Opening September 30th
Visits: Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10am to 8pm, with previous reservation at autoentrada.com - Admission: $250. Wednesdays: free. The Cañada Rosquín Society of Friends and Benefactors of the Arts presents the first retrospective exhibition of C. Brambilla (1912-1983?), which brings together a series of unfinished works and projects, almost fifty years after his last appearance in Cañada Rosquín, Santa Fe. As a result of this extensive research, the exhibition seeks to rescue a heterogeneous albeit highly consistent ensemble of a pioneering production linking art, science and nature. The recovery of a town’s personality, whose legacy is completely unknown to the realm of national and international art, invites us to review the notions of centre and periphery, and fundamentally to reformulate the bond between art and nature within a rural context. Brambilla did not participate in the art scene of his time and was barely aware of the discussions and conceptual developments that were taking place. Yet many of his projects are in tune with the experimental artistic production of the time. His research belonged to the technical field, from which he produced a series of devices for exchange and communication with the animals of the region. He was a member of the Argentine Society of Orchidophiles and the Argentine Interplanetary Association, and in the 1950s he founded the Cañada Rosquín Society of Friends and Benefactors of the Arts. These research projects led Brambilla to hydroponic crops, amateur radio, taxidermy and aviation. His great undertaking, however, was to cultivate an interspecies dialogue with the animals of the Santa Fe region by planning a large natural reserve to preserve cougars, aguará guazú, foxes and yararás. It could be said that he expanded the community beyond the human, thus fostering interspecies links with animals and the native flora.
On this occasion, we will be presenting a series of paintings and three projects that Brambilla never completed. Recovered by the current members of the Cañada Rosquín Society of Friends and Benefactors of the Arts, these projects were recently conducted at the natural reserve Federico Wildermuth Foundation and are presented for the first time together with the documentary The Wandering Ghost of the Blue Town, about Brambilla's life and work. Some of the paintings are originals, while others had to be reconstructed from photographs and the exhibition catalogue. As for the projects, Dialogue with Cougars and Aguará Guazú, Concert for River Fish and Conversation between Animals on Life and Death will be featured. In Dialogue with Cougars and Aguará Guazú he sought to generate a series of sounds from windmills to attract the large mammals of the region. The sounds of the large bells, probably influenced by the Baschet brothers, amplify those of a sound sculpture designed to be installed in the countryside. Conversation between Animals on Life and Death is a relocation of the animals preserved through taxidermy that Brambilla himself made between the 1940s and 1960s. In his notes he proposed to place the dead animals in different locations in rural areas, with the aim of observing and studying possible interactions with living animals. The last project recovered is Concert for River Fish, in which he sought to connect and engage in a dialogue with the aquatic fauna based on the listening frequencies of the fish of the region. Some scores of the concert are available, although it is not known if or how Brambilla actually performed it. The members of the team have performed the concert respecting the general structure, but introducing technology unknown at the time the work was conceived. Finally, there will be a screening of the documentary The Wandering Ghost of the Blue Town, which for the first time presents Brambilla's life and work from his birth in a Cañada Rosquín, stricken by the bubonic plague epidemic, to his legacy, influences and the mystery of his disappearance.
Cañada Rosquín Society of Friends and Benefactors of the Arts Collective