“This project consists of a laboratory that will create a dialogue through combining materials collected from two distant urban contexts – San Salvador de Jujuy and the city of Buenos Aires – using domestic textiles. Inspired by Alberto Heredia’s methods and reinterpreted through textiles, this proposal brings together collected objects using domestic needlework techniques such as crochet and knitting. Llama wool, with its deep roots in the Andean culture of Jujuy, will be used to create a physical and symbolic counterpoint. The slow rhythm of manual production will contrast with the immediacy of the consumption and accumulation of objects. Weaving will lose its traditional functionality of containing, protecting, embellishing or framing objects that are displayed and used in domestic settings, and become an amalgam, a form of welding, a suture for wounds.
The aim is to evoke Heredia’s own gesture by intertwining a variety of tourist, cheap, kitsch and discarded objects to generate new associations and possible readings, by blurring their original logic and narratives, to escape the gentrification and marketing strategies that impose stereotyped local identities.
The project is part of a contemporary exploration of the relationship between art, material culture and territory. By revisiting Alberto Heredia’s methodology, it seeks not only to pay tribute to his legacy, but also to create a dialogue using textile and artisanal practices. The combination of objects from Jujuy and Buenos Aires using llama wool will create a corpus of hybrid objects from the centre and the outlying areas of the country, challenging the construction of regional identities, consumption, the memory of things, and present-day experiences.”
Gabriel Alarcón was born in 1982 in San Salvador de Jujuy. He is a visual artist and professor of Visual Arts. Alarcón holds a degree in Sculpture from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina) and lived in the city of Córdoba for more than a decade, taking part in shows and salons. He currently resides in San Salvador de Jujuy. Alarcón has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Jujuy, Curitiba and Berlin, as well as in provincial, regional and national salons, including Itaú Artes Visuales (2021), UNNE (2019), the 46th National Salon of Tucumán (2018) and Bancor (2018).
His awards and honourable mentions include: 2nd Prize at the NOA Regional Painting Salon (Santiago del Estero, 2018); Mention at the 9th Bancor Painting Salon (2018); Honourable Mention at the 35th City of Córdoba Salon (2016); Mention in “Site-specific Humus”, Centro Cultural España (Córdoba, 2016); Special Mention by the jury at the Jujuy Provincial Salon, Painting category (2016). He has also participated in the Zona Habitada clinic and residency led by Lucas Di Pascuale, at the City of Córdoba Art Market (2017), and at the clinic and workshop given by Chiachio & Giannone through the FNA (Jujuy, 2015).