Menu
Menu
Menu
Kilometro 1 is the Museo Moderno’s new proposal to connect with the San Telmo neighbourhood. Its objective is to make visible, single out, value and promote the artists and studios, and the creative, social and cultural proposals of the community in our neighbourhood.
The Museum reaches out to our neighbours through a series of actions and it connects – through its educational, artistic and editorial programs – with San Telmo’s institutions, markets, temples, park, square, and with its specific audiences: children, youth, adults, the economically and socially vulnerable, educators and health personnel, and their desires and needs.
In his work Materialismo político [Political Materialism], artist Gaspar Acebo intervened in the political graffiti found on the walls of the San Telmo neighbourhood. These graffiti are painted with ferrites and lime, materials that leave behind very thin layers that accumulate as campaign after campaign is carried out on the walls, sometimes building up into layers that are five centimetres thick. The artist terms the layers “tectonic plates”, evidence of the political campaigns that have been carried out on the streets for decades. They offer us a glimpse into the socio-political history that can be seen through these layers of materials.
To reveal both the material and historical qualities of the walls, Acebo carries out an exercise that is the reverse of that performed by those who originally painted them. By applying plaster and allowing it to set, he generates a surface that is capable of removing the lime in a block format. The slow, laborious procedure results in a sculptural piece that is composed of several layers, revealing the imprint of the murals that have been superimposed on the wall. For KM1, Acebo carried out an intervention on a wall located in front of Parque Lezama and obtained an irregularly-shaped piece from the wall that weighed more than 15 kilos. The layers of ferrite, placed one on top of the other, are a record of the passage of time in the city, and of the public space as a vibrant and political place.
The activity was part of the KM1 program, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Gaspar Acebo (Buenos Aires, 1976) is a professor of Painting at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts and holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. His work focuses on copying as a principle of creation. Using drawing, painting, sculpture and interventions in the public space, the artist produces works that function as subtle gestures or signs pointing to an inconspicuous reality. He has had several exhibitions over the course of his career, both in Argentina and abroad. His solo exhibitions include Espesor mínimo [Minimal Thickness], at the Miranda Bosch gallery (2020) and Blanco [White], at Espacio Kamm (2014). He has also participated in group shows, such as Las medidas del vacío [Measurements of the Void], at PROA (2015). His work has been recognized with distinctions and jury mentions by the Salón M. Belgrano (2009), the Becar Cultura programme (2016), and the FNA production grant (2007). He also took part in the FNA Award (2019/2020), the Fola Award (2019) and the Salón Nacional (2016). He has held residencies in: Antarctica; Bitamine, Basque Country, Spain; Curadora, Santa Fe, Argentina; Vermont Studio Center, USA; ArtAmari, Crete, Greece; Villa Renata, Basel, Switzerland; Casa Velázquez, Madrid, Spain. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Hecho en Buenos Aires marked 22 years of working towards social inclusion with an art and culture event that was held at the Mercedes Sosa Foundation. We are very happy for having been part of the celebration.
Artist Mercedes Lozano presents her work, 37′ 45” S 58° 22′ 13” W, a sculptural video that is designed based on a prismatic telescope. At the interior of the work, an analogue virtual reality visor allows the viewer to observe, on an individual basis, a video created from the artist’s research and observations of Mar Argentino and Rio de la Plata basins. The sculptural piece has a very particular design, while the audiovisual component shows two different images, each of which is viewed through a single eye in what is known as a stereoscopic display. Through an optical illusion, it allows the viewer to complete the landscape in their mind’s eye. As part of KM1, the device was placed in Parque Lazama, an area where, in colonial times, a river flowed through the ravine and met with the Río de la Plata. The artists invited passers-by to take a voyage into the past. Those who looked through the visors had the opportunity to discover the waters that once flowed through this space.
The activity was part of the KM1 program, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Mercedes Lozano (Buenos Aires, 1989) holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad del Museo Social Argentino and completed a postgraduate in Cultural Management and Communication from FLACSO. She has participated in the Cinema Programme of the Arts Department at the Instituto Di Tella and is currently pursuing a Master’s in the History of Argentine and Latin American Art at IDAES/UNSAM. Since 2014, her work has centred on generating crossovers between visual disciplines and optical devices. Her most recent works have focused on the use of digital and analogue audiovisual tools and technologies. She decided to focus her research on imaging technologies after attending a recent seminar on Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality at the Technical University of Berlin. She has shown her work at the CCK, Munar, Hilo Galería, Nova Artspace (Weimar), Montana Crux (Berlin), 1085 Gallery (San Diego) and Hermes Artes Visuais (San Paulo), among others. She was a finalist for the N12 (2021) and N13 (2022) Awards given by the Itaú Foundation, in the category of Art and Technology. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
La bici naranjita [The little orange bike] is a music in motion performance by DJ Bad Boy Orange, a representative of the drum and bass genre in Argentina. The project, which began planning prior to the pandemic, consists of long bike rides through the city of Buenos Aires during which the artist plays music from his bike, which is fitted out to mix and produce sound live. In response to a special request from KM1, Bad Boy Orange designed a tour of San Telmo and the surrounding neighbourhoods. The tour departed from the Canto al trabajo [Ode to Labour] monument at 800 Paseo Colón Avenue with more than 200 people on bikes, skates and other means of “human-powered” transport, accompanying the music over a 12-kilometre trip that took one and a half hours. During that time, the participants enjoyed a group experience and celebration that was out of the ordinary.
Bad Boy Orange is a representative of the drum and bass movement in Argentina and South America and is one of the leading figures of electronic music. He is the founder of several emblematic clubs and in 1997, together with his friend DJ Buey, he created the Buenos Aires Frente Jungle, a project that has contributed to consolidating a fanbase of drum and bass music. He is a leading communicator for the scene and became a founding member of buenosaliens.com, a website that has kept its finger on the pulse of the dance movement in the country since 1998.
Bad Boy Orange has continued to soar to new heights in his career as a DJ and producer. He marked the turn of the millennium with a tour of the United States and released the EP ¿Quién hace tu vida tan naranja? [Who makes your life so orange?] at the end of 2001. Since then, when in the studio, he alternates between producing his own tracks with making remixes and edits that continue to surprise his audiences at each of his sets. “La bici naranjita” is his mobile DJ project.
In her work Pan, saliva y trabajo [Bread, Spit and Work], the artist Ariana Beilis produces an at-scale replica of Rogelio Yrurtia’s sculpture Canto al trabajo [Song of Work] (1907). The original sculpture, located in Eva Perón square at the intersection of Avenida Paseo Colón and Avenida Independencia, consists of fourteen large-scale figures in bronze, dragging behind them a large stone, a symbol of the effort of work. On this occasion, the artist reproduced Yrurtia’s work to scale, replacing the original bronze with bread chewed by three performers working live for several hours at the site of the original sculpture. In Beilis’s work, the body plays an active role and it is the effort of chewing that transforms the bread into the raw material used to finish the sculpture. In this way, the soft texture of the food contrasts with the hard bronze, and a counterpoint is generated between the precariousness nature of the bread and the sturdiness of the bronze. With this gesture, the artist brings Yrurtia’s work into the present and offers us a new reading that takes into account the context and issues related to work that prevail today.
Performers: Ariana Beilis, Mara Caffarone, Johanna Borchardt.
We would like to extend a special thanks to the bakery Cosas Ricas, located at Perú 1081.
