the belly of the beetle / about scales

Third version, this time site specific, of an art project that began eight years ago with actions and concepts that have continued to inspire the textile results generated inside a lint remover for domestic use, which for me has always been like a beetle with transparent belly.

A complete exhibition conceived as a work of art, the result of conceiving and playing, intervening and freely distributing the space, going from the smallest to the excessive. It is a gesture, or a chain of gestures. This is what has happened in the meeting between the project, the María Freire room at Juan Manuel Blanes Museum and the painter’s work.

the belly of the beetle / present at biennials 2022

CONTEXTILE 2022, Guimarães, Portugal. International exhibition. Installation for 4m2, 10 textile panels and video art.

WTA Biennial, 25×25 exhibition in Montevideo, Uruguay. Didactic Cube, interactive textile piece.

D.U.D.O.  project

Universal Declaration of the Rights of Others.

How do we position ourselves when we assign rights to our fellow human beings? How do we process the statements and opinions on rights that circulate arbitrarily on the Internet? What happens when the enunciation of rights towards an otherness is not filtered by reason and ethics?

Audiovisual work in video installation format, two versions, on two and three channels, in which more than 70 animated avatars, created by artistic appropriation of the online tool VOKI, say more than 600 different phrases taken from the Google search engine, stating rights towards third person plural both in Spanish in the searches: “they have the right”. Selected for the 50th Montevideo Prize for Visual Arts 2021 and for the 13th. Mercosur Biennial 2022.

siempre te (ll)amaré / I will always (call)love you

The TRUE STORIES photographic diptych project breaks the barriers of linear time to delve into self-fiction, and highlights constants, changes and desires placed in context throughout the author’s personal biography, which at the same time reflect sociocultural characteristics of different periods between the second half of the 20th century and today. (First diptych exhibited at the CÓSMICA fair, Montevideo, November 2021)

Left: Ron Ely as Tarzan, a character he played in film and television between 1966 and 1970. Photomontage on archive image.
Right: Staging of the author in a family home, between 1979 and 1980. Scanned 35mm color negative.
Technical collaboration in editing: Ignacio González.

the belly of the beetle / inversion

It all started with a domestic activity: removing imperfections from clothes, which are produced by the natural frizzing of their use. There are devices called lint removers for that, and I used ones in particular, which have a beetle-like design.

In 2017, a first version (INVERSION) was exhibited within the AQUELLO exhibition, and over several years of work, the project has become a complex installation, with different stations, always in process, which integrates textiles, photography, video and objects, The most recent version has been mounted in the Juan Manuel Blanes museum, in 2022, and later in the two international biennials mentioned above.

never naked enough

We are never naked enough. (And we are always inevitably exposed)

The materiality of the body is revealed and veiled in the face of medical investigation. Genes and history provide data and also opacity.

How many bodies in one body?

Installation with back light box (143 x 38 x 45 cm), three-dimensional collage with radiological and magnetic resonance plates of the author, paternal family migration passages, acetate prints, Cluny lace of maternal wedding dress. (2017)

scale 1:55

I am my own father, and my own son. A strange familiarity in the middle, subject to time, alien to time, blurs who is who.

I am that child that I carry with me and that I take care of, and I am also no longer him. Was I that child that they said?

Photograph of the author at one year of age: Foto Silva (between the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963) Photographic production: Darío Invernizzi. Grayscale photographic print 150 x 100 cm, framed. (2017)

chances

Some things never change. Some things never stop.

Hundreds of dice, incalculable probabilities and combinations, random throws, control attempts, questions to the oracle.

So many games that were made, that are never modified. And so many that change after the most recent release.

Performative action with two hundred dice. Nineteen minute digital video, loop playback (2016).