Carlota Beltrame

Las hilanderas [The Spinners] is the name of an exhibition that I am beginning to imagine, one that is therefore still in its conceptual stage. It is an unfinished project that has its origins in the work of two young artists from Tucumán and considers a period of research into pieces related to textiles, belonging to the collection of the Museo Moderno. After thinking a lot about its name, I finally settled on the homonym of the famous work by Velázquez, chosen for its conceptual strategy of relating sub-themes that, by opening up one within the other, give the work a great discursive complexity, rather than only for what it represents — a group of women spinning.

Las hilanderas [The Spinners] is, then, a project about textiles drifting towards hybridisations that include other languages. For this reason, I started my exploration with the works La trayectoria intermedial del texto [The Intermediate Trajectory of Text], by Valentina Díaz; Randa sonora [Lace Soundtrack] and Tres chalecos verdes [Three Green Waistcoats], both by Alina Bardavid, which go beyond the textile to incorporate performance, installation, video documentation, video installation and sound installation, forming a relationship not only with other artistic languages, but also with other technologies. In my opinion, this opening up of textile art means that the frequently alluded to ‘intimacy of the hand’ is expanded by superimposing it with other discourses, in a process that I find similar to that of Velázquez’s Las hilanderas, as it exposes these ‘holes in language’ that are not always understood because the logic of the domestic, the logic of common sense, is suspended in them.

In this stage of uncertainty from which I venture to present Las hilanderas [The Spinners] — beyond the script developed as a possible gateway to the artistic/aesthetic movements of a practice traditionally associated with the dometic and the functional — I envision this proposal as a fabric that seeks to interweave not only pieces of art, but also concepts maintained by the evolution of the original living fabric, typical of popular practices; but also of manual, mechanical and technological linear weaving. In short, I propose the inauguration of an exhibition at the Museo Moderno that will decompose, symbolise, present, represent and reassemble trajectories that — once new myths, patterns, codes, bodies and spaces are incorporated, as if it were a woven fabric — will end up woven together in the spectators’ perception.