El pedimento

Ana Gallardo
Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1958.
She lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When Ana Gallardo was five years old, her mother, the Spanish visual artist Carmen Gomez Raba, passed away at the age of only thirty-eight. Since then, Ana has been a survivor. Her father, Jose Carlos Gallardo, a poet, quickly remarried. At fourteen Ana was already an active worker; at seventeen she became legally emancipated. Gallardo began her self-education in the arts in various artists’ studios and started to exhibit early on, but it was only in 1996, when she was the same age as her mother when she died, that Ana’s poignant political work began to flourish and she was able to articulate her visceral, urgent message with the utmost economy of means.
Over the past decade, Gallardo’s monumental drawings and participatory projects have enacted a practice of silent denunciation: an art that draws attention to specific social processes of abandonment and indifference, exploring opportunities to transform the status quo of microsocieties. In A boca de jarro (Point Blank) (2008), Silvia Monica, a transvestite prostitute, lived her dream of becoming a real performer in legitimate theater. Her lyrics were a condemnation of child abuse, and the experience of creating and participating in Gallardo’s work led her to quit prostitution. Gallardo’s projects have recently focused on how to ensure a dignified old age for all. In her project A Place to Live When We Are Old (2012), she conceives her own retirement home as a place where, enlightened by the wisdom of her elders, she will eventually achieve the fullness of an old age as rich and luminous as any earlier period in life. The work shown at the Biennale di Venezia, El pedimento (2009–2015), is inspired by various cultural rituals in Oaxaca, Mexico, in which people make offerings to deities in the hope that they will grant them favors. The artist invites the public to think specifically about their own future in old age and to shape a clay figure that embodies their preoccupations or desires for the future.