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Graciela Cianfagna

REFLECTIONS OF QUARANTINES
 


In times of pauses but not of poetics quietude of the poetry of the rest is a Project that summon from a time to now.
Today it displaces to intimistic operations holding up its essence, that recover what was suspended, left on a side or thrown away. Today more than ever these moments for going for going back to look inquiring in its interstices and drifts.
It is like this, that the art works its redefinition constantly happens with certain ties and failed even with some insufficient finding.
We know that the art arrives where the word not. The art inlight where language could anchor unfolding and break through images in silence.

 


Graciela Cianfagna

July 2020   
 

POETIC OF THE REST

“Everything that the big city has refused, everything that it has lost, everything that has disdain, everything that has broken, he catalogs it, he collects it. Certify the archives of excess, the lioness of the waste”.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          “The Rag” of Charles Baudelaire.

According to Nicholas Bourriaud, we live in times of excess of all types. An era of waste. An epoch of threatening waste.  What is the resto r a waste if not what falls when something is manufactured. The inmigrant, the clandestine, the one without a roof is also considered waste, waste of a society. Pushed as a download to the doors of the city, both humans and objects. In sight of this, art assumes a politic role denying the existence of the residue as such, considering that the objects and the persons are integral. It is a task of the contemporary artist to center his attention in the forgotten productions, the single banal, the fool, the nomad, the worker without papers, the expelled, the not assimilable for the selective order. The contemporary artist practices the translation in several ways. The translation functions today as an ethic of recognition of the other, a central figure of the XXI siecle. ¿ What is a translation? In the first place, it is practice of the displacement that values the passage of the signs from one format to the other. Something stays and something gets lost in the operation that was before in the original. This lost is what we call the rest.
Poetic of the rest presents a production based on the rest, the beginning of collection, the achievement, the obsessive. ¿What collects the artist? Milk cartons, walnut shells, pieces of cloths, papers before being wasted, all of it correctly selected, cut, accommodated, sew up in big pieces and little ones. Above each one she inserts an engravement as a memory fixation and as an ephemeral rescue and disposal.
Besides the object, a video in the entrance of the exposition shows the artist walking through a little forest alongside a house in ruins. While she promenades, she hung up pieces of engraven cloths that seem to be pieces of skin of animals hardened by the sun. The cloths keep an organic aspect, at the same time they are beautiful and uncomfortable.
The pieces, grouped and quickly engraved repeatedly, still suggest the singularity of these ones, evocating with the engraven of the rest, the resistance to death, as well as rest, the resistance to death, as well as life and its ephimeral nature.
The artworks of Cianfagna, recover the materials, marking them one by one, still remins the dying nature, an ambient catastrophe, that converts the future in a haunting threat.
The strongly political content of recollecting milk boxes, walnut shells, pieces of cloths and papers before being wasted, transforming them in artworks, places the artist in a position of fight and activism wareness considerating the materials and the persons assimilable by the society. Fulfils its role in a poetic play and criticize offering the realities.

 


Ana Montenegro.
Curator
2019

Ana Montenegro

SILENCE WORKS

 


“…it`s not enough to have memory. You have to know how to forget them if they are a lot, and with big patience wait till they come back. The memories in its self, are nothing: if they become blood in us, only then can happen that – in a very strange time- arise from them the first Word in a verse. But all my verses had been born in another way, it is to say they are not verses. 
                                                                                                                               

Rainer María Rlke.


According to Byung- Chul Han, “the experience of beauty as a memory is subtracted from consumption.” The artist of the XXI siècle maintain a likage with the historian and the anthropologist through a group of memories across a group of not appreciated memories. That that was excluded of the official history, the artists search the reconstruction in a rereading of the past. They recover rubble of events in a familiar landscape and traces of a social building. Under earth remains found of the history of the defeated.
It exists an intersection of the properties of space and time in our epoch, where the space and time in our epoch, where the past, the present and the future emerge in form of left overs, from small details associated with different temporalities.
Images from the past with the shape of the present. From these, the narrative links discover the hidden relations among the things for exploring them. There exist relations between the facts. It is how the artist Works in our time in search of memories that illuminate the political, social and cultural configuration of a determined historical moment.
Graciela Cianfagna, in Silence Works, presents a group of animals bones, intervened with transfer and different levels of them produced from lithographic process. The clean bones, almost polished, with the transfered images, are placed in resemblance of the human body over two pallets that suggest a mortuary table. In other side she installs a serie of marble modules that hang up from the Wall and that as the same as the bones had been intervened by transfered.
In this last installation, Graciela searches a vinculation between remains of bones of abandoned animals in a place to die and the image of the body laying down, a body that could evoque without difficulties violated bodies and subs tract to the memory breaking through the historic violence. Inserting an engravement in each piece, the artist alludes still, to an identity lost, a type of exhumation of the real.
The experience of beauty as a duration of the memory, opposes to the tittle of the exhibition Is it Ephimeral the Beauty? Then a paradox, or t is life in its ephemeral dimensión what it is recovered in these Works? Everything in this show gives the testimony of a pronpensit of the contemporary artist to produce the history in a double sensce. In fact, the are excuses to recover the rubble of a not tell history. The figure of an artist becomes, like that, urgent.

          

                                                                                                                        

Ana Montenegro
Curadora

REVERSE

 


The memories are the soul of things, says Alejandra Kmiya in her novel. The sun moves the shadow of the still things. It could be for that that we keep some things; we feel them animated by the memories. But we live drowned in a sea of objects coming in and getting out daily from our lives. A dirty birth, necessary, inevitable. Things of what we get release immediately, not without disgust: inanimate trash. Not a memory goes with them, just the diffuse dullness of a dark reality. Graciela Works with that throwable, that may be doesn`t arrive to be a rest. Graciela gather cartons, Graciela garbagier, Graciela homeless, Graciela rag and bone woman, Graciela collect and recollect boxes that ones have milk, fabric, used paper. Later then breaks, rips, folds, cuts, crease, inks, impress, sews, join, glue, transfer, tie. Thinks, feels, remember, writes, Project, says, disays, imagines, forgets, associates, creates and recreates. And she submits to a dense play of indeterminated opposed.
Matrix and stamps hollow and empty. The same and the other, continent, content. Repetition and difference, anverse and reverse does not occupy antagonic places, then they can be at the same time and space.
In the reverse, that one “of the other side” hidden is where today makes a mark that it is no seen, the dark abyss of the dream, what the power hide This complex movement surprises us, deviling a major paradox. The reverse of the trash is bright, twinkle as a firefly. Pestilent materia that gets animated in the process. Graciela obtinated, insists in the task of putting the soul.

 

Silvina Torviso

Visual Artist/ Teacher

Silvina Torviso
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