Ariana Beilis (Santa Fe, 1983) is a visual artist and cultural manager. Her works include Seremos como la gota que cae mil veces sobre la piedra [We will be like the drop that falls a thousand times on the stone] (2019), a monument to the victims of femicides in the city of Santa Fe; and Trueque [Barter], part of a heritage exchange with the Rosa Galisteo Provincial Fine Arts Museum (MPBA). Since 2016 she has coordinated the collective Barrio sin Plaza together with Malcon D’Stefano, as well as A LA CAL, a nomadic exhibition space. In 2022 she is taking part in the El Mirador Foundation’s programme Artistas x Artistas, after having been awarded a grant by the 12th UTDT Artists Program in 2020. In 2019, she completed the curatorial programme ACERCA at the Centro Cultural Parque de España/AECID and, in 2018, she graduated with a Diploma in Cultural Policy from the University of Buenos Aires. In 2022, she presented her third solo show at the Municipal Museum of Visual Arts of Santa Fe and also at the 13th Itaú Prize. She was selected for the 74th National Salon of Rosario and the Encuentro de Performances Político de Chile. She has also shown her projects at the Mercado de Arte de Córdoba, arteBA and Microferia. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
In her performance Vaciarse – cuerpo a disposición [Unburden Yourself – Body at Your Disposal], artist Tuty Moreno Campos visited different locations and businesses in San Telmo. She stopped the people she encountered along the way to ask them to write down some of their thoughts that may relate to a pending issue or concern they may have, or something they wished to be free of. With an air of magic and ritual, Moreno Campos offered her body up as the surface upon which the people with whom she interacted could express the thoughts which burdened them. In this way, the artist’s own body became a support to bear the weight of other people’s concerns and problems.
The first version of this intervention was presented during the beginning of the pandemic, a time when Moreno Campos found herself confronting her own thoughts and the need to maintain productivity in emotionally demanding circumstances. In this new version, which took place in the public space, the artist walked through the halls and offices of the museum to Parque Lezama, paying special attention to bus stops and pedestrians in transit or people at work.
This activity is part of the KM1 program, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Tuty Moreno Campos (Buenos Aires, 1987) has completed programs, residencies and art clinics in Argentina, Mexico, Estonia and Arkansas. In 2017, she was awarded a grant by the National Ministry of Culture to carry out the Escena Pública [Public Scene] program in the city of Tandil, which culminated in a multidisciplinary and collective exhibition project. In 2019, she participated in IMÁN, in Mexico City. In 2020, she was invited by elektron, based in Estonia, for an online residency for group production. In 2021, she was artist-in-residence at INVERSE, a performance art program that culminated in a symposium with performances at The Momentary, Arkansas. Her work has been exhibited collectively in diverse spaces, such as MUMBAT, Sala Lidaura Chapitel, in Argentina; Sala el Brocense in Spain; University of Winnipeg, in Canada; Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, in Colombia.
In her performance, ¿Cómo pelás la naranja? [How do you peel an orange?], artist Jazmín Saidman proposes a collaborative action in which she poses a simple question about how to peel an orange. For KM1, the artist went to Plaza Dorrego, at the centre of the San Telmo neighbourhood, where she placed 20 kilos of oranges on a table and asked passers-by to show her their particular way of peeling the fruit. The question that gives the performance its title serves as an excuse to begin a conversation with a stranger and, in this way, discover a universe of procedures, theories, stories and memories that revolve around an utterly everyday action. Once the orange has been peeled, the participant can opt to eat it, or if he or she does not wish to do so, the artist sets it aside in a pot to later make marmalade.
¿Cómo pelás la naranja? was made within the framework of Kunsttage Basel during her residency at the Atelier Mondial (Basel, Switzerland), in June 2021, as part of an international exchange programme in partnership with the seventh edition of URRA (Buenos Aires) and the support of artEDU Stiftung; this is the first time it has been performed in the city of Buenos Aires.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Jazmín Saidman (Buenos Aires, 1987) holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA). An artist and art teacher, her production involves performance, drawing, painting and video. She has exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (MACRO), the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, and the Teatro Sarmiento, among other places. She was selected to participate in artist-in-residence programmes in Basel (Switzerland), Córdoba (Argentina), São Paulo (Brazil) and Tigre (Buenos Aires, Argentina).
Asked to participate in KM1, artist Luis Pazos decided to hand out 100 original drawings to passers-by and residents of the San Telmo neighbourhood. The drawings, conceived by the artist to be like “electric shocks”, were created in a single night using markers on white paper in a cathartic and spontaneous act of translating his state of mind to the paper. Inspired by Alberto Greco’s capacity to transform the everyday into complex aesthetic proposals, Pazos created each drawing with the idea it be given as a gift to whoever would accept it. Over a few hours, the artist approached people in Plaza Dorrego, located in the San Telmo neighbourhood, and offered up his work in a humble and kind gesture. Through this action, anyone passing through the plaza at that time could come into contact with the art and the artist in a friendly manner. “I decided to give them away to everyone because they don’t belong to me. They are part of the world, which in my opinion is something that spins out of control and without purpose”, writes the artist in the text which accompanies the work. His action forms part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Luis Pazos was born in La Plata in 1940. His work is based on conceptualism, performance and poetry, through collaborative and collective working methods. Throughout his career, he has shown an impulse for street art and public interventions. In 1966, he participated in Movimiento Diagonal Cero, led by Edgardo Antonio Vigo. He was also a member of the following groups: Esmilodonte, Grupo La Plata, Grupo de los 13, CAYC and Grupo Escombros. His work can be found in the collections of museums in Spain, the United States and Argentina, among others. In 2020, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes and was also the 2020/2021 recipient of the National Artistic Lifetime Achievement Award of the Palais de Glace.
KM1 presents Casal de Catalunya, a curatorial and management project that took place in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. Joam Prim and Diego Fontanet, the manager and curator, respectively, created this artistic project at the Casal de Catalunya, a modernist-style palace dedicated to preserving and disseminating Catalan cultural heritage, located at 863 Chacabuco street. Under their management, the old building’s meeting rooms and tea room were transformed into an art gallery that held exhibitions between 1992 and 1993 of the works of emerging and established Argentinian artists. Since opening, exhibitions of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, comics, installations, performances and projections have all been held in the building, bringing together artists of different ages and background. As can be seen in the photographs, its halls have been graced with the works of artists such as Nicola Constantino, Jorge Macchi, Graciela Sacco, Ana Gallardo, Ernesto Calo, Carlos Caputo, Pablo Páez and Liliana Maresca, with her emblematic installation Espacio disponible [Space Available]. The directors distanced themselves from conventional curatorial processes and considered the public audience to be part of the exhibitions; as Fontanet said, as “living conceptual works”. In the few years that the project lasted, the Casal de Catalunya promoted and raised the profile of artists and contributed to consolidating the art scene of the era, leaving behind a great legacy for later generations. This legacy can be measured through its prolific production of events, exhibitions and actions that enriched the art scene of the time and which, thanks to their dynamic inclusion of artists and innovative experimentations, were fundamental to contemporary artistic practices in Buenos Aires.
