Painting (Painting)

Llorar mucho (To Cry A Lot) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina. It also picks up the thread of earlier works, accentuating the use of cotton, and embracing an almost cornily sentimental tone.

Painting (Painting)

¡Qué triste estoy! (I’m So Sad) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread. The work is self-supporting and stands in a crack or a hole in the floor. The work suggests precariousness, frailty as well as humanity through its verticality, and its gentle sinuous form, referencing perhaps the work of Giacometti.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle. Her careful meditations in fabric reflect Plata’s ongoing interest in the relationship between people and their environments, in fragility, systems, and destruction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016. Mayotte is the only remaining island belonging to France in the archipelago of the Comoros, which gained independence in 1975, creating an invisible border that divides the islands from Europe. Koropa is the portrait of a particular relationship: that of Ben, a former fisherman turned smuggler, and Patron, a child who makes his first smuggling voyage between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte.

Installation (Installation)

Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.

Installation (Installation)

Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.

Textile (Textile)

Like most of Laura Rokas’s hand-stitched works, Once in Two Moons was made while she sat in bed, imbuing the work with a tender sense of domestic intimacy. The scene’s dominant figure is a faceless woman whose blood red, dagger-like fingernails, polka dot jacket, and jet black hair resemble a sort of avatar of the artist. The figure surveys a chaotic scene that might be described as a “cute apocalypse” (a phrase Rokas says is characteristic of her work in general).

Painting (Painting)

The impressionistic surface of Wild Money (2017) recalls the 1950s paintings of Philip Guston. Its creases recall human skin, while the filigree pattern of red skeins implies what lies beneath. The body is fully implicated in this work.

Photography (Photography)

N°001 Djoubi et sa meute is part of a series of photographs by Laura Henno titled Ge Ouryao! . This particular work depicts a young man named Djoubi posing proudly, surrounded by his pack of dogs, along the shoreline of Mayotte.

Textile (Textile)

Anonymous by Laura Lima consists of a series of fabric-based forms, over which rope has been arranged in varying textures and patterns. Visually, the work evades more complex descriptions, demanding a separate set of conventions to describe its semi-textural, semi-sculptural surface. Lima’s principle of demanding alternative descriptive conventions and exploring the experiential dimension of interacting with her work is fully visible in Anonymous , which is in many ways best qualified, in its sheer variety of shapes and textures, by its title.

Installation (Installation)

Misting Miner is a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Urban Fauna Lab collective that gives material form to the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency. The work is comprised of a water cooling system attached to technology that continuously mines cryptocurrency, and in the process also generates an extraordinary amount of heat. As a latent and untapped source of energy, the artist harnesses the heat and reveals its transformative potential by turning it into fog through the water cooling system, which he then reroutes to follow a cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn, an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica.

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.