PIAV 2019-2020. Memory Exercises, from Autobiography to History

In Meditación sobre la naturaleza de un espacio fragmentado, Ramiro Pasch submerges his self-portrait in a group of landscapes, animals and plants.

With a detailed drawing, he translates the remembrance of moments of his life, in which the represented combines in an open narration, where every section becomes a significant core in the evocation of treasured sensations.

Having in mind the textures of the petroglyphs, Lara Seijas transfers a photograph on a fragment of old marble, combining in one same material the idea of ruin, and therefore, the reference to the remainder that leads to the historical memory, as she makes it coexist with the technique with which she produces the image.

The work title also brings to the present a suggestive face whose ethnical features force us to look back on other traditions, making times and spaces converge in a poetic journey.

Referring to the same time and making use of an art topic, such as the picture within the picture, in Halo de luz Pablo Tesoriere pays an homage to Enrique Shore, a photographer that in the 1980’s documented the clandestine detention centers in the country and published his work in the Nunca Más book.

For that purpose, Tesoriere made copies of those images and photographed them in those same places, incorporating his own point of view trespassed by the passing of time and a different aesthetic approach that update the always frail though necessary memory that those places call.

On the other hand, Andrés Werthein in La escuelita de Famaillá, a possible morgue, shows the deterioration of an establishment that empathizes with the no less disastrous history of the photographed place, used as a morgue of the detention center in which that school in the province of Tucumán was perversely converted

One more proof of the boundless cruelty with which they violated the bodies, freedoms, rights and symbols during the dictatorship that devastated the country in the 1970’s.

As he refers to previous genocides, in the series Ratones patagónicos, Migo Welsh appropriates old photographs of characters that show power and are located in vast Patagonia landscapes.

He intervenes the head of the one that looks the most important and replaces it with an empty Mickey Mouse silhouette. An epitome of colonialism, the mouse here symbolizes a historic mentality that allowed –and still does– the usurpation of vast territories that should be a natural community reserve and whose possession caused bloodsheds that led to the extermination of their ancient inhabitants.

Approaching other chapters of national history, Ezequiel Verona creates a sort of domestic altar in Warnes, la demolición. It is a memorial on that immense building projected as a children’s hospital.

Never finished after Perón’s overthrow in 1955, with the time it became a shelter for thousands of people, evicted shortly before its demolition in 1991.

The documentary images of that epilogue are transferred to the work as cement fragments that represent debris. A story that deserves to be evoked within the current context.