant from Jumex Foundation in Mexico City to carry out her project Kitchen with a View (2019). She was also awarded the Raúl Urtasun - Frances Harley scholarship for emerging artists from Argentina (Banff Center, Canada, 2015). She completed the Open Sessions programme at The Drawing Center, New York, in 2018-2019. Her solo exhibitions include: Kitchen with a View, at Locust Projects, Miami (2019); Angel Engines, at the Natalia Hug Gallery, Cologne (2018); and Fenómeno [Phenomenon], at La Fábrica, Buenos Aires (2014). Her work was recently included in group exhibitions at: Sculpture Center and The Drawing Center (New York), the Kamias Triennial (Philippines, 2020), Doc! (Paris, 2019), the Chalton Gallery (London), Soma (Mexico) and The Banff Center (Alberta), among others.
Serie “Ucronías de habitaciones totémicas” [‘Uchronias of Totemic Rooms’ series], 2019 pp. 114 — 117
In the artworks from the series “Ucronías de habitaciones totémicas”, silhouettes of small archaeological figures contain landscapes and architectures. Solid figures are thus opened up for reimagination as containers of other universes and constructions: they become transparent so as to reveal new places and thus become bigger than themselves even as they remain within their outlines. The artworks are made from a combination of images cut out of pages from archaeology journals – we are left with only the main motif, its silhouette and its shadow – and watercolours that complete and adapt to these ghostly bodies, which have faded entirely. Interested in the symbolic and formal potential of the constructive fragment, with this series the artist continues her exploration of cultures that conceive of their homes as bodies or extensions of themselves and especially ‘talking architectures’; a kind of utopian architecture developed during the neoclassical French period in which the form of each construction would intentionally reveal its function.
GONZALO BECCAR VARELA Tigre, Buenos Aires, 1983 – where he lives
Between 2001 and 2009, Gonzalo Beccar Varela studied Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism within the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Fine Arts at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. In 2007, he participated in workshops at The Art Student League, New York, and was a student at the Guillermo Roux Foundation between 2003 and 2006. In 2014, he attended the workshops led by Karina Peisajovich and Matías Duville, at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Also in 2014, he attended the crits ‘Cazadores de arte’ [‘Art Hunters’], run by Alejandra Roux, Fabiana Barreda and Sergio Bazán, and between 2015 and 2016, ‘Cosmos’, a workshop run by Daniel Joglar and Bruno Gruppalli. In 2017, he won a scholarship for the Yungas Project, Tigre edition, directed by Raúl Flores and, in 2020,
he participated in the workshop ‘El texto de la obra’ [‘The Text of the Work’], directed by Silvia Gurfein. In 2018, he had his first solo show, Es otra cosa [It’s Something Else], at the Acéfala Gallery in Buenos Aires. He has been general coordinator of the María Casado Home Gallery since 2015.
Una quescucha para escuchar [A Listeningear to Listen], 2020 and others pp. 118 — 119
The set of paintings made by Gonzalo Beccar Varela redevelops the historical relationship that painting has always maintained with the gaze as an experience of distance. Countering this tradition, each of the pieces aims more to reach out to the viewer’s body than to simply be a surface to be viewed, although it retains that dimension. It also presents a relationship with the senses very different from the conventional experience offered by painting. By including sound and touch as dimensions that establish new rituals around the artwork, the paintings offer the opportunity to glimpse the artist’s body as the real and symbolic territory where the works were made. A prayer, ring, whisper or the squinted gaze make it possible to see the paintings as an object more for devotion than contemplation.
