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In this performance, recorded exclusively for the Museo Moderno, the Argentine singer, composer and actress runs through some of the most popular tunes in her songbook, with which she has appeared on stages all across the globe. Her old-school rock, marginal, tropical style takes a tour of the 23 provinces of Argentina as part of the Moderno’s Imagined Country programme. Chacarera sin estribo (chacarera) / Con Gaspar al mar (Andean beats) / Pajarito ya volaste (melody) / Guayaba y un cuchillo (guaraní) / Santo Marcos (country milonga) / Pitanga (Rio de la Plata cumbia)
Payada ballad or rap? Country or city? Tradition or modernity? An iconic payador troubadour and his guitar, a noted rapper and a beat box virtuoso Milo Moya ‘compete’ to improvise lyrics and music on a tour of 23 Argentine provinces to show us the dialogue that different genres may hold to reimagine the country.
This week we share one of our biggest editorial challenges: the book made to accompany the exhibition A history of imagination in Argentina. In connection with the extensive visual tour that the exhibition proposed through the territory national and its identity, the book includes an exhaustive literary anthology in which the diverse landscapes and their mythical, narrative and political themes find crosses, contradictions, resonances and nuances.
We invite you to read the theoretical essays by Javier Villa, curator of the exhibition and Alejandra Laera, Doctor of Letters who was also in charge of the anthology of texts. The book brings together fragments of narrations, essays and poems by more than 70 authors, and many images of the more than 250 works that made up the exhibition.
The pandemic has necessitated the closure of many national and international borders but, paradoxically, it has seen the consolidation of tools of connection and paths of communication all across Argentina. In a context where we are physically separate, the ties that bind the cultural network of Argentina together have actually grown stronger. We have been given a new opportunity to question the centrality of Buenos Aires and to draw a new, more expansive artistic map of the country with emphasis given to several different hubs at once.
Juan Pablo Renzi, Nostalgia del Paraná, 1976, óleo sobre tela, 120 x 150 cm.
Over the past three decades, regional artistic centres (which have often been relegated to a peripheral role in what is already commonly seen as a peripheral continent) have organized research, artistic practices and methods of cultural administration that have become essential to telling a properly diverse story of Argentine art. These stories centre around educational spaces such as the historic public universities, provincial and municipal art schools and workshops coordinated by artists as well as exhibition venues such as public museums and galleries and autonomous projects that have always been pillars of the contemporary scene and that, now two decades old, have seen artistic communities grow around them, producing their own poetics and critical currents fully distinct from one another.
Furthermore, the network has grown through a dynamic interaction between regions artists have chosen to migrate to and the fairs that have appeared in recent years in cities such as Córdoba, Rosario and Corrientes, which lead to greater frequency of exchange as well as different training programmes and grants that strengthen regional ecosystems. These movements bring different experiences together and create mutually reinforcing federal circuits that, through great effort by the artists themselves, ensure that the map of Argentine art is flourishing and diverse.
Over the next few weeks, the Museo Moderno will take us on a trip per day to each province to introduce a local artist and thus begin an institutional exchange with the regional focal points that are conducting research, fully aware that such selections can only offer a partial view of the wider panorama of artistic production across the provinces. Through their work and voices we will learn more about these artists’ output, how they learned their art and their influences. At a time when the present seems absolute, imagining the future requires processes in which territorial diversity is fully integrated, resources are democratized and the circulation of experience is more fluid and poetic.
Valeria Conte Mac Donell (1971) has lived and worked in San Martín de los Andes, Neuquén, since 2003. She is a visual artist and teaches at different artistic institutions in the area. More than fifteen years ago she decided to move with her family to the Andes town and the new environment inspired her to create a body of work made up of installations, sculptures and drawings in close dialogue with the vast dimensions and resilience of the nature around her.
Romina Baigorria lives in the town of Villa Mercedes, San Luis. Her painting explores formal issues related to the study of colour. In recent years, her work has begun to employ traditional techniques that lend her pictorial practice a physical presence. Using the codes of the installation, the work is made up of different elements that – suspended, supported or superimposed – construct a landscape of colour that expands beyond the edge of the canvas to take on new forms. Volumes of wood, domestic objects and folded textiles become part of her artworks resulting in a degree of estrangement in the viewer as well as evoking local light and atmosphere.