Photography: Guido Limardo
This sculptural group by Argentinian artist Rogelio de Yrurtia (1879-1950) was produced in Paris in 1922. It consists of fourteen large-scale figures in bronze, dragging behind them a large stone, a symbol of the effort of work. It is guided by the values of modernity that express confidence in effort and progress, which is why the silhouettes march forward, guided by two children, headed towards the promise of a future that will arrive at some point. With this piece, Yrurtia sets himself apart from the monuments of the time by depicting anonymous bodies, far removed from monuments to heroes. The work was installed at Plaza Dorrego in 1927, and ten years later it was moved to the square in front of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires, in the San Telmo neighbourhood, where it remains today. Yrurtia was a representative of the academicist tradition in the country and was influenced by the French sculptor Auguste Rodín. His sculptures are characterised by a realistic treatment typical of the academic canon that idealised the human figure. He trained with the masters Lucio Correa Morales, Julien and Jules Félix Coutan and received international recognition at the Paris Salon. In the years that followed, he was commissioned by the Argentinian State to create several monuments located around the City of Buenos Aires, such as the Monument to Colonel Dorrego, located at Suipacha and Viamonte streets, and the Mausoleum of Bernardino Rivadavia, in the Plaza Miserere.
The El monte studio is situated at the heart of the San Telmo neighbourhood and is a studio space that opened in 2012, under the direction of artist Tomás Cochello. Built in 1860, this large old manor house originally belonged to the French family and is located at the corner of Defensa and Carlos Calvo streets. Years later, it was converted into the neighbourhood apothecary, which operated during the 1871 yellow fever epidemic. Now declared a historical property, the house has a series of rooms and balconies with cast iron railings. The structure was restored and, today, its 400 square metres are used for a variety of artistic activities. In the past decade, the rooms have been used as studios by artists from various disciplines, such as ceramics, painting, textiles, photography, video, sculpture and engraving. Currently working at the studios are Rafael Audivert, Clara Catalán, Silvina Resnik, Cristina Rochaix, Ana Audivert, Gabriela Golder, Pelícano cine, Lucía Valdivieso, Nuri Quintero, Amalia Dri, Sebastián Camacho, Richard Shpuntoff, Federico Kirschbaum, Axel Alexander, Tomás Cochello and Esteban Pucheta.
Photography: Guido Limardo
The mural located at 879 Chacabuco street pays homage to the artist Carlos Gorriarena. Created in 2019, the mural is located very close to where he kept his studio for many years and where he produced the majority of his works. The image reproduces his painting Sombras [Shadows] on a large scale. In it, the Argentinian painter portrayed the walk that Carlos Menem and Raúl Alfonsín took together at the presidential residence, the Quinta de Olivos, at the time of the presidential transition in 1989. The original work, which was based on a photograph, shows the artist’s interest in political symbols and strong colours and expressive brushstrokes. The mural, created at the request of the neighbourhood, is located high up on a large semi-circular wall that provides a touch of colour to the entire block.
Let us know, have you walked down this block? Have you seen the mural?
Photography: Guido Limardo
This edition of KM1 takes us to Las Nereidas [The Nereids], a monumental fountain and sculpture located on the Costanera Sur.
Created by the Argentine artist Lola Mora in 1903, the sculpture is a sensitive study of the female nude and captures the moment Venus emerges from the water.
In Greek mythology, the Nereids are the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris, and they were the nymphs of the sea. This fountain is one of the most important works by the artist. It was carved from Carrera marble in Italy and later shipped to Buenos Aires. The sculpture was originally located on a site at the emblematic Plaza de Mayo but, because of the high naturalism of the nudes, in 1918 it was moved to its current location of the city which, at that time, had yet to be urbanized. Today it continues to provide the sculpture with a unique natural setting.
Lola Mora (Tucumán, 1866-1936) is one of the most important Argentine sculptors of the 20th century. She was noted for her incursions in spaces that were forbidden to women of her era, something which garnered her both difficulties and admiration during her lifetime. She worked for many years in both Rome and Buenos Aires. Lola Mora followed the process of her sculptures very closely, from the sketches to the assembly.
Las Nereidas is located at Avenida Dr. Tristán Achával Rodríguez 1401, in front of the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve, and is part of the city’s public heritage.
Augusto Tovar created this cartography for the intervention, La silla [The Chair] by Silvina Babich, as part of KM1.
We present a series of maps made by cartographer Augusto Tovar, within the framework of Silvina Babich’s intervention for KM1. The maps show the course of the underground stream that flows through the San Telmo neighbourhood where, in September, the artist carried out an action in which she dedicated several hours to repairing a traditional chair woven from the reeds that can be found on the banks of the local streams. The artist hung the maps around her while carrying out her work, to bring visibility to the rivers and help create a collective urban imagination of these old streams.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Buenos Aires was criss-crossed by streams, some of which have now been confined to an underground course. The source of the Tercero del Sur stream lies in what is today Parque Patricios. From there, it zigzags through Peru and Bolívar streets and crosses Defensa, where it joins with another stream to form the Zanjón de Granados (Granados gorge). This watershed, which flowed from out to the Río de la Plata, crossed the entire neighbourhood of San Telmo. In 1860, the stream was rerouted into a conduit, which was then covered over in 1890, when the first sewage network was constructed.
In 1972, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) organized the exhibition Arte de Sistemas II – Arte e ideología [Art of Systems II – Art and ideology], held in the emblematic Plaza Roberto Arlt, located at the corner of Esmeralda and Avenida Rivadavia. In fact, the event took place in three different locations simultaneously: Plaza Roberto Arlt, the CAyC headquarters, and at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. It featured the participation of more than seventy artists who asserted the critical and poetic links between art and society through the use of the public space.
Elda Cerrato presented a work of art that consisted of two-metre-high metal cylinders on which she reproduced phrases from Roberto Arlt’s censored collection of essays, “Aguafuertes porteñas” (“Buenos Aires Etchings”). In 2017, La Ene (Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo) invited a large number of contemporary artists to recreate the 1972 artworks and thus create an updated version of that same experience. Marial Scafati took Cerrato’s piece and reprinted a selection of texts by Roberto Arlt and handed them out to visitors, with the intention of putting those same words that fifty years ago were so highly subversive into circulation among the public. Cerrato herself recently recreated a series of posters that were part of that experience and that can currently be seen in our exhibition Elda Cerrato: El día maravilloso de los pueblos [Elda Cerrato: Wonderful Peoples Day] at the Museo Moderno.
Photography: Agustina Puricelli
KM1 presents Palacio México, a space for artists’ studios at 130 Mexico street, a large 19th century house that served as the residence for the Brazilian ambassador until 1917.
For the past twenty years, Palacio México has been used as a studio space. The rooms where ceramists, restorers and artists work are decorated with blue and red stained-glass windows brought from England, and the rooms feature high ceilings with wood mouldings.
Many artists have worked here over the years, including Pablo Siquier and Jorge Macchi. The studios are currently self-managed by different generations of artists who work in different trades, such as Hernán Rojo, Amparo Viau, Fernando Lancelloti, Daniela Raggio, Calipso Cerámicas and Tomás Vidal, along with Julia Padilla, Antonella Agesta and Aurora Castillo, who recently participated in the KM1 programme.
Photography: Agustina Puricelli
KM1 presents Pólvora, a space for artists’ studios located at Avenida Venezuela 720, in a building once used as a dance floor for milongas and as a bathtub factory.
Pólvora is one of the spaces that was founded against the backdrop of the pandemic as a means of satisfying the need to create meeting places and spaces for dialogue between artists This large hall with its factory-style architecture is home to the studio spaces of the sixteen different artists currently working here. Artists Nadia Martynovich, Ivan Enkin and Alfio Demestre were the driving force behind the project, who, in 2020 sought to transform the rooms of the building into spaces for production, exhibitions, open studios, book presentations, film cycles and talks. Since its opening, three group shows have been held: Equinoccio [Equinox] and Solsticio [Solstice], in 2020, and Artillería [Artillery], in 2021.