FEDERICO ROLDÁN VUKONICH Paraná, Entre Ríos, 1993 – lives in City of Buenos Aires A graduate in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, during 2018, Federico Roldán Vukonich participated in the Artistas x Artistas [Artists by Artists] Programme, organised by the El Mirador Foundation, where he attended crits with Florencia Rodríguez Giles, Tomás Espina and Pablo Siquier. In 2019, he won the Second Sculpture Prize at the Entre Ríos Provincial Salon. He has participated in several awards, including: Entre Ríos Provincial Salon (20182012), Bienal de Arte Joven de Buenos Aires (2017), the Project A Prize (2017), the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales Palais de Glace (2016), the Bienal de Arte Joven de Santa Fe (2014-2016). During 2018, he attended the residency at the Museo Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires and, in 2019, in Comunitaria, an international residency for contemporary art and social processes in Lincoln, Buenos Aires. His solo projects include: Pobre duende [Poor Elf], at the Quimera gallery (2019); Teorías de la comunicación [Theories of Communication], at the Museo de la Cárcova (2018); ¿Qué es el arte? [What is Art?], at the El Mirador Foundation (2018); and De mis lágrimas brotará un río [From My Tears Shall Spring a River], at the Usina del Arte (2017).
Virtuoso, 2020 and others pp. 120 — 121
This set of artworks made in 2020 focuses on a specific moment when lockdown limited the availability of materials and thus encouraged the use of simple supplies and small formats. In an attempt to conjure the power of eternal symbols, the artist
conceives these pieces as a means of transferring abstract ideas about love to symbols made from pasta stuck to paper, which turns out to be a surface as resilient and noble as stone. The spirals, letters and marks, traced in symmetrical order, establish a code for an encounter within the private, emotional and territorial space from which the artist produces.
ANA WON San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, 1989 – where she lives
Ana Won studied Artistic and Technical Photography at the National University of Tucumán. In 2018, she attended the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She participated in workshops at Yungas Contemporary Art and the Rusia gallery. She has taken crits with Carlos Huffman, Diego Bianchi, Mónica Giron, Verónica Gómez, Eduardo Stupía, Eduardo Basualdo, Raúl Flores, Sandro Pereira and others. She was awarded a grant by the Proyecto Impulsar Cultura in 2020 and by the URRA residency scholarship in 2019. She received distinctions in the UNNE Award for Visual Arts and in the XLIV Salón Nacional de Tucumán. She has held solo exhibitions like Cantos y alaridos [Songs and Howls], at the Constitución gallery, Buenos Aires (2021); Episodios de la pintura [Painting Episodes], at Lateral, Tucumán (2017) and G3NER∆C1ON 1000ЁNNI4Г, at the Espacio Tucumán, Buenos Aires (2017). She has also taken part in group exhibitions, including: Mannequin, at Tucumán Foundation for Contemporary Art (FACT); Tucumán (2019); Faltas personales [Personal Failings], at the Exhibition Hall of the Universidad Torcuato di Tella (2019); Cover, at the Tres Pinos Foundation (2018) and Tucumán Abstract Art, at the Espacio Cripta (2017). She is a co-founder of the FACT.
Sin título [Untitled], 2019 and others pp. 124 — 127
Ana Won’s paintings accumulate layer upon layer of different methods and materials whose combination – through compatibility or otherwise – takes the images to unexpected places. Considered by the artist as a ritual act by which ‘human action can connect with the other,’ her painting generates canvases strewn with anxious writing that, permanent and alive, spreads across the surface like a magnetic field. The brushstrokes and lines, which hurry the appearance of basic forms and outlines – from crossings out and blotches to polygons – are, the artist says, ‘a record of the passage of a force through the canvas via the materials.’ This is expressed in her rhythmic use of colour and the way in which the shapes take their form on the surface and find ways to relate with one another, configuring diagrams riven through with intense graphic energy.
MATÍAS TOMÁS San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, 1990 – where he lives
Matías Tomás graduated from the Maestro Atilio Terragni School of Fine, Decorative and Industrial Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. From the outset, he specialised in engraving and graphic arts. He assisted María Rossini in her private workshop and has given courses in printed art and cyanotype. He was part of the ‘El Rancho’ art gallery, which featured in arteBA 2013. He has exhibited in group shows, including: La cueva en la roca [The Cave in the Rock] (2015), thanks to a scolarship granted by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and, in 2017, staged a solo show at the Big Sur gallery. In 2016, he received a scholarship from the Programme for Artists of the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (CIA).
