PAC

The PAC continues its exploration of continents through the lens of contemporary art with the exhibition ARGENTINA. What the Night Tells the Day, a selection of works created by more than twenty Argentine artists from different generations over the last fifty years. 

Through sculptures, installations, photographs, videos and performances, the curatorial project revolves around three themes – irony, literalness, and reference – presenting different approaches to the representation of a culture often characterised, both in the past and today, by forms of violence. It’s a multi-faceted itinerary that seeks to narrate and reveal the many nuances and forms of expression of a country that for years has been the main destination for European mass migrations.  

On show, some site-specific works conceived for the PAC and others created in Argentina, both in periods of enforced silence – as alternative forms of protest – and in moments of effervescence for the return to democracy.  

The title, a tribute to the novel of the same name by the Argentine writer of Italian origin, Héctor Bianciotti, alludes to the dichotomy between the disturbing and the luminous that is also evoked in the works on display, a metaphor for a story that the day does not know and that the night must tell. 

Leandro Erlich’s studies ways to give new meaning to everyday spaces, by playing with viewers’ perception. For PAC, Erlich has reworked El cartel (The Cartel), created in 2019 for his anthological exhibition Liminal, curated by Dan Cameron and held at MALBA (the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires). In this new, site-specific version created for the exhibition in Milan, the artist has worked on the façade of PAC, hanging a large real-estate sign that announces the sale of the historic Milanese building belonging to the Public Administration. Referring to the end date of the exhibition, the sign says that the building will not be free until March 2024: thus, reality is challenged and its boundaries with pretence cancelled, just like in the rest of the artist’s production. This provocative act starts from a breach that cannot last long but, as the artist himself emphasises: “This microstate of confusion erects something which can, potentially, show us a kind of truth”.[1] Thus sparking a critical reflection on the ongoing debate concerning the enhancement and promotion of public culture. As Dan Cameron wrote when the previous version was presented: “Erlich has ensured that a prestigious museum be seen as a sort of ghost of itself: something that could be here one day and disappear the next, but with no warning sign whatsoever”.[2]

[1]As quoted by Erlich in Pamela Pasik, “Gente que pasea debajo de una pileta, el Malba en venta y otras ilusiones: bienvenidos al arte de Leandro Erlich”, in Clarín, Buenos Aires, 2^nd July 2019. Accessed on 10 September: https://www.clarin.com/cultura/puso-venta-malba_0_8IMCgnvtL.html

[2]Dan Cameron, “Atravesar el umbral”, in Leandro Erlich. Liminal, MALBA, Buenos Aires 2019.

In Matías Duville’s artistic studies, the landscape takes shape thanks to drawings, installations, objects and videos, and his works express different ways of approaching a place – real or imaginary alike. For the inner courtyard of PAC, Duville has created a site-specific new version of the installation Precipitar una especie (The Precipitation of a Species), originally produced for his solo exhibition at the BARRO gallery in Buenos Aires in 2014. The title has a dual meaning: the scientific idea of gelling a sort of alien species via chemical means and that of giving life to a new way of being. Chemistry, science and nature blend in his work. The artist manipulates a long steel pipe to draw a line in space. An immense, partly rusted pipe anchored to two large stones that modify its route. A cactus and a pine tree emerge from either end of this tubular line, which creates a huge installation dominating the environment and the viewers. Two elements recalling different landscapes which, however, manage to coexist thanks to the artist, who reduces distances so as to make us think they belong to the same natural universe. The installation conveys a tension between the materials it is made of. A tension that plays out in the work’s duality: hard elements in contrast with soft ones, natural elements in contrast with artificial ones.

Throughout his career, León Ferrari often returned to subjects like religion, power, intolerance and violence, to reflect on their Western and Christian origins.

In 1965, Ferrari presented the work La civilización occidental y cristiana (Western and Christian Civilisation) at the Premio Di Tella in Buenos Aires: a crucifix mounted on the wooden replica of a North-American fighter plane, denouncing the violence of the West. Inaugurating his more political production (a result of the Vietnam War) and sparking a long debate on religion seen as the origin of violence, the artist stated: “I believe that our civilisation is reaching the most advanced state of barbarianism ever recorded”.[1]

This work was sent to the award organisation along with three other crates; however, a few days before the inauguration, the director of the Di Tella institute claimed that it offended religious sensitivity and requested that it be withdrawn. Faced with such a censorial act, Ferrari made the political decision to only exhibit the crates: “I found myself at a crossroads: that of plastic arts which suggested (or rather required) that I withdraw everything and expose the censure, or that of politics, thus following my initial idea of displaying something from Vietnam in this very place”.[2]