Carlota Beltrame lives and works in Tucumán. She is an artist, teacher, researcher and Doctor of Art. For several years she has trained young artists at Taller C, her course at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Recently her practice has focused on combining traditional techniques from her region (such as randa) with symbols and materials that refer to the political history and violence of the country.
Diego Figueroa lives and works in Resistencia, Chaco. He has taught many young artists at his studio and received grants from the Fundación Antorchas and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to further the aesthetic experimentation of his sculptural and pictorial work, which combines popular iconography and the history of art with fragile, dissonant materials.
In this conversation, the artist Maximiliano Mamaní and the singer Sara Hebe talk about art as a tool of struggle, the tensions between the centre and the periphery and social conflicts in Argentina and Latin America.
Maximiliano Mamaní lives and works in Jujuy. He is a drag artist and teacher of folk dances. A few years ago, he created the character Bartolina Xixa, inspired by the indigenous leader Bartolina Sisa, whose legacy she seeks to restore, taking inspiration from Andean legends.
Dry twig. Permanent colonialism is a video-dance piece filmed at the Hornillos rubbish tip in Quebrada de Humahuaca.
Concept, choreography and performance: Bartolina Xixa. Filmed at the Hornillos rubbish tip in Quebrada de Humahuaca, in February 2019.
Daniela Rodi (1980) is a visual artist and museological researcher. She works with writing, sound and the voice, exploring their conceptual potential. Communication is a material in her work: messages, social networks, books and conversations are used to create new poetic circuits. Through different media (such as book-objects, sound installations, and photography, among others), the artist sees words as a continent of emotional landscapes. She has lived in La Pampa since 2002 and is currently a part of the working collective Fuego en la Torre, which brings together artists from different towns in Patagonia.
Roxana Ramos was born in Cafayate and lives in the city of Salta, where she plays a fundamental role in higher artistic education and promoting contemporary practice from the region through her education work at the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes Tomas Cabrera, and the creation and coordination of the La Guarda space between 2004 and 2014. For almost two decades Roxana has researched and promoted the relationship between traditional and contemporary artistic practice based around a feminist poetic that examines the silenced role of Latin American women in general and especially in Salta. Her practice combines different visual media with collective productions and social field and academic research in which the body is sensitized in a bond with the territory and its densities.
German Bormann (1969, Corral de Bustos, Córdoba) lives and works in Valle Viejo, Catamarca. He has a degree in architecture from FAUD, UNC. In 2012 he created Castillo Arte Contemporáneo, a gallery and experimental space for contemporary art that he runs from home with the objective of promoting local and regional art. His artistic research focuses on materials in relation with his architecture work and also the relationship between the object, space and viewer, constructing different devices that can often be physically accessed.
Julia Rossetti (1986) is an artist, administrator and teacher. In this video she tells us about her recently released documentary Creer o reventar [Believe or Burst]. She studied at the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste and has held workshops supported by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the Yungas Project and the Artist Programme at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Since 2018 she has been a part of the federal platform Intemperie.
Eugenia Calvo was born in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, in 1976. In her work she arranges situations that undermine functionalism and the blinkered use of spaces, things, and habits. Inverting the precarious, inanimate existence of objects, she gives them another purpose that creates permanent states of tension and suspicion. She has received several honours and awards, including the Gasworks Grant (2005), the arteBA Petrobrás First Prize (2006), a grant from the CIFO Grants and Commission Program (2010), a Special Mention in the International Cuenca Biennial (2011) and a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2017)
Maia Gattás Vargas (1986) lives in Bariloche, Río Negro. Her conceptual practice combines visual arts with different tools from scientific disciplines. Most recently the artist set out to investigate the construction and representation of the territory of Patagonia through its images, immersing herself in historical and field research. Her artworks are generally installations with prominent archival components combining drawings, collage, photography, video, found objects and writing. Maia has a degree in Social Communication, a Doctorate in Contemporary Latin American Art from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and a CONICET Doctoral Grant at the IIDyPCA Institute in Bariloche. Among other training and artistic workshops, she took the Film Programme at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in 2019.