Sin título [Untitled], 2019 and others pp. 129 — 131
The work of Matías Tomás is born out of an irrepressible graphic drive. Loose and impulsive, his ferrite strokes explore the expressive potential of the line and he uses them to construct an almost monochrome artistic universe. This space includes extraordinarily vital abstract figures as well as images of bodies that range from caricature to existential melancholy. The large format work included in this exhibition was made during a period of intense communion with the artist’s natural surroundings in Tafí Viejo, Tucumán, where he lives, with said landscape taking on a more important role in his work. Made at speed and in fragments, the artwork is composed of lines that were put down on paper after long walks through the Tucumán rainforest. It is thus infused with both exterior and interior life, reflecting the connection between the body and its environment.
ANTONIO VILLA Esquel, Chubut, 1989 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
Antonio Villa is a graduate in Dramaturgy from the Metropolitan School of Dramatic Art, was part of the Artists’ Programme of the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (2017) and a Scholarship Holder in Criticism and Curatorship on the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2018). As an artist and cultural manager, his work crosses contemporary art, writing and theatre. He has premiered theatre plays in Argentina and Mexico as both director and playwright. He curates the Gallinero collection of contemporary drama for the Rara Avis publishing house. As an author, he has published Teatra, in Desde un tacho ediciones, and Paz [Peace], in Libros Drama. He is the director and curator of the Constitución gallery, with Martín Fernández.
Fiesta de la luna [Feast of the Moon], 2021 p. 133
Fiesta de la luna by Antonio Villa is a mobile made from wood gathered in the city of Esquel
– where the artist grew up – and industrial and craft incense burners made using the macramé technique. This piece seeks to eliminate the historic tension between art and craft: techniques and materials that have their own symbolic, spiritual and private value have their power enhanced by a sculptural form in which objects on a domestic scale present a new collection of floating symbols that can be interpreted as house, landscape and body simultaneously. The usual purpose of the materials used is to be burned as incense during a mystical ritual, expressing power with their aromas, which lend them an invisible, evocative dimension.
JIMENA CROCERI Cutral-Có, Neuquén, 1981 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires
Jimena Croceri graduated from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes and continued her training on the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2013) and at the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (2014). Among other recognitions, she received the Oxenford Travel Scholarship for field research in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest (2016), was selected to participate as artist-in-residence on the FLORA ars+natura programme in Colombia (2018), participated in the Pro Helvetia exchange programme ‘Coincidencia’ in Switzerland (2019) and received the Pernod Ricard research scholarship from Villa Vassilieff in France (2020). Her work has featured in exhibitions at the Raven Row Exhibition Centre, London (2019), the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2019), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2014 and 2019) and for the Braque Prize, Muntref, Buenos Aires (2015).
Trapo sonajero (escuchá, escuchá) [Rattle Rag (Listen, Listen)], 2021 p. 134
Trapo sonajero (caudal lento) [Rattle Rag (Slow Flow)], 2021 p. 135
The artwork Trapo sonajero by Jimena Croceri adds a new dimension to a set of used domestic rags: the artist has sewn bells to them so as to produce sound. Her work is aimed at making audible the objects and actions of our everyday life to highlight their essential role in maintaining our environment as well as in creating modes of communication of which we are not aware. When animated, these objects are capable of giving rise to new experiences for the viewer and revealing a network of emotional, vital and sound-based connections between them, our bodies, the air and the water. Their activation also reveals the unique character of each and every encounter: in the case of the elements in Trapo sonajero, the sound that arises from their movement is determined by the specific rhythm of the orange lines one often sees in cleaning cloths – the gleaming line of bells which appear as though set out in a musical score – the dimension and quality of the cloth, the spaces between the stitching and, most of all, the force with which one shakes them, or the wind.