The exhibition of Leon Ferrari’s work at PAC Milan is possible thanks to the Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo (FALFAA) and the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS). CELS is part of the human rights movement that came about in Argentina in the mid-1970s to confront the last military dictatorship and hold it accountable for its crimes. Democracy brought with it new objectives that have also shaped what CELS is today: a Latin American organization that fights for rights and equality. For more information visit: www. cels.org.ar

[1] León Ferrari, “La respuesta del artista”, in Propósitos, Buenos Aires, 7 October 1965.

[2] Letter from León Ferrari to Andrea Giunta, 7 August 1993. Archivio FAALFA.

Untitled (Self-portrait with square) and Untitled (Triangle) are two self-portraits by Liliana Porter that investigate the way we represent ourselves. Porter intervenes on the image and draws a line that identifies a portion of the body. She begins by tracing it on her hand and extending it onto a piece of paper, then she records the result photographically and makes a photogravure on which, once printed, she traces the line with a pencil.

At the PAC the artist exhibits La Barrendera (The Sweeper): the large installation on display is part of the monumental work To Sweep, 2023, created on the occasion of her retrospective at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse. Within a landscape composed of broken lampshades and damaged objects, Porter draws our attention to a small female figure that is sweeping. The scene has almost a dreamlike air and refers to those who carry out a useful job but are often invisible to most people, like this tiny street sweeper who appears absorbed in bringing order to the chaos: a metaphor for time and memory that drags us and drowns us. Antagonistic elements dialogue in the same space and interact in her work in an aesthetic, narrative, historical, critical, temporal and humorous sense; broken objects as reminiscences that evoke the non-linear character of time and the anarchic essence.

The research of Lucio Fontana, an Italian-Argentine artist and precursor of action art and conceptual art, is characterized by the pre-eminence of gesture, matter and the incorporation of space into the canvas.

After returning to Argentina in 1939, Fontana remained there until 1946, working mainly in Buenos Aires. In the last year of his stay in Buenos Aires he elaborated the Manifiesto Blanco with a group of students from the Altamira School, an expression of the research he brought about in those years towards new forms of language. From Argentina he brought back with him a block of drawings, including the three on display, which reveal the process of automation aimed at concentrating and discharging theatricality and psychological tension from the gesture, so as to highlight a combinatorial capacity, a decisive break with the fixity of figurative schemes and a taste for light inventiveness and spatial inspiration. Furthermore, a certain plastic inflection, some chiaroscuros with indication of hinted volumes and a solicitation towards organic and at times vaguely surrealist ways allude to forms of sculptural space and full-bodied thickness.

In Concetto spaziale, Attese (Spatial Concept, Waiting), 1959, the flat, black-painted surface undergoes six slashes (cuts) of various sizes distributed across the canvas. In cutting, the canvas retracts and a space appears between the surface of the canvas and an “undefined back”. Fontana acts on the monochromatic surface by producing cuts to introduce into the work a space that is as real as it is indefinite. This radical gesture undermines the space of representation and the two-dimensionality of the canvas, starting the path towards the dematerialization of the work. From the beginning, on the back of the “cuts” Fontana placed the title “Attesa” or “Attese” (Waiting), however also specifying its nature as a “Concetto spaziale” (Spatial Concept). “Attesa” in a rather broad and deliberately multi-allusive sense, probably going from a hypothesis of a futuristic condition to an almost metaphysical contemplative intention. In the new cycle of “Cuts” (1958-1968) Enrico Crispolti underlines how their decisive and characterizing monochromatism begins to assert itself together with the desire to order the cut or cuts as primary and elementary structures, very gesturally calibrated.

Mariela Scafati, a queer painter and silk-screener, brings together creativity, collective activism and affectivity in her artistic production. Together with Marina de Caro, Daiana Rose, Guillermina Mongan and Victoria Musotto she founded the group Cromoattivismo, in which she conducts an ongoing reflection on colour and its biunivocal bond with political connotation.
Scafati, who treats her work as painting rather than installation, has created, site-specifically for PAC, a work composed of several monochrome paintings linked by cords and suspended in space. An expansive painting that unfurls in space, composed of canvases painted with acrylic, with slight colour variations between one another. The artist uses pink as an expression of violence against women and the LGBT community, in reference to the pink triangle that distinguished homosexuals in the extermination camps. Scafati experiments with the limits of painting, challenging them to establish new relations; pulsating in her painting is something “vital”, like “bound, motionless bodies”.[1]
The elements that make up the work are all visible, fruit of the artist’s decision to rethink and challenge the exhibition space, breaking with frontality as the only possible viewpoint.

