Statement
[/special_heading]
The experience of being raised in Buenos Aires, a South American city with a deep-rooted European legacy, established my academic and artistic preoccupation with cultural hybridity, space in-between, and borders –both metaphorical territories of multiplicity in which several worlds overlap.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Argentina went through a belle époque that attracted thousands of European immigrants and infused our capital with its architectonic character. These opulent buildings later became monumental fetishes to a society prone to idealizing the past and constructing its identity around narratives that envisioned a ‘white nation’, excluded native cultures, and saw ‘mestizaje’ as Otherness.
Geopolitics and postcolonial constellations became even more relevant to me when my perspectives broadened by becoming an immigrant, first in the UK and currently in the US. Identifying and reflecting on my position as a ‘non-racialized’ female Latin American artist, my work developed a critically engaged stance towards these issues.
By appropriating neo-classical imagery from textiles, façades, and craft—inspired by my hometown’s eclectic historicist architecture, domestic interiors, and museum collections—I play with the communicative value of ornament as a rhetorical discourse. I find this iconography to hold an intimate evocative power, while its political implications perform at a cultural level as expressions of social values, status, and order. The use of this imaginary acknowledges my Eurocentric upbringing at the same time that it questions a long history of hierarchies and learned notions of beauty that impose Occidental canons over ‘subaltern’ cultures.
My work includes sculpture, installation, and objects, all of which are threaded together through my use of a particular soft epoxy-resin. Materiality is a key aspect of my work, conveying fluidity not only as a sign of our times but as the embodiment of a hopeful vision for new perspectives on being, those which may overcome the binary perspectives of Western thinking. Displaying an organic flow, the objects’ physicality suggests that frontiers not only separate and exclude, but also invite us to rethink intersections, singularities, and different forms of belonging.
Within my work, oversized net-like patterns allude to social fabric and collectiveness. They direct the viewer’s gaze to the uniqueness of each interconnection, addressing individuality, and subjectivity. Other pieces suggest processes of metamorphoses and instability that bring about the possibility of healing and change. I often address the politicization of the body and the physical and symbolic violence inflicted by the categorizations among races and genders still imposed by colonial discourses.
My research-based practice is informed by decolonial authors -such as Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel- and feminist theory. The im/possibility of imagining a European decentered artistic practice is one of my concerns as an artist. My visual discourse responds to it with Neobaroque tactics, playing with antagonistic figures, ever-shifting categories of interpretation, and hybridization as a central cultural trait.