DENISE GROESMAN City of Buenos Aires, 1989 – where she lives
Denise Groesman studied the Visual Arts degree at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. She trained at Gabriel Baggio’s drawing, painting and crits workshop. In 2013, she received a grant to attend the Artists’ Programme of the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti and, in 2016, she participated in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). In 2015, she attended the Cuaderno de apuntes [Notebook] workshop, given by Andrés Di Tella at the UTDT, and in 2016, collaborated with Agustina Muñoz at Das Arts – Amsterdam for the work Las piedras [Stones]. In 2018, she participated in the URRA residency in Tigre, Buenos Aires. In 2019, she was a fellow of the Action Lab at the Teatro San Martín, Buenos Aires. As resident artist, she took part in the Belluard Bollwerk international theatre festival (Fribourg, Switzerland) and in Providenza Lab (art and permaculture) on the island of Corsica (France). She has participated in several group exhibitions and art fairs in Argentina, Chile and the United States, including: Una historia de la imaginación en la Argentina [A History of the Imagination in Argentina], at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2019) and Mostro, at La Fábrica (2017).
El beneno de la belleza [The Benom of Beauty], 2019 p. 137
El beneno de la belleza is a sculpture that is a ‘rocket / tree / sound shower / crazy rattle / shed / oven / incense burner... a spatial cabinet, a place in which to stay and make wishes, somewhere to burn bay leaves,’ that can be both threatening and playful. This is Denise Groesman’s description of a tin structure made from discarded tomato cans that, modified by the artist – who cleans, solders, hammers, softens and polishes them – create a malleable, reusable structure for a gleaming, musical, habitable space. The title – taken from a poem by the Brazilian poet Douglas Diegues who is recognized for his use of an exuberant language arising out of a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish and Guaraní – expresses the idea of fusion in the artwork whose shape makes it a multiple symbol, both dystopian and uplifting.
SOLEDAD DAHBAR Salta, Salta, 1976 – where she lives
Soledad Dahbar is studying for a Master’s in Contemporary Latin American Aesthetics at the Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda. Since 2015, she has directed the La Arte visual arts project. In 2021, she was selected for the National Salon of Visual Arts, the 8M Prize and the Amalia Fortabat Prize. She received distinctions at the Andreani Foundation Award (2013) and the 31st Salta Provincial Salon (2012), among others. In 2021, she was awarded the Metropolitan Fund and Patronage and, in 2019, the “Creation” scholarship by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and the Future Platform scholarship by Argentina’s Ministry of Culture. The
collaborative projects she has coordinated include the following: Tierra suelta [Loose Earth] (Cachi, Salta, 2017), with Andrea Fernández; Residencia Puente Campamento Vespucio [Residence Bridge Campsite Vespuccio] (General Mosconi, Salta, 2016), with Santiago Gasquet; Residencia telúrica II [Telluric Residence II] (San Carlos, Salta, 2013) and 5 intenciones y 1 defecto [5 Intentions and 1 Defect] (2012). He coordinated the project La Guarda (Salta, 2006-2009) with the artists Ana Benedetti and Roxana Ramos.
Manifestación [Demonstration], 2019 pp. 140 — 141
A set of geometric shapes rises up in silent proclamation. The artwork Manifestación by Soledad Dahbar is composed of the repetition and grouping of circles, squares and triangles attached to wooden poles to form a group of resting signs that combine artistic and political activism. The proportion of the colours copper, silver and gold reflects the percentages of these minerals in the soil and mountains of northwest Argentina, which are being exploited by massive mining concerns. The way the signs are laid out to form a horizon and silhouette of polychrome mountains symbolizes the return of the metals extracted from the landscape to their original state in the ground. This dimension of the artwork is accompanied by an aesthetic dimension in which simple shapes combine with the bright colours – in resonance with the landscape – and a political one in which the signs act as guardians of a collective treasure.