The following artists work at Pólvora:
Gaspar Acebo, Eugenia Hernández, Julián Matta, Ailen Ibarra, Hernán Kacew, Lukas Rimsky, Johanna Borchardt, Amelia Barros, Mariana Bersten, Agustina Puricelli, Micaela Iribarren, Lucas Barrer and Ernesto Alli, who is a recent participant in the KM1 programme.
All images are from the La Verdi archive.
KM1 looks to introduce the work of artists from the city at locations that make up the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today we introduce La Verdi, a cultural events and studio space that, since 2014, has been operating from its first-floor location at the century-old Teatro Verdi on Avenida Almirante Brown 726, in the heart of La Boca.
La Verdi is a collective project, a space for artists’ residencies and studios, coordinated by Ana Gallardo and Magdalena Petroni. It is also a space for public activities such as shows, lectures, music and cinema festivals, talks and exchanges, debates and community-building events.
In 2017, La Verdi launched an international artist-in-residence programme that led to the opening of a Mexico City branch that also hosts cultural activities and residencies, thus allowing for exchanges between Argentine and Mexican artists.
There are currently 11 artists that use La Verdi as their work space, including Alfredo Dufour, a recent participant of the Museo Moderno’s KM1 programme, as well as Carlos Cima, Martín Farnholc Halley, Antonio Villa, Martín Fernández, Constanza Giuliani, Josefina Labourt, Manuela Aramburu, Agustina Leal, Magdalena Petroni and Rocío Englender.
Photos by Julián Terán and Francisco Montes, courtesy of Brasil 675, 2021
KM1 looks to introduce the work of artists from the city at locations that make up the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today, we present Brasil 675, an artists’ studio space located in an old manor house on Avenida Brasil, very close to Parque Lezama.
This incredible heritage building houses a dozen rooms over its three stories. Originally constructed as a single-family home by the architects Lanús and Hary, over the years it served several purposes, functioning as a guest house and residence for the elderly. In 2015, in began to operate as Casa Zur, hosting one-off cultural events, art and music exhibitions. That same year, it began to host the URRA artist-in-residence workshops, receiving artists from around the world. Between 2016 and 2019, having restored several of the spaces in the house, Casa Zur was able to establish permanent studios for Argentina artists.
Since 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the space underwent another change and its members founded the Brasil 675 group, with the intention of installing new studio spaces. The current project has taken over the entire building and is home to the studios of Emilia de las Carreras and Francisco Montes – both of whom recently participated in KM1 – as well as María Carballo, Cervio Martini, Julián Terán, Sofía Gallo and Lucila Gradin. There are also temporary exhibitions, open studios and installations in specific areas of the house that have been created by artists on invitation.
(Photos: 1 – 4 and 6 – 9, by Joaquín Wall; 5, de Sol Navedo. Courtesy of Munar)
KM1 looks to introduce the work of artists from the city at locations that make up the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today, we present Boca de fuego, which opened in 2018 as part of the Munar Arte project, and which provides space for artists’ studios. It is located close to our neighbourhood, at Avenida Pedro de Mendoza 1555, across from the iconic La Boca transporter bridge.
For the past two years, nine artists have been working and developing their projects on the first floor of the building. Artist Carlos Herrera is the artistic director of Munar and also coordinates the activities. The aim is to accompany young artists whose works have a strong connection to materials, techniques and crafts.
As an open plan space that is free of dividing walls, Boca de fuego looks to stimulate encounters and group projects among artists. All of the works in the exhibition Ulises Mazzucca: Spritual Gymnastics, on display at the Museo Moderno, were produced at Boca de fuego. Mazzucca has shared the studio space with many other artists, such as Cartón Pintado and Aurora Castillo, both of whom also recently participated in KM1, mounting their works in different locations of the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Artists-in-residence 2020-2021: Cartón Pintado, Inés Beninca, Jazmín Kullock, Matisto, Nazareno Pereyra and Stella Ticera.
(Photographs: 1 and 6, Guido Limardo; 2, 3 and 4, Archive of the Basilica of San Francisco).
KM1 seeks to introduce the work of artists from the city at locations that make up the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today we present Horacio Butler, author of the tapestry that crowns the altar of the Basilica of San Francisco, located at 380 Adolfo Alsina Street. The large tapestry was commissioned to occupy the central altar, which had been destroyed a decade earlier, in the fires of 1955. La glorificación de San Francisco [The Glorification of St. Francis] is a striking 12 × 8 metres. It took a team of workers several years to complete under the supervision of Butler and the direction of Santiago Larochette. The tapestry was hung on 4 October 1972.
The composition is based on an allegorical engraving of the Franciscan Order. At the top, the Virgin rests on a flowering, thorny tree that envelops the image of Saint Francis in flowers and birds below.
Butler had begun to work on developing the applied arts as a way of providing continuity to manual practices in an era in which the industrial production of cultural objects was advancing. He produced many other tapestries that featured images of great formal synthesis and exquisite chromatic compositions, for which he used motifs from his surroundings in the Tigre area, where he had made his home. One example is La casa violeta [The Violet House], which has been in the collection of the Museo Moderno since 1968.
KM1 aims to introduce the work of artists from the city in locations that are part of the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today we feature Raquel Forner, who produced much of her work in the neighbourhood of San Telmo. The house and workshop she shared with her husband, sculptor Alfredo Bigatti, is now a cultural space dedicated to disseminating and conserving the legacy of these artists.
Created in 1982, the Forner-Bigatti Foundation is located in front of Plaza Dorrego. Beginning in 1937, the artists worked and lived in the house, which was built by Alejo Martínez and inspired by the ideas of the modernist architect Le Corbusier.
The Museo Moderno collection includes Astromutación [Astromutation], from 1969, and La torre [The Tower], from 1959, two works by Forner that are part of an incredibly imaginative series begun by the artist in the 1950s, when she became interested in space travel and created images of beings that reside on other planets. This series, considered to be absolutely contemporary as well as prophetic, was invigorated by the space race of the 1960s and the 1969 moon landing. Some of the works from the series are preserved at the artist’s studio, along with some of her work materials, as can be seen in the image which shows them as they are today, and in a photograph from 1976.
KM1 aims to introduce the work of artists from the city in locations that are part of the artistic and cultural map of San Telmo.
Today we feature Raquel Forner, who produced much of her work in the neighbourhood of San Telmo. The house and workshop she shared with her husband, sculptor Alfredo Bigatti, is now a cultural space dedicated to disseminating and conserving the legacy of these artists.
The Forner-Bigatti Foundation, created in 1982, is located in front of Plaza Dorrego. Beginning in 1937, the artists worked and lived in the house, built by Alejo Martínez and inspired by the ideas of the modernist architect Le Corbusier.
The Modern Museum’s collection includes the works Astromutación [Astromutation] (1969) and La torre [The Tower] (1959), which are part of an incredibly imaginative series begun by the artist in the 1950s, when she became interested in space travel and created images of beings that reside on other planets. This series, considered to be absolutely contemporary as well as prophetic, was invigorated by the space race of the 1960s and the 1969 moon landing. Some of the works from the series are preserved at the artist’s studio, along with some of her work materials, as can be seen in the image which shows them as they are today, and in a photograph from 1976.