The works of Nacha Canvas (Ushuaia, 1990) explore the relationship between the natural and the artificial, the human-made and nature. Her most recent pieces, a collection of soft toned ceramic forms, directly address the viewer’s memory and associative ability. She studied Graphic Design at the UBA and has also trained in ceramics, drawing and photography. Her work was selected to take part in the Buenos Aires Young Art Biennial in 2013. In 2019 she was invited to compete in the Muntref Premio Braque. She lives in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, where she has founded a workshop that carries out the research and development of Alfar ceramic pieces.
Yiyú Finke (1960) is an artist living in Posadas, Misiones. In this video she presents her pictorial project Mesa chica [Small Table] which explores our relationship with childhood and the events that linger in her memory such as the time, on 20 August, 1965, that it snowed in Misiones. She has a Master’s degree in the Methodology of Research into the Visual Arts. Her studio is at home and has always been a space that houses multiple cultural activities, including the ACMI space (2012-2016) and Galería de Arte (2016-2018). It is currently home to her bar: Hormiga.
Yiyú Finke (1960) es artista y vive en Posadas, Misiones. En este video nos presenta su proyecto pictórico Mesa chica y su relación con la infancia y los sucesos que reverberan en su memoria, como aquel 20 de agosto de 1965 en el que nevó en Misiones. Se formó como Magister en Metodología de la Investigación en Artes Visuales. En su casa tiene su taller, que ha sido siempre un espacio de múltiples actividades culturales. Allí funcionaron el espacio ACMI (2012-2016) y Galería de Arte (2016-2018) y, en la actualidad, su bar, Hormiga.
Lucas Mercado (1980) lives and works in Paraná, Entre Ríos. He is a writer, artist, cultural administrator and curator. His work combines drawing with narrative elements, poetry and comics. In the series “Procedencia y desplazamiento” [Origin and Displacement] he develops a project that tours the Province of Entre Ríos documenting in his drawings and texts the stories, people and everyday jobs he comes across on his way.
Hoco Huoc lives in Quilmes, Buenos Aires Province, where he runs his general store, Los solteros. Describing himself as a complex artist of the occult and the extended suburbs, the driving force behind the underground general store, a night owl and musician, Hoco Huoc held his first exhibition at UV estudios in 2015: El restorán de Hoco Huoc [Hoco Huoc’s Restaurant]. After that he has appeared at different fairs and held solo exhibitions together with UV while also from time to time organizing an artistic open house and culinary project in his home town of Quilmes, called S. Conozca.
Verónica Meloni (1974) is an artist and teacher. She lives and works in Córdoba where her practice varies between performance, public art, drawing and writing. She is part of the long and vibrant tradition of performance from the city of Córdoba. Her creative processes are aimed at placing in conflict the abstract relationships between actions, objects and people. Building up and dismantling common senses and meanings, her artworks create images that ask new aesthetic and ethical questions.
Verónica Meloni, Pausa, 2019
Performance at the Biennial of Performance, Córdoba edition, Fundación El Gran Vidrio
Camera and editing: Guido Grosso
Camera: Julián Miret
Sound: Francisco González Cholaky
Direction and editing: Victoria Ulrich
Facundo Diaz (1985) is an artist and cultural administrator. He lives and works in the Province of Mendoza. He trained in clinics, residencies and workshops given by other artists and his work, which includes drawing, painting and poetry, makes recurring references to mountains and volcanoes. The mysterious, powerful forces of geography are evoked in a body of work that exposes the fragile border between real and fictional landscapes.
Walter Tura was born in Formosa in 1970. In 1992 he moved to Resistencia, Chaco, to study architecture. At the Workshop of Visual Arts (Universidad Nacional del Nordeste), he found a space in which to practice painting and drawing. In 1999 he won an award for his sculpture from the Consejo Federal de Inversiones. He has attended artwork production and analysis workshops in Posadas and Resistencia (organized by the Fundación Antorchas, MAC UNAM and the Museo de Bellas Artes René Brusau). At the end of 2002, the Fundación Alberto J. Trabucco awarded him a grant that saw him receive training from Luis Wells and Alejandro Puente. In 2006 he moved back to Formosa, where he continues to produce and develop his art.
