Only presentation: Saturday December 4th from 10.30 am to 6pm
Departure from Puerto Piojo
The multiple roles of museums include the development of narratives about the social and political memory of the territory and the identities of its inhabitants. These narratives are often overlooked or ignored by official accounts. Thus, through a counterpoint between past and present, the Occasional Museum of an Incredible Landscape (MOPI) proposes to activate the imaginaries of the river landscape painted by Josefa Díaz y Clucellas - the first female painter of the continent to sign her works - at the end of the 19th century, giving voice to those who think about that landscape and inhabit it today.
In that masterpiece, which has been lost, Josefa captured the dynamism of the fluvial activity between Europe and America that marked an era of economic prosperity. Based on verbal accounts, the MOPI, founded by the artists Ana Vogelfang and Julieta García Vázquez, undertakes a search for that lost landscape and questions from the present the same territory painted by Josefa.
The museum will be open on Clucellas Island for only one day thanks to the collaborative management of three provincial museums: the Museo Histórico Provincial Brigadier General Estanislao López, the Museo Provincial de Ciencias Naturales Florentino Ameghino and the Museo Etnográfico y Colonial Juan de Garay. The MOPI will exhibit in its ephemeral headquarters a collection of popular art - by artists, artisans, and neighbours of Clucellas and Alto Verde - that will reconstruct in a fragmentary way the famous landscape painted by Josefa.
Likewise, her former house, currently a Provincial Historic Monument that was closed and boarded up for years, will be activated and engaged in a dialogue with the MOPI through a series of actions that will offer a live reconstruction of what transpires on the other side of the river. Thus, the project presents the river as an active entity whose flow confronts two models of heritage construction and seeks to rethink binary notions that permeate this constantly changing geology, from the lifestyles of the original inhabitants to the present day.