Gonzalo Lagos (Neuquén, 1988) is a dance artist and independent curator. He received his degree in Fine Arts from the University of Buenos Aires and has developed his career at the intersection of dance, performance and the visual arts. He participated in the Artists’ Programme of the Universidad Di Tella (2017) and his works have been shown at the Centro Universitario de Arte (La Plata), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Munar Arte, Galería Gachi Prieto, the Universidad Di Tella and the Centro Cultural Kirchner, among other venues. He is artistic director and creator of “El asunto de lo remoto”. He lives and works in Buenos Aires. The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
For KM1, Gonzalo Lagos, an artist, performer and independent curator, carried out an action at the San Telmo Market. He invited the dancer Alina Marinelli to participate, and together the selected a series of objects from one of the antique shops at the market. These included a chair, some brushes, and other items, which they moved to two of the entrances. For the next approximately two hours, the dancer invited those who walked through the market to choose one of the objects, and asked them to imagine how they could move it together to one of the entrances. Lagos set out to create an intimate moment between bodies through the use of an object that functioned as a bridge. With this minimal gesture of moving the objects, the small brushes and proximities between bodies made the action a sensitive experience generated by the choreographic flow of the materiality of the object, the body and its expressiveness. The work produced thought-provoking images and, above all, provided a unique experience for the participants.
Daiana Rose was invited by the Museo Moderno to present her performance Gilda callejera [Gilda in the street], which is part of her series “Gilda depre” [“Depressed Gilda”], in which the artist performs songs by Gilda, the cumbia star, but sets them to a melodic arrangement that emphasizes the romanticism of the lyrics.
Daiana Rose (Buenos Aires, 1980) is a visual artist and graduate of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Lola Mora. Her work is focused on drawing and performance art and her works evoke the sensitive and the affectionate through both material and bodily gestures. In recent years she has created a series of musical performances in which she reflects on love and kitsch. She is a member of the arts collective, Cromo Activismo. In 2019, she released her album “Este peludo sentir” [“This hairy feeling”] with the label Otras Formas, produced by Lola Granillo. Her most recent show, Caparazón caparazón [Shell Shell], curated by Santiago Villanueva and held at the Galería Grasa in 2020, consisted of a series of charcoal drawings of turtles.
Daiana Rose was invited by the Museo Moderno to participate in KM1 and she chose to present Gilda callejera, a musical performance that took place out front of Bar Sur, in the San Telmo neighbourhood. The artist, a fan of Gilda, sang five of her songs, accompanied by Dani Zelko on piano. As a way of highlighting the intimacy with which Gilda composed her songs, Rose removes the cumbia rhythm from her version to expose the romantic, melancholic and sad nature of Gilda’s lyrics.
The performance is part of a series that the artist titles “Gilda depre” [“Depressed Gilda”], a series she began in 2020 and in which she takes on different versions of her character depending on the location in which she is carrying out the performance. Adopting a theatricality that evoked the burlesque, Rose created a mobile set piece using two metal coat racks from which she hung coloured feather dusters and a curtain of velvet cushions with intertwined scissors symbolising lost hearts. The artist interacted with the set during her performance in order to give it a touch of the dramatic.
Gilda callejera is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Esteban Álvarez (Buenos Aires, 1966) studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón and continued his studies in Italy, Czech Republic and England. His work focuses on graphics and on altering the way in which we use objects – money, the sounds of a cell phone, a street sign – so that they take on new meanings. He has received numerous awards and grants, including from the Fondazione “Il Bisonte – per lo studio dell’arte grafica” (Florence, Italy) and the British Council Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies at Middlesex University (London, 1999-2000). Over the course of his career, he has exhibited at museums and institutions such as the MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museo MacRo Castagnino, Rosario; The Drawing Center, NY; ifa Gallery, Berlin, and many others. He dedicates his time to teaching and developing his art. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Esteban Álvarez engages with the San Telmo neighbourhood through his work, Usted está aquí [You are here], a road sign that stands, “soaking” in two glass jars. With its posts stained with dirt, the sign appears to have been pulled up like a plant from the garden and placed in the jars of water to keep it “alive”, in an allegorical sense.
Made in 1997, the work has been shown at the Galería Álvaro Castagnino and at the exhibition for the Klemm Visual Arts Prize. Now, more than twenty years later, it has come out of the studio and left behind the gallery space to take on a new meaning within a new setting: the street. In the public space, Álvarez’s piece modifies the function of a road sign, taking an item that orders us into action and transforming it into a static statement made in the pure present tense: “You are here”. Written in white letters on a green metallic sign, it identifies not only a space but a precise and specific moment of time. Within the context of the pandemic, the piece calls on us to look back over our experiences and points to our new perception of time as has emerged over the last year or so, when the “here” became our only option.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Usted está aquí [You are here]
Metal signpost standing in two water-filled jars, 200 × 220 cm, San Telmo, 2021
José Luis Landet (Lomas de Zamora, 1977) studied visual arts at La Escuela Nacional “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City. A prolific artist with a long career, he typically employs images he finds and with which he composes a new historical archive that incorporates alternative cultural and conceptual elements. His work highlights the materiality of the elements found as well as the weight given to them through memory, the passage of time and use. He has exhibited around the world, including his recent show El atajo [The Shortcut], at the Museo Marco in Buenos Aires. He has participated in art fairs such as Scope Art Fair (Miami and New York), Art Miami (Miami), ArteBA (Buenos Aires), Zona Maco (Mexico City), Artissima (Turin, Italy), among others.
In the last few years, José Luis Landet has been recovering landscape paintings of the last century by amateur painters, which he finds at the city’s flea markets. These “Sunday painters” produced a large number of works that, for the artist, symbolise alternative ways of looking at nature and the history of painting.
For KM1, the artist assembled a two-metre-high structure consisting of more than 30 recycled frames and installed it on the Costanera Sur in front of the Ecological Reserve. Using both the canvasses and the frames, Landet assembled a sort of self-supporting monolith that provided a new framing of the environment. As series of signatures cut out from the painting are placed on the wooden grid, in a gesture of recovering the names of the artists who were overlooked by history.
The work proposes a new way of looking at nature at the level of both the fragment and the details, in order to reinvent the landscape and generate new ways of considering and approaching nature. With the signatures and the cut-out frames, he provides a new point of view of this green area, recovering the memory of those who observed it at another point in history.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
José Luis Landet, Reinventar el paisaje [Reinventing Landscape], structure consisting of 33 wooden frames and cut-outs of signatures of oil paintings on canvas, 200 × 200 cm, Costanera Sur, 2021
Silvina Babich (Burzaco, 1969) studied Fine Arts at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón. She has developed a career as an artist and curator focusing on the relationship between nature and culture in riverside areas of different parts of the world, and the Rio de la Plata basin in particular. With the river at the heart of her practice, she has designed interdisciplinary programmes that bring together performance and craft technologies. For several years, she has trained with artisans and producers, researching and learning about natural fibres, their uses and applications. She is the founder and head of Ala Plástica, an artistic-environmental organisation that builds connections between ecological, social and artistic methods, and the Base Riachuelo Programa Estuario, a multidisciplinary space that explores the intersections between art and community. Her projects have been exhibited in Argentina, Uruguay, Germany, England, and other countries. In 1992, she began the project La silla [The Chair], which she has continued through to this day.
La silla is a project in which the artist collects discarded, broken and unused chairs and refurbishes them using a traditional weaving technique that makes use of junco, a large, fibrous bulrush that is the first plants to populate riverbanks. In shoreline areas, the material has been used to manufacture basketry since ancestral times.
