The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is honoured to present Ofrenda al sol [Offering to the Sun], by Florencia Sadir (Cafayate, 1991), originally conceived for the Aichi Triennale 2022 in Japan, but only recently produced with support from the Museo Moderno for this exhibition.
Florencia Sadir’s work arises out of her keen, sensitive gaze on the territory. It is particularly concerned with the historical knowledge developed by the communities of the Calchaquí Valleys, particularly those of the village of San Carlos, where Sadir lives, the oldest in Salta and a cradle of local crafts. Her practice – which we know through installations, sculptures and drawings – highlights the ways natural materials are so transformed by ancestral technologies that, on coming into contact with heat, humidity or wind, they become pottery, adobe or fertile soil for cultivation. Their production contributes to the building of home and hearth, to the preservation and cooking of food, to the transfer of water or to shelter.
Sadir’s work, however, seeks to deflect these processes from their functional nature and to exhibit these objects’ forms in the raw: equipped with a minimalist outlook and faithful to her conceptual background, Sadir has, in her short but thriving career, created stripped-down installations to reveal orders, textures, patterns and methods.
Ofrenda al sol is Sadir’s most recent installation and the first in which fantasy predominates. Animated by the prospect that blind production processes open up to the imagination – a reference to the rich material life that develops beneath the surface and to the process of firing and charring the ceramics in a sealed kiln – Sadir has given form to imaginary beings that rise up shoot-like out of a charcoal floor, the heat source that has made possible their consolidation as sculptures. Standing upon this black mantle, whose shape recalls the whimsical drawings that echo the divisions of crops and property, these sculptures inform us about the magic of their material nature and exhibit the knowledge that has shaped them.
Curator: Alejandra Aguado, Clarisa Appendino