Lucía Pellegrini (1978) lives in Puerto Madryn, Chubut. Lucia works with the conceptual possibilities of pieces of marble or stones from the door of her house, incorporating time as a necessary element for the development of her artwork. During the process, she reflects on the link between her work and its surroundings, the landscapes and horizon of the town where she lives. Lucia has attended the a painting workshop given by Marisol Jindra and an artwork clinic with Claudia del Río, Leticia Obeid, Marina de Caro and Daniel Fischer. In 2015 she won an FNA Creative Grant and received a Special Juror’s Mention in the sculpture category at the 104th National Salon.
The Ossobuco collective (Néstor Basualdo, Mónica Miranda, Víctor Moresi) works with the materiality of textiles with an emphasis on the feminist, collective practice of embroidery. Today, they are presenting their project Altares Populares together with Mantera Galería, run by the artist María Rocha. One of its objectives is to draw attention to the struggle against precarious employment at the margins of legality. Their convictions and questions about the role of art are developed and shared from a stand at a market located on the Ferrocarril Mitre lot in the town of La Banda in Santiago del Estero. Among other recent exhibitions and initiatives they took part in the 2018 and 2019 Mercado de Arte Contemporáneo, Córdoba.
Carla Monguilner was born in San Juan, where she lives and works. She is a visual artist with a degree in sculpture from the Faculty of Art at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. She has received a group grant for production from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, an incentive grant for Young Artists from the Fundación Banco San Juan and was a finalist in the Premio Itaú Cultura in 2014. Since 2015 she has been a part of the collective Proyecto Baldío, dedicated to organization, production and experimentation in the field of art and public spaces in San Juan.
Patricia Viel has lived and worked in the Province of Santa Cruz since 2000, where she continues an intensive artistic career that includes production, teaching, cultural administration and curation. Her work centres around the challenge of living in Patagonia, the distance between the centre and the periphery and the climate, geography and politics of the area. From painting, Viel branches out into other disciplines such as video installations and video art to think about the territory and ways of inhabiting it as a focal point for production. She is an independent curator of exhibitions where she seeks to promote the regional scene by bringing together artists from different parts of Patagonia.
The curators of the Listen [Visual Sounds] cycle, Jorge Haro and Leandro Frías, have made this playlist on Spotify to introduce a very varied group of artists (electro-acoustic, concrete music, noise, electronica) with a specific bond with a region of Argentina: by birth, choice or circumstance. The list features pieces by Juan Namuncurá (Mapuche), Gonzalo Biffarela (Córdoba), Hugo Druetta (Santa Fe), Ricardo Pérez Miró (Santa Fe) (In Memoriam), Elsa Justel (Buenos Aires), Ricardo de Armas (Buenos Aires), Beatriz Ferreyra (Córdoba), Andrea Pensado (Buenos Aires), Francisco Ali-Brouchoud (Misiones), Melmann (Buenos Aires), Jeremy Flagelo (Santa Fe), Juan Sorrentino (Chaco), Tripnik (Chubut) and Yamil Burguener (Chaco).
This week we share the publication made to accompany the exhibition Sol Pipkin: Piltriquitrón Inside, which took place in the museum’s halls in 2014-2015. The hill Piltriquitrón, which rises 2,260 meters above sea level in the city of El Bolsón (Río Negro) is the fundamental geography that Sol Pipkin took to carry out this project in the that the natural landscape, the hiking routes and the signage of their place of origin they were transformed into sculptural spaces.
The publication contains an introductory text by Rafael Cippolini and excerpts from a conversation between him and the artist, as well as images of Pipkin’s work, his references visuals and your own written lyrics.
Let’s find things you’ve never noticed before: take a look around your room to make a picture using recyclable materials. Don’t forget to share the results with us by tagging us on your social networks!
When you see an artwork, what sounds do you imagine? Throughout 2019 and during the summer of 2020 we asked that question to groups of school pupils on tours organized by the Education Department. This video features images from the exhibition Ad Minoliti: Soft Museum and recordings from those tours. We invite you to add new voices to these characters. You can use your voice, hands or other objects to generate sound. Record your efforts and upload them onto your social networks. Don’t forget to tag us!
Guided by the concept of Active Old Age, The Elderly in Action is a programme run by the Education team at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires involving several different projects for older people. One of them is the ‘Group of 8’, which includes Hugo Schamber and Alcira Jesiotr, among others. They discuss the artwork La boca del infierno [The Mouth of Hell] by Florencia Bohtlingk and share myths and legends from the area that inspired the artist. Leave your comments underneath the video!
