Federal Moderno is the Museo Moderno’s Special Projects programme to map the national contemporary arts scene. Its aim is to reveal, show and value the work of the artists, galleries, museums and training spaces of our country.
This federal programme plans out trips with the guidance of local curators who act as hosts in each city, coordinating visits to artists, agents and institutions in different provinces throughout the country. On each trip, curators from the Museo Moderno interview and meet artists, making audio-visual recordings of their testimonies. These will later be published by the museum in the form of portraits of the artists. Along with a biography and background of each artist, these records will become the archives of the Federal Moderno, thus contributing to the dissemination of the work of these artists, both within the museum as well as publicly, through its website.
Each visit contributes to the research that lays the foundations for future exhibitions at the Moderno. The programme seeks to stimulate and promote the careers of artists from different backgrounds as well as institutions and collectors from the different cities where these encounters take place. In this quest, the museum has sought to support and collaborate in the dissemination and training of artists, curators and collectors, and also looks to contribute to their professional and economic development through the allocation of funds for the acquisition of historic and contemporary art, thus shaping the collection so that it will become more representative at the national level.
Moderno Federal is a territorial and artistic endeavour that connects different areas of contemporary artistic production. It is based on the recognition of the need to form relationships with artists from other provinces and, in turn, build a History of Art that is inclusive and federal. The development of the federal programme can be followed through our social media and the museum’s website, where we will publish the videos from each visit.
Fernanda Aquere is an artist, curator, teacher and cultural agent. She has developed her work in different areas of the visual and performing arts, based on her understanding of art as a field that generates knowledge and a place where creative praxis and a critical gaze open the possibility of operating in other fields. It is from this conceptual and ideological basis that she generates strategies and imagines and creates the conditions that favour collective artistic production. The consistent mark of her creative practice is artistic production through experimentation with new languages and technological resources.
Fernanda Aquere (San Gregorio, Santa Fe – 1968. Currently lives and works in the city of Santa Fe). She has graduated in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario and carries out curatorial, pedagogical and cultural projects. In 2005, she co-founded the independent production and management group, Germina Campos, with which she curated shows, publications and managed training spaces up until 2010. She was also the Host Curator for the Moderno Federal programme in the city of Santa Fe and curator at Conversación Rosa, an activity by visual artist Ana Gallardo that took place at the Museo Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez in the city of Santa Fe. In 2020, she was awarded the Máscara Prize by the Municipality of the City of Santa Fe for her work in the performing arts. She has been a juror at national salons, awards and competitions. She was producer, costume designer and set designer for Adrían Airala’s play La Jauría de las Damas [Ladies’ Pack], selected for the 2018 Festival Internacional de las Artes de Armenia-Colombia.
For Ramiro González Etchagüe, the sense of void is a trigger, a feeling that accompanies him and which, in his works, is used as a possibility to interpret potentialities related to the paradigm of uncertainty as a portal, driving him into new searches based on proposals established as pretexts of the landscape for the representation of ideas or sensations. He uses simple elements to construct complexities that consider or translate counterpoints between space and time, place and “non-place”, subject and object, in his desire to materialise the impossible against a backdrop of absence. Compression and displacement, metaphor and metonymy are concepts that haunt and constitute the effects of the incompleteness he tries to resolve or explore.
Ramiro González Etchagüe (Tostado, Santa Fe. Currently lives and works in Sunchales, Santa Fe) A visual artist and director of the Museo Municipal Basilio Donato and the Municipal Historical Archive of the city of Sunchales. He worked as a teacher at the municipal high school. He has trained with renowned artists, curators and art specialists in different clinics and workshops; he has been awarded grants by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the NBSF Foundation and the Art Boomerang Program. His work has been recognised in provincial and national salons and competitions and is part of both private and public collections. He has participated in several individual and group shows. He specialised in Cultural Project Management at the Universidad Provincial de Córdoba, the Universidad Nacional del Litoral and in Curatorial Studies at the Node Center in Berlin, Germany.
Florencia Sadir’s work originates from her watchful gaze and sensitivity for the territory. She pays particular attention to the historical knowledge developed by the communities of the Calchaqui Valleys and, specifically, to the community of her adopted home of San Carlos, the oldest town in Salta and a birthplace of artisans and handicrafts. Her practice reveals the ways in which natural materials can be transformed using ancestral technologies in such a way that, when they come into contact with heat, humidity or wind, they are transformed into pottery, adobe or fertile land for cultivation. It is a production that helps in the construction of homes, food preservation and cooking, the channelling of water and the provision of shelter.
Sadir’s work, however, seeks to redirect these processes away from their functionality to exhibit the forms of the objects in the raw. With a minimalist attitude and remaining faithful to her conceptual training, Sadir, over the course of her short yet powerful career, has created stripped-down installations that reveal orders, textures, patterns and methods. The forms are subjected to a strong synthesis through which, when deployed and multiplied, they dazzle in their simplicity and the integrity of their presence.
Florencia Sadir (Cafayate, Salta – 1991), currently lives in San Carlos, a small town near Cafayate. She is a graduate of the School of Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán where she attended the Taller C workshop. She participated in the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella 2020–2021 Artists’ Programme and, in 2019, she completed the Escuela Flora Ars + Natura study programme in Bogotá, Colombia. In July 2022, she participated in “Still Alive”, the 5th Edition of the Aichi Triennale in Tokoname, Japan, directed by Mami Kataoka. In November of that same year, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires unveiled the exhibition Florencia Sadir: Ofrenda al sol [Florencia Sadir: Offering to the Sun], her first solo exhibition at a museum in the city of Buenos Aires. In 2021, she showed Todavía las cosas hacían sombra [Things Still Cast a Shadow], at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Salta and, in 2018, she presented her exhibition Un lugar sin nombre [A Place Without a Name], at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. She has also participated in group exhibitions, such as: Trazar sobre el suelo el contorno de la polvareda [Trace the outline of the dust on the ground] (2021), at the Museo Jallpha Kalchakí in San Carlos, Salta; Adentro no hay más que una morada [Within There is but One Abode] (2021), at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, and Gualicho (2022) at Galería Revolver, Buenos Aires. Her works are part of the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and are also held in private collections in Argentina, Chile and Colombia.
Analía Solomonoff (Rosario, 1972): Since 2016, Analía has been the director of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez in the province of Santa Fe. Under her directorship, the Museo Rosa Galisteo won the 2019 Ibermuseums Education Award (Honorary Mention, Museo Tomado) and the 2022 Konex Award for Visual Arts (Diploma of Merit). That same year the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) honoured the museum with the Outstanding Museum Practices award, highlighting the innovation in the management of the institution. She has been invited to act as juror on several occasions, including an open competition to select the project that would represent Argentina at the 59th Venice Biennale. She was also assistant director of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and Proyecto Siqueiros: La Tallera. In addition, she was coordinator of the Contemporary Publishing Forum at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and of the project, Radicante. Intercambio de prácticas culturales México-Argentina [Radicante: An Exchange of Cultural Practices between Mexico and Argentina]. She is a cultural manager, curator and professor.
Marcela López Sastre (Salta, 1975) finished secondary school in New York. She studied Social Communications at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, where she undertook several self-managed projects related to the visual arts. She studied photography and worked in an art gallery in Barcelona between 2001 and 2003. In 2008, she received the Híbrido y Puro Award for the 10th anniversary of the Centro Cultural España Córdoba (CCEC) and was appointed curator of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) of Salta, where she worked until 2015. She is part of the 2018 cohort of the PhD in Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, where she is currently finishing her thesis on artistic and curatorial practices in self-managed projects. She has been director of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de Salta since 2019.