Looking to recapture appreciation for the craft, Babich creates actions in which she teaches the technique in public spaces, with the intention of rebuilding the community appreciation of the technique and orally transmitting the craft and her knowledge about it. With her action, she restores the usefulness of discarded chairs that were considered rubbish, and thus questions our perception of the useful life of objects.
For KM1, the artist placed several of her woven chairs on the pavements of Bolivia and Chile streets in the San Telmo neighbourhood, recreating the winding path of the stream that once ran through the area in colonial times and which today flows underground. She then sat down and began to weave, creating an opportunity for interaction in which passers-by could approach, ask questions, converse with her and learn the technique.
With this work, Babich generates a dialogue between the edge of the street and the banks of the river, restructuring the public space to include the watersheds in the urban and collective imaginary.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Artes. He was awarded the Yungas Scholarship, coordinated by Raúl Flores and under the tutelage of Lolo y Lauti (2019-2020). He was participant of the PAC Programme at Galería Gachi Prieto (2019). He was a resident of the Kooshk Residency programme in Tehran, Iran, where he held a solo show at the Ogallery (2018). He received a Special Mention for the Painting Award of the Central Bank (2019) and a Mention for the Stimulus to Performance Award of the Colección Brun Cattaneo. He participated in the group shows Yungas La Prensa, held at the La Prensa building (2021); Mi vereda edición 6 [My Sidewalk Edition 6], curated by Vale Vilar (2020); and Testimonios de lo que solía ser [Testimonies of What Used to Be], at Galería Gachi Prieto (2019), among others. His works are part of several private collections. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Ernesto Alli works around the imaginary of medieval fairs and the traditions that have been passed down from them to today. For the artist, these contemporary themed fairs symbolise the intersection between the past and the present, and represent a space for play and imagination. Alli uses objects that have withstood the test of time as a reference in his works, and returns to them in an act of nostalgia. As part of his process, in recent years, he has produced a series of sculptures in which he changes the scale of everyday objects in order to accentuate their fantastic aspects.
For his participation in the KM1 programme, Alli presents his work Al don pirulero – the title of which refers to a children’s game – in which two 190 cm-long resin sculptures in the shape of lollipops (or pirulines) have been placed in the playground of Parque Lezama. The giant lollipops were placed on the swings and the see-saw, thus linking art with play, humour and imagination.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Ernesto Alli’s installation of Al don pirulero, which consists of his placement of two giant 190 cm long resin lollipops in the children’s play area of Parque Lezama, San Telmo, 2021
Julia Volpato (Buenos Aires, 1992) trained as an industrial designer and has attended workshops and clinics with several different artists. In 2017, her work Rodamientos [Ball bearings] won first prize at the 15th Edition of the Proyecto A competition. In 2018, she was awarded a grant for a three-month residency at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo. That same year, she participated in Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Artists’ Program and was a fellow at the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, Buenos Aires. In 2019, she held xx, her first solo exhibition in Bogotá. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Julia Volpato takes materials and processes associated with industrial design and applies them to art. In recent years, she has produced a series of sculptural tracings of manhole and power line covers. She first selects the covers that capture her interest, perhaps because of the grid pattern or inscriptions they feature, and she then makes a copy of them using the frottage technique, in which she places a paper over the piece she wishes to trace and rubs a piece of chalk on the paper, thus picking up the shape and texture of the cover she has chosen to work with. She then transfers the results onto wooden plates which are fretworked and painted, giving them the look of polished, shined iron.
For KM1, Volpato decided she would demonstrate her process in public, transforming it into a performance and an intervention in the urban landscape. Using the same technique, the artist registered the details of a series of manhole covers she found in the streets of San Telmo and hung the results in public, displaying them on a billboard in the neighbourhood so that passers-by could look at them and even take them home. At the same time, in recognition of the fact that this area of the city used to be dedicated to industrial production, the artist placed one of her sculptures at the intersection between Avenida Paseo Colón and Avenida Martin García, a location that was previously home to factories.
The installation is part of the Km1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Julia Volpato Registro superficial [Surface register], 2021 Frottage of manhole covers on paper, mounted on billboards; and a sculptural piece constructed of MDF, located at Avenida Paseo Colón and Avenida Martín García, San Telmo, Buenos Aires.
Alfred Dufour (San Juan, 1989) is a graduate of the Visual Arts programme of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza. He has participated in residencies at MARCO Arte Foco, Fundación Tres Pinos, Buenos Aires (2018/19) and Can Serrat, Barcelona (2017). He attended the Artists Programme at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella (2016) and Yungas (2013). He was selected for the First National Drawing Biennial of the Museo de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson (2019), the Fundación Fortabat Prize (2019), the Braque Prize (2019) and for the Rosa Galisteo Salon (2017). He was awarded the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Training Grant (2016) and received a special mention from the jury at the Banco Central Painting Salon (2015). He participated in the National Drawing Salon (2015) and in the Fundación Andreani Prize (2015). He has held the exhibitions No me digas entiendo [Don’t Tell Me I Understand], at MARCO (2019); Germán, at Galería Constitución (2018); Las cosas simples [The Simple Things], at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in San Juan (2018); Dibujos animados [Cartoons], at Imagen Galería (2016), and Diciendo mentiras por David Bowie [Telling Lies by David Bowie], at Centro Cultural Julio Le Parc (2013). He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Confitería [Confectionery] is the title of Alfredo Dufour’s intervention at the Bar Británico, one of the most well-known cafés of the San Telmo neighbourhood. Dufour chose to transform the space with his sculptural series of croissants and lemons. In these pieces, materials and items from the world of handicrafts – such as balls and expanded polystyrene foam – are brought into the world of sculpture, creating surreal scenes and changing the habitual use of objects.
With this focus on the picturesque aspects of foods, Dufour emphasises their beauty. He decorated the entrance to the bar with a large black tray covered in white sparkles; it can be seen as something like a starry night sky, or a classic roasting pan. A solitary croissant floats at the centre of the tray. This is the work that initiates the installation, which then unfolds on the tables, the bar and the windows of the café.
Dufour takes small everyday occurrences, such as dipping a croissant in a latte, or serving a dozen pastries on a plate, and transforms them into sculptures. With this intervention, the artist creates a link between the poetics of contemporary art and one of the most traditional cafés in the neighbourhood.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Julia Padilla (Buenos Aires, 1991) attended art clinics with Ernesto Ballesteros and José Luis Landet, as well as training programmes such as Artistas x Artistas (Fundación El Mirador), PAC (Gachi Prieto Galería) and ABC (Pan y arte). She received a grant from the Universidad de Avellaneda to pursue a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Latin American Aesthetics (Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas). She attended Nicanor Aráoz and Flavia Da Rin’s Spooky Vision workshop and has participated in writing workshops held by María Gainza and Silvia Gurfein. Julia has had solo exhibitions at Fundación El Mirador, Naranja verde and the Gachi Prieto Galería and has taken part in group exhibitions at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Munar, Cecilia Caballero, Granate Galería and Panal 361. She has participated in the awards held by UADE, Fundación Andreani, Fundación Williams (textile and sculpture), Ópera Prima at the Casa del Bicentenario, Proyecto A and the Young Art Bienniale.
Julia Padilla carried out an intervention at Parque Lezama with her installation Piel rizoma [Rhizome skin], in which a series of artworks interact with the surrounding green space. The work is characterised by encounters between textures and forms that awaken our sense of touch. It includes sculptures that resemble eggs, insects, fruits, ears and unfamiliar bugs, all of which the artist placed among the trees and roots. The strange, hybrid creatures camouflage themselves within the ecosystem.