[1]“Mariela Scafati: comienza”, Artishock, 6 January 2023. Accessed on 10 October 2023 at https://artishockrevista.com/2023/01/06/mariela-scafati-comienza/

The series En el sexto día (“On the Sixth Day”) centres on the Argentinian countryside and its animals, shown as dead or dying. Alessandra Sanguinetti portrays the relationship – at once intense and violent – between human beings and animals so as to convey a message: “Taking the life of a fellow living creature is neither a natural nor an everyday action”. The scene is isolated from its background in every photograph, so as to intensify the situation captured. Aside from the cruelty aspect, the images maintain a certain romance that allows us to reflect on a situation depicted as normal. In this series of works, Sanguinetti expresses her captivation with the contradictory nature of “this combination of the love we feel for animals and of the violence we show them”.[1]

The art of portraying animals allows the artist to give them “new life”. Sanguinetti lingers on the beauty of the environment in contrast with the cruelty taking place all around: “I’ve always seen nature as something full of life and death. […] Life and death coexist in everyday life. All animals in nature are faced with two options: to take advantage of those who are dying, or to grow fat and thus become food”.[2]

[1]Alessandra Sanguinetti. Accessed on 12 October 2023: https://www.taringa.net/+imagenes/alessandra-sanguinetti-fotografia-notas_hrakp

[2]Alessandra Sanguinetti: On the Sixth Day. Accessed on 12 October 2023: https://www.nataliarubio.es/alessandra-sanguinetti-el-sexto-dia/

Mariana Bellotto is a director, choreographer and performer who considers interdisciplinarity and experimentation as the foundation of her art. In a world veering towards the dystopian, the artist includes other people in her research and considers bodies as critical and political media. Through her performances, performative ideas, video-performances and audiovisual work, she engages with themes such as consumption, the impact of human actions on nature, technology and violence.

At PAC the artist is showing her video-performance Trilogía Pandémica (Pandemic Trilogy). The video begins with documentary images of a snake shedding its skin, images that allude to the transformation of bodies in post-pandemic times. Later, in Tecnopiel (Technoskin), the performers occupy an undefined space for a precise length of time. A man surrounded by obsolete technology announces that he will cross through a portal and become a post-pandemic being, a hybrid; then two human beings appear inside transparent trash bags, like human plastics, technological waste. In Coda-Trash, the screen of a computer shows the accumulation of digital waste, the reproduction and discarding of images, the recording of a meeting, and the “canc” key and trash bin as protagonists.

Making use of all possible media and disciplines, Villar Rojas tackles the topic of the extinction of the human species, of environmental uncertainty, of the fleetingness of nature.

Untitled VI belongs to the series “Rinascimento” (Renaissance), begun in 2015. In a regular refrigerator displayed with its door open, Villar Rojas composes a still life by placing some food in the freezer behind a transparent support. This enables us to observe the mutations the material undergoes over time: as the days go by, the composition begins to show ice crystals, which change the shape of the elements. In addition to the cold, there are external factors (such as the alteration of the power supply or the obsolete nature of the appliance itself) contributing to further changes. The work clearly references to the precariousness of life and our irreversible path towards degradation, as well as our dependence on electronic devices.

The composition behind the glass recalls Renaissance-era still lifes, also referenced in the title – a pictorial genre revisited by the author with real food (meat, vegetables, fruit, fish, etc.) that he distributes, with great meticulousness and balance, in the small freezer, where light is the key element of the composition.

Using different languages and media such as drawing, painting, video, photography, installation and music, Jorge Macchi elaborates poetic proposals challenging the viewer’s perception. The artist selects trivial objects that he takes from everyday contexts and sets them in places that are foreign to them, a simple operation that disturbs the senses and generates a feeling of alienation opening up to multiple meanings. In addition to decontextualization and the cancellation of function, the artist works on the idea of repetition to provoke new readings.