FLORENCIA SADIR Salta, Salta, 1991 – lives in Cafayate, Salta
Florencia Sadir studied for the Plastic Arts degree at the Faculty of Arts, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. In 2015, she cofounded and co-directed the exhibition project ‘Lateral’, in Tucumán. In 2020, she participated in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She was awarded a Roberts Scholarship to study at the FLORA School, in Bogotá (Colombia), during 2019, and a 2019 Creation scholarship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. She has been an Azcuy Award finalist (2020), a winner of the Centro Cultural Recoleta’s RADAR Visuals Award (2017) and winner of the Ópera Prima Award (2016). She has taken part in the URRA Tigre residencies (2017), and the Curator residency, in Santa Fe (2016).
Llegué. La tierra era tan firme que seguía apisonada [I Arrived. The Earth Was So Firm It Was Still Packed Down], 2021 and others pp. 142 — 145
The work of Florencia Sadir occurs in intense dialogue with the knowledge accumulated in the community where she lives regarding the cultivation of the land and production of objects and crafts. Her
sculptures and installations reduce these objects to their basic forms, adopting formal minimalist strategies to distract from their functionality and create apparently classical and formal compositions that expose their original structure and richness. Sadir’s works in this exhibition, however, combine pure forms with representations of what arises from their link with the earth: the food she grows, the ceramics she makes, the objects of domestic and symbolic value that represent the materials she has access to in her local environment: from wood to guano and wicker. Set out over the earth she works with every day in her garden, these elements compose an essential order she presents as a gesture of gratitude and offering.
LA CHOLA POBLETE Mendoza, Mendoza, 1989 – lives in the City of Buenos Aires 17 Galería, 2017), Ejercicios para cargar ausencias [Exercises for Carrying Absences] (A la Cal, Santa Fe, 2018), Muerte de barro [Death of Mud] (Imagen Galería, arteBA 2018), Todos sabemos lo fácil que es hacer llorar a alguien [Everybody Knows How Easy It is to Make Someone Cry] (El Cultural San Martín, 2018); Slave ( Museo Carlos Alonso, Mendoza, 2019), El órgano masculino de la Chola [The Chola’s Male Organ] (A la Cal, MAC, Córdoba 2019) and Tenedor de hereje [Heretic’s Fork] (Pasto, Buenos Aires, 2021). He participated in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2018) and in the Artists’ Programme of MARCO Arte Foco, artist-in-residence workshops and the training and experimentation platform lab for transdisciplinary artists, at the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires (2019). He is part of the collective of dissident activists ‘Comparsa Drag’.
Sin título [Untitled], 2021 pp. 146 — 149
Poblete studied for the BA degree and teacher training degree in Visual Arts at the Universidad de Cuyo. She participated in solo and collective exhibitions with artworks that include: Il martirio di Chola (Espacio Cultural Julio Le Parc, 2014), Esercizi del pianto (Primera Bienal de Performance, Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson, 2015), Rumore (Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de Mendoza, 2016), American Beauty (Imagen Galería, arteBA 2017); Pierrot (Plataforma Futuro, Centro Cultural Conte Grand, 2017); Pierrot II (Pasaje The work of Poblete explores the interrupted transformation of bodies and identities as embodied by mingling, mixture and exchange. Employing performative, sculptural and pictorial languages, the artist develops a system of symbols identified with bodily accessories such as clothing, jewellery, masks and objects. Through a repertory of bodily and ornamental forms seen in a set of bread masks laid out like archaeological pieces, she enacts an ongoing mutation of figures in a search for a forever shifting identity and to renew the symbolic power of ancestral
cultures. The process of experimentation and learning undergone by the artist for each of his pieces revolves around bread as a living material; a perishable, primordial element that is moulded to represent a state of change.