Each of Padilla’s objects refers to an elemental morphology shared by animals and plants. The artist’s work fuses organic and artificial materials, creating connections and links between the human and the non-human.
For her installation, Padilla chose to work in two areas of the park that allowed her to point out the strangeness of the trees and the flora and fauna that can be found there. One of these includes a so-called “paper tree”, a variety of the Polylepis tree, in whose branches she placed an object that looks like a strange soft fruit with a dangling tuft of hair. In another green area of the park, she positioned two ear-shaped sculptures that listen attentively to the sounds of the park.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Julia Padilla, Piel rizoma [Rhizome skin], 2021, Sculptural installation in Parque Lezama, San Telmo.
Emilia de las Carreras (Buenos Aires, 1989) is a visual artist. She completed art clinics with Fabiana Barreda, Osías Yanov, Luciana Lamothe and Ernesto Ballesteros. Emilia has participated in group exhibitions in spaces such as Centro Munar, Museo de Arte MBA, MAC of Bahía Blanca, La Verdi, the El Mirador gallery, among others. She participated in the 2014 ABC grant and in Proyecto PAC, and in 2018 she was awarded a grant to participate in the Artistas x Artistas training programme, directed by Florencia Rodríguez Giles and Tomás Espina. She attended Nicanor Aráoz and Flavia Da Rin’s Spooky Vision workshop, In 2015, she won the Proyecto A competition, with which she produced Luego [Then], her most recent solo show. In 2019, she was selected for the Young Art Bienniale and Itaú Cultural Award. She is part of the Vergel teaching team, participating in the “Pintando en el Hospital” [“Painting in the Hospital”] programme. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
At the request of the Museo Moderno, Emilia de las Carreras presents Harapos diabla [Devil’s Rags], a work which is part of a series of large mobiles that incorporate different elements the artist collects on her daily walks, such as metal tabs or butterfly wings, and tresses of her own and her friends’ braided hair. By concentrating on items that are normally discarded or ignored, de las Carreras weaves a constellation of the spaces she moves through and, at the same time, gives new life and mobility to the objects.
De las Carreras defines herself as a “surgical” artist. Out on her walks, she always looks at the ground and collects the small treasures she finds and then transforms into material for her works of art, which she produces in a ritualistic manner. In this way, the artist creates an emotional relationship with the objects and highlights their vulnerability and resistance.
The mobile, which is more than two metres long, was hung in front of the Nueva Librería bookshop, at the intersection of Balcarce and Estados Unidos streets. The orange wall of the building served as the backdrop and the support that allowed the mobile to come to life and sway in the wind, thus bringing part of the urban microcosm to life on a large scale.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Emilia de las Carreras, Harapos diabla [Devil’s Rags], 2021, Mobile made of metal tabs, nylon thread, butterflies and braided strands of hair. Located out front of the Nueva Librería bookshop, San Telmo.
Daniel Basso (Mar del Plata, 1974) studied painting at the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales de Mar del Plata. He has received grants from Fundación Antorchas, the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Fundación Telefónica, TRAMA (sponsored by the Rijk Academie) and the National Ministry of Culture. His solo exhibitions include Bijouterie para camiones (Galería Appetite, Buenos Aires, 2008), Tour blando (Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2016) Maple&Co. (OSDE Foundation, 2017), Richmond, Reggo, Real (The White Lodge, Córdoba, 2018) Farola. Tapiz. Túnica (Calvaresi Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, 2019), among others. His work has been shown at numerous group exhibitions, biennials, fairs and salons, and is part of different public and private collections. In 2017, he was selected for the Braque Prize and, in 2019, he received the first Itaú Prize in Visual Arts. He completed a three-month residency at Atelier Mondial, Basel, Switzerland, and in 2009, together with the artist Juan José Souto, founded the Mundo Dios project in Mar del Plata, a national reference for contemporary art. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Daniel Basso is a highly experienced artist from Mar del Plata. His work focuses on developing sculptural pieces that lie somewhere between the decorative and the utilitarian. Basso takes the decorative style of the chalets built in Mar del Plata in the 1950s and 1960s as his reference point, placing a special focus on their characteristic mouldings and materials.
For KM1, the artist presents Bijouterie para camiones Real State [Bijouterie for Real State Trucks], in which he intervenes in the front grille of a moving van, upon which he mounts his pieces inspired by architectural columns along with a large glossy acrylic jewel. With this action, Basso generates a dual transformation of the objects. On the one hand, he changes the context and scale of the architectural elements, turning them into precious jewels, and on the other, he uses the truck as the body and support on which he places his items. Thus, the truck’s mirrors become ears while the grille becomes the support for a large brooch.
Although the series was exhibited at the Apettite gallery in 2008, this is the first time he has presented it on a vehicle in the streets of Buenos Aires. By exhibiting the works in the public space, the artist’s intention to display his truck bijouterie in the medium and space for which it was designed finally comes to fruition.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Daniel Basso, Bijouterie para camiones Real State [Bijouterie for Real State Trucks], San Telmo, 2021, An installation of wood and acrylic pieces mounted on a truck.
Mariano Altamirano (Buenos Aires, 1988), known as Cartón Pintado (Painted Cardboard), is a self-taught painter and musician. He started painting in his room, using mixed media on large pieces of cardboard he found in the street. In 2019, he participated in group exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Haroldo Conti and at the Alpha Centauri gallery in Buenos Aires. In 2020, his first solo show was held at the Quimera gallery, curated by caterine ful lov (a project by Nina Kovensky and Lucía Reissig). He is currently artist-in-residence at Munar / Boca de Fuego. He also composes and sings love songs and takes urban rhythms and twerk classes. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Cartón Pintado has produced a series of striking collages, full of colour and strength. He uses recycled cardboard as his support and works with oil, acrylic, aerosol and objects such as shoelaces. Different characters that range from the mythological to the domestic appear in his paintings, which present an intimate and sensorial journey throughout which his emotional, dream-like vision unfolds.
For KM1, the artist produced five paintings, in a loving and humble gesture, for a bicycle shop in the San Telmo neighbourhood. They are portraits of his friends and pets, mixed with fantastic beasts, spider women, winged and shiny beings.
With his work, Cartón transforms the everyday, giving materials new uses and adding a touch of magic to surfaces. A clear example is the painting MariPosa [Butterfly], which he has located at the entrance to the bicycle shop, and in which two pizza boxes are transformed into wings. According to the artist, playing with the popular and the precious, this work symbolises the ephemeral nature of time and the measures that are necessary to enjoy it properly.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Cartón Pintado, Onda fixie [Fixie Style], 2021, Intervention with five oils and acrylics on cardboard, at the Mila bicycle shop.
Francisco Montes (San Fernando, 1995) studied at the Universidad del Cine. He participated in the Artistas x Artistas and the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (CIA) programmes. He studied painting with Mariana López and attended clinics and workshops with Fernanda Laguna, Santiago Villanueva and Roberto Jacoby, among others. Montes also participated in El burro y la moto (2018), an exhibition curated by Nicanor Aráoz and Flavia Da Rin, and held his first solo show, La casa del incesto (2019), in an abandoned house. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Siesta unicornio [Unicorn Nap] is a series of paintings executed by artist Francisco Montes on the windows of the El Triunfo garage, a car park located in an old building on Mexico street in the San Telmo neighbourhood. Montes painted four of the windows with figures that represent the reflection of a butterfly, bathers from other dimensions and a sleeping unicorn. Montes’ work evokes both fantasy and the occult.