In 2013 Macchi created Beehive, an installation made up of twenty-two ceiling fans joined together, a situation which eliminates their functionality by preventing them from rotating and recalls the cells of the beehive through the proposed distribution. The installation is characterized by fans placed on the ceiling of the room and an insistently repeated sound. The repetition of the object and the geometric arrangement of the structures create a rhythm, some sort of “musicality” that runs through the work. In the same year Macchi created Fan, an installation that uses the same object, though in this case only one fan is in operation.

Drawing, fundamental in the work of Nicolás Robbio, ceases to be an aesthetic practice and becomes a means for the construction of thought.

At PAC the artist has created an installation for the series “Estudios de Tensión” (Studies in Tension), begun in 2010. Robbio, using a system of cables, points and plummets, tends to subvert the spectator’s perception, demonstrating the impossibility of separating the concrete from the abstract, the objective from the subjective. An arrow points upwards, an ideal ascending force, to which the artist contrasts two weights, which push downwards due to the force of gravity, something real.

Bozal (Muzzle) is an installation composed of a saw and an axe, standing vertically on the floor. Once again the artist destabilizes perceptions: the two tools are limited here in their function, as the title itself infers; they are covered in a rough cardboard casing that prevents their use, in the wake of the Duchampian assisted readymades.

Also shown in the exhibition is the video Los de arriba los de abajo los buenos los malos (The High the Low the Good The Evil), made in 2011. Here the artist focuses on iron gratings – a constant feature of buildings and homes in Brazil and an element of security – as an expression of boundary and a divisive element that intensifies conflicts.

With her artistic practice, Cristina Piffer recovers and questions the economic and social history of Argentina, crossed by violence at the time of the consolidation of the national state. The artist uses organic matter (meat, entrails, beef fat and dehydrated blood) to allude to the bodies suppressed by official narratives. Her subject allows her to address the moment in which Argentina, having become a producer of agricultural goods for the world, and needing to conquer new territories, faced the bloody military campaign that began in 1879, decimating the native populations.

In the work Doscientos pesos fuertes (Two Hundred Pesos Fuertes) Piffer uses dried bovine blood powder to imprint on a glass plate a significant fragment of the image printed on the peso fuerte banknote, currency of the Argentine Republic from 1826 until the monetary reform of 1881. The choice of the two hundred peso banknote is not random: the artist selected it for the image depicted, a large crowded group of cattle and sheep grazing in the countryside. The work rests directly on the ground. Under it, a large puddle of dried blood is spreading; it alludes to slaughter in the abattoir and, at the same time, indicates the bloody consequences of the developing agro-export economic model.

Photographs, drawings, installations and video installations are the media chosen by Adriana Bustos for her works – a quest, revisited from the viewpoint of postcolonial studies, attesting to historical or social events that took place over the centuries.

In her video installation Ceremonia nacional (National Ceremony), Bustos drew a relationship between film recordings of sports ceremonies that took place during the 20^th century within authoritarian political contexts. On the one hand, the work – composed of two screens set up as a diptych – connects a section of the documentary Olympia (directed by Leni Riefenstahl) on the XI Olympic Games, which took place in Berlin in 1936, during the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler, who presided at the inauguration ceremony. On the other hand, Bustos chose a section of the opening moment, presided by general Jorge Rafael Videla, of the football World Cup held in Argentina in 1978 during the military dictatorship (1976–1983). The visual selection draws an analogy between the models of the two governments, which both used the same formal and propaganda resources. With this work, Bustos generated a non-linear narration of the chosen events, showcasing the visual resources used by the bloodiest fascisms.

Photography lies at the heart of Miguel Rothschild’s work, which is altered – with the addition or partial subtraction of extra-artistic materials – so as to open up to potential new interpretations. The series (“Dream Catcher”) consists in a series of photographs taken in slum n. 20 located in the Lugano barrio in Buenos Aires. The pictures are framed and protected by glass presenting fragile cuts or cracks tracing the intricate lines of the electric wires spanning the air. Though the name of the series refers to the object, the artist connects the strands of the dream catcher with the reapers of Greek mythology who, tasked with spinning the fates of mortals, had the powers to weave but also to cut short their lives.

In his series “Burned”, Rothschild revisits the sublime in German Romanticism through cloudy skies recalling the natural and spiritual power of nature. The artist transforms his landscapes by inflicting small burned holes on the pictures printed on cotton paper, and he plays with the light so as to create a sense of ambiguity, lending an atmosphere of mystery to the work. Indeed, it is hard to detect the source of light: is it within the work itself or is it an effect of external light on its surface?

The oeuvre of Ana Gallardo offers a profound reflection on themes such as old age, gender violence, exclusion and death.

