Seedbed 2020
Artists in dialogue

SEMILLERO (Seedbed) is a program sponsored by Fundación´ace that seeks to give visibility to local artists, curators and researchers (or foreign ones residing on Argentinean soil). Within this framework, there are no limitations in terms of language, media or techniques—on the contrary: we are interested in works, series and completed projects that seek to explore the inter- or trans-disciplinary, which navigate unknown waters and explore territories that are difficult to define. For the first time since the creation of the program, the exhibition of the selected projects will be held, for obvious reasons, virtually. What better circumstance to continue to deepen in this direction and choose challenging proposals whose strength is due, at least in part, to the immaterial fragility of the digital medium?

Fundación´ace continues to bet on emerging local talent, giving national and international visibility to artistic practices that question their own nature and the capacities of the medium. We invite you to browse the pages of these artists and explore their works.

CURATORIAL ESSAY
By Andrés Knob [curator]

Smell precedes vision, and its stimuli are directly linked to memory. How to bring these stimuli so associated to the physical, to the sensory and to the intimate memories to the digital realm? Cecilia Catalin is an artist who works with smell and aromas as the foundational material of her pieces. Her series What is the way the word takes to become smell? take this question and make it evident. Catalin uses screen captures of films and series, recording olfactory instants and misplacing the image to make way for the subtitle that enunciates situations related to smell. From the title, this is a work that leads us to ask ourselves questions about the sense of smell and its link with the sense of vision, about the possibility of transmitting olfactory sensations without the nerve endings of our noses being stimulated and about of the predominance of the word over the image, among others. Fortunately, those questions are not answered when we’re confronted with the series.

Daiana Ares is terrified of oblivion. Her sculptures and installations revolve around practices that bond with the space and work on everyday elements that she crosses in her path, broken, damaged, rusted and worn, having lost their functional sense. These elements, organized in heterogeneous modules, are linked together in the same way that isolated memories make up the memory of what used to be: some interlock or timidly support each other, others accompany or simply hold each other emotionally, without touching. Immersed in a subtle melancholy, Ares tries in her Mechanisms to turn the light on to rebuild with time and patience what collapsed, reinterpreting it through artistic language. Thus, she seeks to save them from oblivion. Or, perhaps, rather than saving them from oblivion, it is an exercise in personal memory to avoid terror.

Desireé De Stefano works on the themes that they go through both in their role as artist and researcher and from their daily vital perspective: dialogued bodies, territory, desire and emotionality, biodiversity and the political, artistic and technological context. (Untitled) is a work that captures the complexity of their work sustained from a discourse and a tool that, many times, are mistakenly considered antagonistic: poetics and technology. We must first be alive in order to die, and this effervescent Ophelia calls out to us from her stillness: how alive is a digital being? And if that digital being had been created from photographs of a human body, does that mean that it is more real? How much fun is there in referencing death, regenerating it and degenerating it through an engine used to build video games? Can zeros and ones become sculpture? True, these are irrelevant questions. What is certain is that, in the words of De Stefano, in this present time that dissolves without the possibility of being accumulated, we need room for doubt.

Luana Cabra was selected for her work Ventana portal with a mention to stimulate her production. This work, carried out during the pandemic lockdown, simultaneously documents the passage of time and completely nullifies it. The images we see on the phone screen show us the light and the shadow, the interior, the exterior, the above, the below, the solitude and the company, the presence and the absence. And that can only happen with the passage of time. However, the screen is equally broken in all the images, as if, for this very intimate device (which became so necessary in the confinement to maintain certain links and certain types of links) time had not passed at all. Cabra’s series confronts us with a self-referential use of photography from two perspectives: as it speaks about the contemporary photographic image and as it tells us something about the life of its author during the confinement. In this sense, returning to the words of Szarkowski (1978), it is worth wondering if this series by Cabra is a window through which to better understand the world, as the title seems to refer, or if, instead, it is a mirror that reflects a portrait of the artist who made it