In recent years, the artist has produced paintings on translucent surfaces, such as glass or transparent plastic. In this way, he underlines the ritualistic spirit of his painting; it is a form that aspires to function as a portal to other perceptive states. Often his paintings depict animals and strange creatures that remind one of medieval bestiaries. Instead of a brush, Montes uses an airbrush as his main tool, and thus achieves forms with blurred boundaries that lend a dreamlike atmosphere to his pieces.
In this series, Montes refers to the medieval tapestry collection of The Cloisters branch of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. These feature the central figure of a unicorn, which symbolises the figure of Christ, immortality and wisdom. Montes’ insistence on bringing the figure into the present reflects on how mythical elements of the past have survived and on their new meaning as part of the economic transactions of today.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Francisco Montes, Siesta unicornio [Unicorn Nap], 2021, An intervention of the windows of the El Triunfo garage, acrylic paint and airbrush on glass.
Aurora Castillo (Buenos Aires, 1987) studied at the Instituto Vocacional de Arte Manuel J. de Labardén (IVA) and at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Rogelio Yrurtia. She has trained at Diana Aisenberg’s clinics since 2013. She attended workshops held by Eduardo Stupía and Alejandra Seeber at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Artists’ Programme in 2012, and by Paula Massarutti and Severine Hubard at the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (CIA), in 2013. In 2017, she completed a sculpture workshop with Luis Terán. She also participated in the Boca de Fuego residency at Munar Arte, coordinated by Carlos Herrera, during 2018 and 2019. She has been represented by Moria Galería since 2020. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
With their lightness and transparency, the two large swathes of fabric that Aurora Castillo lets fall from a balcony aspire to dissolve the material to become pure colour. With them, the artist investigates the uncertain boundary that exists between painting and sculpture, and wonders whether colour alone can generate a space, occupy a place, become a body, be a sculpture in and of itself.
With their larger-than-human scale and resemblance to flags, the pieces recall the public ambition of monumental sculpture. However, her works quickly move away from these references and create a twist on them, resembling and nestling in the feminine traditions of textile art and a child-like palette. In this way, they forge an alliance with a fluid and moving world, with artistic traditions that are at once alternative and domestic.
The pieces were first shown as part of Un bosquejo de la intemperie [A Sketch of the Outdoors], an exhibition organised at Munar, La Boca, in 2019. Now, hung from a balcony in San Telmo, their subtle fluttering comes together with the emblematic architecture of the neighbourhood to create a new setting where fabric and concrete communicate and complement each other to create a composition that calls for a more organic, softer, friendlier life.
The installation is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Aurora Castillo, Gauzy, an urban intervention of painted voile fabrics hanging from façades, 2021
Antonella Agesta (Temperley, 1993) studied Visual Arts and specialized in painting at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. She participated in independent training clinics and workshops, such as the 2017 edition of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Artists’ Program. Since 2017, she has participated in both group and solo exhibitions, including the Young Art Bienniale at Centro Cultural Recoleta (2017), Premio Itaú Artes Visuales at Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (2018), Ya nos estamos yendo [We are already on our way out] at Universidad Di Tella (2018), the 73rd Edition of the Salón Nacional de Rosario (2019) and Antosofías at the Selvanegra Galería (2019). Antonella teaches art workshops for children and adults. Since 2019, she has been an editor at Jennifer, an art and current affairs digital magazine. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Antonella Agesta produced a series of paintings in different formats for display in three windows of the traditional antique shops of San Telmo. In the paintings, the artist presents an intimate and fanciful vision of antique and precious objects.
For the artist, the installation is a way to bring the paintings back to their origins. The series, in which almost magical objects stand out against backdrops of curtains, resulted from Agesta’s investigation, during which time she toured the antique shops, looking for and finding antique items with which she became affectively and symbolically attached in order to paint them afterwards.
Agesta imbues the objects with an almost magical power in her artwork, which links contemporary painting to tradition and history. Sometimes, due to her delicate, detailed treatment of the objects, or her use of curtains that open like portals to other points in the universe, the pieces seem almost like jewels, talismans, or amulets that conjure up the past and thaumaturgy.
Her action is part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood. We would like to thank Anticuario Finocchi, Calvaresi Antiquariato and Imperio Antigüedades for their participation.
Antonella Agesta, Eclipse, a pictorial installation in San Telmo’s antique shops, 2021.
Nina Kunan (1990, Buenos Aires) is a visual artist and is a Teacher with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Buenos Aires. She studied sewing and upholstery and attended a clinic and workshop with Marina De Caro. She worked for the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas in 2018. She studied painting and drawing with Eduardo Stupía (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, 2015 and 2016), Alfredo Londaibere and Bárbara Low. She won the BECAR Cultural Exchange grant (Turin, 2019) and the Creation Grant of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2018). She was selected for the Salón Nacional (2021), won the KLEMM (2019) and Proyecto-A (2017) awards, and she participated in the RARO Madrid Residencies (2017). In 2020 she opened her sex shop, Arrepentida. She was a member of the self-managed project teams and of collectives such as La Baranda Galería, Editorial Muchas Nueces and Proyecto NUM.
Invited to participate in Museo Moderno’s KM1 programme, Nina Kunan decided to dress the bollards on the corner of Chile and Peru streets and the columns of Parque Lezama. It is a continuation of a series in which she intervenes in public signage and urban elements, fitting them with handmade textiles.
Through these actions, the artist highlights the elements of urban design that have become such everyday objects that we often ignore or no longer see them. Kunan unveils the sensuality of these objects with her gestures, which lie somewhere between the humorous and the affectionate, and she invites us to relate to the city in a more tactile and playful manner.
Kunan is particularly interested in fetishism, paraphilia and the seductive capacity of objects. Enclosures, concealments and unveilings, the reframing of items that she singles out, and plastic and shiny fabrics are all recurrent elements in her work, which take a sensual approach to our surroundings.
His action forms part of the KM1 programme, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
Nina Kunan, Vestido público [Public dress], custom-made textile intervention in the bollards of Chile and Peru streets and the columns of Parque Lezama, 2021.
Julieta Tarraubella (1991, Argentina/Peru) is a visual artist, image and sound designer, and a graduate of UBA. In 2014 she won the Escala AUGM exchange grant to study Visual Arts and Medialogy at UNICAMP, Brazil. In 2015 she was selected for the internship program at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. In 2017, she participated in the Film Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. In 2019, she won the Young Art Bienniale in Buenos Aires. In 2020, she received a mention for the Fundación Bunge & Born Photography and Video Contest and was selected to participate in the Byte Footage Festival. Her work can be found in renowned Argentine collections. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Búnker [Bunker] is a performance in which three people wearing glasses that incorporate a LED display move through a dystopian urban landscape. The glasses display a continuous news feed of headlines taken from internet portals. The characters walk around the city, blinded by the same information we consume every day – or perhaps they are observing reality through a distorting filter of news and newspaper headlines.
Búnker was first presented in 2018 as part of the exhibition Perfuch at the UV art gallery in Buenos Aires. On this occasion, the artist selected spaces near the highway and arcades of the neighbourhood of San Telmo which, because of their large scale and grey colours, invoke the feel of a post-industrial, dehumanised city. Like many of the artist’s other works, Búnker questions our relationship with technology and how it is modifying our perceptions.
This activity is part of the KM1 program, a series of artistic interventions carried out by the Museo Moderno in the San Telmo neighbourhood.
