Based on Filoctetes Project by Emilio García Wehbi
Opening: Thursday, July 17th, 7.30 p.m
The Philoctetes Project, the urban intervention created by interdisciplinary artist Emilio García Wehbi that stormed the streets of Buenos Aires, Vienna, Berlin, and Krakow between 2002 and 2007, was an aesthetic response to the devastating neoliberal experiment implemented during Menem’s administration, which led to a major political, economic, social and institutional crisis and resulted in the 2001 outbreak. The Philoctetes Project challenged and impacted the social fabric from an artistic perspective, exposing what seemed to have been naturalized and assimilated by the city's passers-by: the bodies of those discarded by a system that left them scattered throughout the urban landscape.
Maricel Álvarez's participation in the project involved collecting, preserving, organizing, and highlighting the traces, records, and documents of the artistic intervention. Her strategies aim to shape and bring to life an ever-growing archive. Created two decades after the 2001 outbreak, Philoctetes Archive is a living repository of dynamics that connect perspectives, reflections, and gestures. It responds in part to the fleeting nature of live arts and the progressive exclusion of art from the public space.
The exhibition Philoctetes Archive gathers the heterodox, classified, and preserved documentary corpus from the four editions of the Philoctetes Project.
Exhibit design: Gonzalo Córdoba Estévez
Curatorial assistance: Cinthia Hernández
Image: Proyecto Filoctetes, Photo: Amalia Retamozo, Archivo Filoctetes