ALEJANDRA MIZRAHI San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, 1981 – where she lives
A Doctor in Philosophy from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, specialising in Art and Design in the area of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Alejandra Mizrahi holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Philosophy (2009) and in Aesthetics and Theory of Art (2008) from the same university. She currently lectures at the National University of Tucumán, for the University Technical Degree in Clothing and Textile Design. She has been coordinating workshops on art practices and textile experimentation since 2012. During 2018, she was a scholarship holder on the Argentinian National Ministry of Culture’s Investiga Cultura Programme, at the Museo Nacional de Historia del Traje (National Museum of Costume History). In 2017 and 2018, she participated in Katsuhiko Hibino’s Turn Project, in Buenos Aires and Tokyo. She is part of the Intercampos II Programme (2006), at the Telefónica Foundation. She has participated in art residencies at the Curator residency, in Santa Fe (2014) and the Savvy Contemporary International Residency, in Berlin (2016). Fantasía aplicada [Applied Fantasy], 2021 pp. 150 — 153
The work of Alejandra Mizrahi is inspired by craft methods of textile production in her region. She uses them to produce a range of fragments – cloths, weaves and lace – that make visible the infinite possibilities of these construction methods as well as the imprint of the individual and the place where they were produced: they contain information about the tension and regularities with which the body works, her trains of thought and imaginative outbursts and the resources she uses to colour the fabrics, which generally come from the fruits and vegetables she eats. The title, Fantasía aplicada evokes the decorative imaginative world we associate with embroidery but also seeks to reach a universe that might be a fantasy in itself, separate from the traditions that shape this kind of production. The artwork combines a geometry composed of a collection of frames made by Luis Pereyra – a supplier of frames for the community of weavers with whom Mizrahi is associated – that maintain some of the classic forms while also adding more whimsical designs, on which interiors of incredible intimacy and delicacy are embroidered. The fabric, dyed with avocado stones, is sewn, the artist says ‘to the cold, rigid outline of the shape,’ on which ‘flowers, bird silhouettes, lines that go nowhere and nets that catch the emptiness weave the fantasy together.’
AGUSTINA TRIQUELL Córdoba, Córdoba, 1983 – lives in Anisacate, Córdoba and the City of Buenos Aires
Agustina Triquell is an artist, teacher, publisher and social researcher. Her work revolves around the relationships between history, memory, politics and their pedagogies, and articulates poetic investigation and contemporary photographic, publishing and audiovisual production. Since 2020, she has coordinated the Centre for Contemporary Artistic Research/Procedures at the School of Art and Heritage, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, in Buenos Aires, and runs the Asunción Casa Editora publishing house, devoted to publishing research on contemporary photographic practices. Since 2011, she has been part of the Citizenship and Human Rights Programme of the Institute for Economic and Social Development, CLACSO.
Serie “Todo lugar es el centro del mundo” [‘Every Place is the Centre of the World’ series], 2021 pp. 156 — 159
“Todo lugar es el centro del mundo” presents a poetic, reflective imaginative world inspired by how communities inhabit a territory. The different elements that make up the artwork – images, objects, documents and videos – were gathered together over a long period when the artist, who was herself settling in an isolated region of the Sierras of Córdoba, formed ties with neighbouring communities to whom she offered photography workshops. The results of her exploration of the alchemical photographic process ended up providing a metaphor for the transformations and imprints of collective bodies. Combined with other material and photographic matter connected to the exercise of habitation, documents, and literary and philosophical texts about access to property, these elements present a reflection on the distance between need, reality, legality and utopia.