The pieces exhibited here at PAC were presented at the exhibition Dibujos textuales II (Textual Drawings II) in 2018 at Gallery Ruth Benzacar in Buenos Aires. It’s a monochromatic installation that envelops the spectator: a series of large sheets of paper drawn with charcoal reveal traces of the artist’s lines, while the overlapping layers of opaque black intensify their funereal character. On each of the five sheets, Gallardo has transcribed brief statements by Guatemalan women describing the fear and suffering they experienced during the country’s insurrection. The handwritten texts are positioned down low – almost at floor level – to generate a certain difficulty in reading them, forcing the spectator metaphorically to get closer to what is being denounced. The placement of the text creates a striking visual line that connects all the stories, accounts that express cruelty against bodies: “They put the guns inside us”, “They searched our genitals”. Their words emerge from the black charcoal and, though they came about in a specific context, they are representative of others’ suffering as well.

Eduardo Basualdo invades the space – the key protagonist of his artistic quest – with disturbing installations.

The artist has created a site-specific installation for PAC: a rocky, shapeless black mass spreading out over the exhibition area. Before its monumental presence, time appears suspended and space shrunk, making viewers tense and causing anxiety, anguish and restlessness. The work’s amorphous shape is reminiscent of disturbed soil, while its texture recalls the irregular surface of meteorites or volcanic rocks resulting from solidified magma: a way to remember past extinctions or to foretell future catastrophes. This monumental presence questions viewers, urging us to reflect on our own destruction: it could have been originated from a volcanic eruption or be composed of fragments of meteors or of a great asteroid that once impacted Earth. For the artist, the idea of a near and inevitable danger “takes us to a place of attention”.[1]

This vast yet ephemeral work is actually pretence: the apparent heaviness of the rock we see contrasts with the fragility and lightness of the aluminium chosen to make it.

[1] Julia Villaro, “Eduardo Basualdo. Un peligro pende sobre nuestras cabezas”, Clarín, 9^th February 2018. Consulted on 28^th October 2023: https://www.clarin.com/revista-n/arte/eduardo-basualdo-peligro-pende-cabezas_0_ByWvYWtLf.html

In Spider/Web, Saraceno takes the spider with its web – a divine and relational symbol often appearing in his works – and reworks it through the ancient lace-making technique. Between memory and tradition, the artist focuses on respecting local differences, involving 288 textile craftspeople from La Quebrada and the Jujuy puna grassland to create the weaving/spider web that makes up the work.

Art, science, engineering and environmental engagement come together in Tomás Saraceno. On 28 January 2020, the Aerocene Pacha – the first aircraft entirely sun and air-fuelled – took flight in Argentina. The place was chosen intentionally: “We are in Salinas Grandes because, when the hot-air balloon flies over a white surface like this salt flat, the sun reflecting on the ground increases the chance of rising in the air”. The project depicts the link between the artist, the Aerocene community he founded and the indigenous peoples of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc. Pacha conveys the artist’s environmentalist position by specifically referencing the local conflict caused by lithium extraction. Piloted by Argentinian Leticia Noemi Márquez, the flying sculpture flew over natural environments, with a message by local peoples on its surface: “Water and life are worther than lithium”.

Through sculpture, installations, videos and performances, sound artist Juan Sorrentino investigates the relationships established between sound and materials. The artist creates sensory experiences where sound is constantly involved.
Sorrentino takes on the theme of the forest fires that have devastated Italy by occupying PAC’s space with a site-specific installation. The artist creates by exploiting the movement of organic matter: the charcoal produced by the remains of burnt trunks, moved by mechanical engines, traces lines and stains on the room’s white walls, while the dust produced is deposited on the floor as a mark of the act. The machines’ repetitive action produces constant sounds that can vary slightly depending on the effort the engines are forced to make. Added to these are the smaller noises made by the trunks themselves in their upward or downward motion.
On the opposite wall, Sorrentino places two large containers for loudspeakers, three-dimensional geometric figures that are the antitheses of one another: transparent and opaque, solid and hollow.
The whole installation revolves around the relationship between sound, kinetics, drawing and time.

Through the use of different media, Graciela Sacco creates images of faces, mouths, eyes and bodies so as to tackle complex social themes such as hunger, migration, social outcasts etc. When asked if art had a mission, the artist would claim not to know, adding that, if indeed it did, it should be “offering someone the chance to ask themselves new questions”.[1]

In 1993, Sacco began working on Bocanada, a series of close-ups of open mouths, by putting together heliographs, stamps, installations, interventions and urban interferences: the landscape of several cities thus became the backdrop of the operations carried out with her “mouths”, which generated signs with marked political undertones.

