Opening September 16th 7 p.m.
Wednesday to Saturday from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm and from 4 pm to 7 pm; Sundays from 4 pm to 7 pm.
The purpose of this exhibition is to integrate, conceptually and visually, textile pieces created in Santiago del Estero with a selection of contemporary artworks. Its main trigger is a research project on the arrival of European embroidery manuals in this Argentine province in the mid-1900s, and how these designs reconfigured traditional pre-Hispanic Andean iconography, thereby permitting the coexistence in these rugs of stepped fret design with rococo floral baskets and medieval griffins, hitherto unseen in this iconography. These handcrafted weavings produced by each of the weavers in the middle of the arid forests of Santiago, away from any monochrome transmission tendency, anticipate many of the mechanisms of contemporary art, especially in the conception of uniqueness. Likewise, these contemporary works on their way, perhaps inversely, direct their gaze towards specific procedures of textile design. On the one hand, the weavers of Santiago appropriate European embroidery patterns and, by amplifying them, excise their rapport and functional nature. On the other hand, the artists reflect, voluntarily or involuntarily, on the origin of the fabric in that productive boundary between the textile and the unique work.
And on both sites, the will infringed on the textile fibres mutates between its must be, so precious to fabrics in society, and the uncontrollable proliferation of creativity.
Photo: Ara Solís, aquí estoy frente a tí, Luis González Palma (2010)