Nina Kovensky Sin título, de la serie “Selfins” [Untitled, from the ‘Selfins’ series], 2019-20
Exposición / Curaduría: Alejandra Aguado / Asistencia curatorial: Clarisa Appendino / Jefa de exposiciones temporarias: Micaela Bendersky / Coordinación de exposiciones temporarias: Giuliana Migale Rocco / Registro de obra: Paula Pellejero / Diseño de Exposición: Ivan Rösler / Coordinación: Almendra Vilela / Productora: Agustina Vizcarra / Asistencia de producción: Gonzalo Silva, Rocio Englender, Manuel Maquirriain / Montaje: Leo Ocello, Fernando Sucari, Germán Sandoval, Andrés Martínez / Iluminación y sonido: Claudio Bajerski, Guillermo Carrasco, Soledad Manrique, Jorge López
Publicación / Edición general: Gabriela Comte / Edición gráfica: Eduardo Rey / Textos: Alejandra Aguado, Clarisa Appendino, Federico Falco / Edición: Martín Lojo, Alejandro Palermo / Coordinación editorial: Soledad Sobrino / Diseño: Pablo Alarcón / Corrección de textos: Julia Benseñor / Traducción: Ian Barnett, Kit Maude / Retoque de imágenes: Guilermo Miguens / Producción gráfica: Daniel Maldonado
EQUIPO MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO DE BUENOS AIRES
Dirección / Directora: Victoria Noorthoorn Gerente de operaciones y desarrollo institucional: Marina von der Heyde / Planificación estratégica: Flavia García Melgarejo / Comunicación y proyectos especiales: Álvaro Rufiner
Curaduría / Curador senior: Javier Villa / Curador asociado: Francisco Lemus / Curador del programa federal: Raúl Flores / Curador de programas públicos: Fernando García / Coordinadora del equipo curatorial: Clarisa Appendino /Curador asistente: Marcos Krämer / Asistente curatorial: Violeta González Santos / Curadores del ciclo El cine es otra cosa: Andrés Denegri, Gabriela Golder / Curadores del ciclo Escuchar: sonidos visuales: Leandro Frías, Jorge Haro / Patrimonio / Jefa de patrimonio: Alejandra Aguado / Asesor de patrimonio: Marcelo E. Pacheco / Coordinadora del archivo audiovisual y de los ciclos de música y cine: Valeria Orsi / Administración del patrimonio: Adrián Flores, Celestino Pacheco / Registro e investigación: Cristina Godoy, Victoria Olivari / Asistente curatorial: Rodrigo Barcos / Fotografía: Viviana Gil / Montajistas: Rodrigo Alcon Quintanilha, Juan Sottocorno / Estrategia digital: Matías Butelman, Ezequiel Gentile Montes, Juan Pablo Suárez / Conservación / Jefe de conservación: Pino Monkes / Conservadoras: Silvia Borja, Diamela Canosa, Lucila Murcia / Asistente de conservación: María Luz Boy Arditi Rocha / Exposiciones temporarias / Jefa de exposiciones: Micaela Bendersky / Coordinadora de exposiciones: Giuliana Migale Rocco / Registro de obra: Paula Pellejero / Diseño y producción de exposiciones / Jefe de diseño y producción de exposiciones: Iván Rösler / Coordinadora general de producción: Almendra Vilela / Productores: Javier González King, Edgar Lacombe, Julieta Potenze, María Bárbara Venancio / Asistentes de producción: Rocío Englender, Manuel Maquirriain / Coordinador de montaje: Germán Sandoval / Montajistas: Santiago Antonio Contin, Francisco Agustín Donnerstag, Andrés Martínez, Aurea Chiarle Meissinger, Andrés Raymond Martínez Rodríguez / Coordinador de iluminación, sonido y tecnologías: Guillermo Carrasco / Iluminación, sonido y tecnologías: Claudio Bajerski, Jorge López, Soledad Manrique Goldsack, César Tula / Asesor artístico: Jorge Ponzone / Comunicación / Coordinadora general: Johanna Santalucía / Diseñadora gráfica senior: Paula Galli / Diseñador gráfico: Juan Peters Desteract / Producción: Laura López / Prensa: Victoria Onassis / Imagen y video: Sol Navedo / Fotografía: Guido Limardo / Redes sociales: Gabriela Giles, Andrea Kain / Web: Matías Jorge / Editorial / Editora general: Gabriela Comte / Editor gráfico: Eduardo Rey / Editores: Martín Lojo, Alejandro Palermo / Coordinadora editorial: Soledad Sobrino / Correctoras: Julia Benseñor, Inés Gugliotella / Traductores: Ian Barnett, Leslie Robertson / Diseñador gráfico: Pablo Alarcón / Retocador fotográfico: Guillermo Miguens / Productor gráfico: Daniel Maldonado / Educación /
Jefa de educación: Laila Calantzopoulos / Asesora pedagógica: Patricia Rigueira / Coordinadora del departamento educativo: Silvina Amighini / Coordinadora de instituciones educativas y universidades: Gabriela Gugliottella / Productoras de instituciones educativas y universidades: Solana Ceccotti, Sofía Sagle / Coordinador de comunidades: Alfredo Aracil / Coordinadora de accesibilidad: Mariana Capurro / Productora de accesibilidad: Giuliana Perticari / Productora de cursos y talleres: Sol Santich / Productora de recursos pedagógicos: Victoria Boulay / Educadores: María Clara Imán, Alejandra Knoll, Ignacio Cerbino, Johanna Herrera, Luciana Sáez, Maite Galdós / Desarrollo de fondos / Jefa de desarrollo de fondos y relaciones institucionales: Mora Juárez / Responsable de eventos: Pía León Masson / Responsable de desarrollo de fondos- RSE y alianzas corporativas: Graciela Antognazza / Responsable de desarrollo de fondos – Programa Mecenas: Silvia Braun / Coordinador de canjes y mecenazgo: Gabriel Kirchuk / Técnico de eventos: Franco Pellegrino / Biblioteca / Bibliotecarios: Alejandro Atias, Silvia Carabajal, Mónica Lerner, Luciana Belén Olveira / Administración / Jefe de planta permanente, estadística e inventarios: Vicente Sposaro / Coordinadora de funciones patrimoniales y mesa de entradas: Liliana Gómez / Asistente de administración: Carla Sposaro / Contabilidad y Finanzas / Jefa de contabilidad y finanzas: Verónica A. Velázquez / Coordinadora de contabilidad: Natalia Minini / Administración: Fabiana Beatriz González / Recursos Humanos / Jefa de recursos humanos: María Belén Cugliare / Asesor de recursos humanos: Maximiliano Sánchez / Analistas de recursos humanos: Vanesa Bérgamo, Romina Ortoleva / Servicios generales / Jefe de servicios generales, mantenimiento y seguridad: Rolando Gabriel Ramos / Asesor de mantenimiento: Gustavo Shokida / Coordinador de mantenimiento: Hugo Arrúa / Mantenimiento: Rodolfo Amaya / Sistemas de la información: Matías Altieri / Coordinadores de seguridad: Susana Arroyo, Fabián Oscar Bracca, Gladis de la Cruz, Soledad Rodríguez Penino / Guardias de sala: Julieta Aguiar, Mirta Graciela Castel, Lino Espínola, Catalina Fleitas, Camila Kovec, Ramiro López Núñez, Gabriele Marafioti, Florencia Maury Daglio, Alejandro Meng, Ana Clara Montini, Agustina Nattero, Laura Núñez, Javier Francisco Pacheco, Andrea Peirano, Celia Rochi, Lola María Vázquez Aparici, Midya Zingman / Recepción: Lorenzo Domaica, Camila Paz Kotek, María Laura Moyano, Victoria Renzo / Equipo de higiene y desinfección: Maximiliano Alonso, Gabriel Amarú Córdoba, Johana Cardozo, Patricia Ceci, Alejandra Domínguez, Esther González, Pablo Agustín Lembo, Rosana Ojeda, Patricia Peletti, Laura Andrea Pretti, Katherine Vega
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