The first city to host the series was Rosario: here, Bocanada was presented in the urban space during the strike called by the employees of a catering service that prepared meals for public schools. The images, that seem to suddenly attack the city walls in a variety of political and social contexts, depict hunger but also the need – and inability – to communicate and express ideas.

At the 23^rd São Paulo Biennial (1996), Sacco displayed matchboxes with mouths printed on the front and, on the back, the sentence: “A single spark can set the prairie on fire”.

[1] Graciela Sacco quoted in Andrea Giunta, Poscrisis. Arte Argentino después del 2001, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires 2009, p. 214.

To celebrate the country’s return to democracy after the year-long military dictatorship, in December 1983 Marta Minujín installed El Partenón de libros prohibidos (The Parthenon of Forbidden Books) in the streets of Buenos Aires for five days. The work was an iron-wrought replica of the Greek temple covered with the books that had been banned during the dictatorship and now were gifted to the artist by their publishers. With the aim of putting them back into circulation, when the time came to dismantle the work, two cranes bent the metal structure so the public could take the books. Minujín recreated the work for documenta 14 in Kassel, gathering books “republished after having been banned for years”[1] and books that were still illegal in certain countries. Following an open call for donations, the artist ended up with almost 100,000 books; 6,000 long-banned publications were collected in Argentina alone. The work was installed in Friedrichsplatz where, in 1933, the National Socialist Party carried out a campaign that culminated in the burning of thousands of books by authors considered to be opponents of the regime. At the end of documenta, as in 1983, the books were given to visitors; this time, however, through a previously organised invitation.

[1]Convocatoria. Accessed on 30 September 2023: https://www.documenta14.de/en/news/1601/call-for-book-donations

In an attempt to bring together art and life, Alberto Greco wrote the manifesto Dito del arte vivo (Finger of Living Art) in Genoa on 24 July 1962, claiming that the living finger “is the adventure of what is real”, and that the artist’s task is to teach people to “see not through a painting, but with their finger”, focusing on what is happening all around us.[1]

After moving to Rome, Greco devised and staged Cristo 63 (Christ 63) at the Teatro Laboratorio with Carmelo Bene and Giuseppe Lenti. The experimental play was a parody of the Passion of Christ. The work, a living finger performance, did not have a predefined duration and contemplated unexpectedness, the audience’s participation, the use of amateur actors and improvisation. It premiered on 4^th January 1963 without a script or even shared guidelines – a decision that caused unexpected situations and reactions among actors and audience alike. Scatological scenes, nakedness and excessive alcohol consumption required the police to intervene. And so, after a brief incarceration, Greco was forced to escape Italy under the accusation of blasphemy.

Descriptions and memories of the theatre experiment appear in the Gran manifiesto-rollo del arte vivo-dito, a work created subsequently in Spain.

[1] Alberto Greco, Manifesto for DITO del ARTE VIVO, 24 July 1962, 11:30 am.

The photo performance Maresca se entrega todo destino (Maresca Abandoning Herself to Fate), created by Liliana Maresca and published in the 8th issue of the monthly magazine El libertino on 8 October 1993, is a sequence of 14 black-and-white pictures portraying the artist in provocative poses. The double-page spread included the woman’s phone number and a text describing her condition as an artist and listing her ‘partners in crime’: “The sculptor Liliana Maresca gave her body over to Alex Kuropatwa (photography), Sergio De Loof (costumes), and Sergio Avello (makeup) for this maxi ad where she’s willing to do anything”. The top right-hand margin of the page also showed the names of the producers: Fabulous Nobodies (a sham company belonging to Roberto Jacoby and Kiwi Sainz).

Maresca chose a monthly magazine featuring erotic stories to create and publicise her photo performance, in an attempt to break through the frontiers of individual works, overcome the temporal limits of an exhibition and increase the scope of circulation and communication with the public. This artistic act, which existed only on the printed page, increased her awareness of the impact of her work, which “continued with phone calls”[1] made by the public.

[1] Julio Sánchez, Una artista se ofreció “para todo destino” en una revista erótica, in “La Maga”, 99, Buenos Aires, 8 December 1993, p. 15.

Exhibition guide curated by: Cecilia Rabossi

Text adaptation: Leonardo Savini