From Wall to Paper to Air

On July 27th, 2025, Proyecto´ace reopened its doors to the public with an Open Studio that brought together a wide variety of practices, all of which were united by the same quest: to think of art as a territory for sensitive, poetic, and political exploration.

From Chicago (USA), Valerie Downs presented La Precaria, a series of delicate pieces made of handmade paper perforated with needles and intervened with unconventional materials such as her own hair, deer hair, rust, and earth. Her work proposed an intimate and forceful questioning of what is usually discarded, re-signifying the fragile as aesthetic power. From another perspective, American photographer Fredrik Marsh shared I Am Lost to the World, a project born in a cemetery in Tuscany and transferred to paper using the waterless lithography technique. His images, made with a rudimentary hand scanner, evoked intimacy, memory, and an awareness of our own mortality.

For its part, the C.O.P.I.A. Group was invited to present VECTOR POÉTICO, a site-specific installation that displays affective maps traced by the daily journeys of its members to and from the workshop. Thirteen paths, converted into inexact copies, intersect and vibrate in the Sala Políglota until they converge in a fourteenth shared journey: the arrival at the ´ace studio.

Finally, this Open Studio also included the participation of Argentine artist and architect Cristian Battista, who produced an intervention within the Carapantallas Project with A Wall that Barely Stands, a work that combines cement, iron, wire, and fabric, challenging the rigidity of construction materials and exploring the thin line between the solid and the vulnerable.

This Open Studio brought together diverse sensibilities and multiple practices, generating a crossover between the individual and the collective, the intimate and the public, the material and the affective. A true laboratory of shared resonances where the local artistic community could meet, converse, and inhabit the expanded territory of contemporary creation alongside the resident artists.