Opening: Friday, August 29th, 1 p.m Can we still imagine new images absent from what we call History? What happens if we pause at the margins of official narratives, in forgotten fragments, or in the smallest details that escape the heroic script? In this project, developed in dialogue with the collection of the Cornelio de Saavedra Historical Museum, Ariel Cusnir explores a series of visual shifts in Argentine national memory. This is not about illustrating well-known episodes, but about opening spaces of ambiguity and speculation, where the historical and the imaginary converge. In times when memory hardens or becomes simplified, this work seeks to envisage other ways of looking at the past. Based on a series of drawings that revisit the British Invasions—an episode made famous by the resistance of Buenos Aires’ population against the British army in 1807—Cusnir approaches these scenes with a critical eye, sensitive to absurdity, distortion, and the narrative power of the marginal, far from reproducing the military feat as an epic. In this gesture, history ceases to be an orderly sequence of dates and heroes, becoming instead a contested domain. In dialogue with the museum’s archive, this project activates a poetic and political archaeology that challenges the very notion of the document and inscribes a persistent cartography intent on reimagining the narratives of the past.
Image: Ariel Cusnir, Bueyes, 2019.