ARQUEOLOGIA SUAVE [SOFT ARCHAEOLOGY]
In the early 2000s scene, artists reorganized the cultural marks of the previous decade, invented new ways of managing art, and devised political strategies suited to the moment. Projects emerged in which authorship dissolved—and also recombined. It is possible to locate at that time the beginning of two lines which, although seemingly opposed in several respects, share certain activist affinities. The first, professionalized according to curatorial agendas and shaped by an instrumental understanding of the local-global relation. The second, which continued at another rhythm the artistic sensibilities of Jorge Gumier Maier in spaces such as Belleza y Felicidad, Sonoridad Amarilla, and Juana de Arco. It is in some of these that Chiachio & Giannone held their first exhibitions. Here we find the artists of intimacy who, distancing themselves from central narratives, continue to ask about beauty and allow the nearness of the real to enter—naively, devotedly, without speculation. Their works evoke Argentine art as an ongoing conversation among friends, a process that expands the boundaries of art toward practices such as craft and handwork, historically lacking status within the modern canon.
This lineage has been sustained by a set of oral testimonies, texts, and lived experiences that once again nourish contemporary art today, particularly through questions of queerness and anachronism.
From the beginning, Chiachio & Giannone formed part of this process, refining it to the point of an obsession with women who, as we know, did not receive the same critical fortune as men. Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Otti Berger, and Elena Izcue are among those honored in this exhibition—Bauhaus figures associated with textile art, teaching, and design.
But not all names are widely recognized. The artists’ soft archive also includes seamstresses, embroidery teachers, and craftworkers who resist the technification of life—creatively and without nostalgia. In their studio they unfold books, catalogs, patterns, and images that trace a visual path interrupting the heteronormative and somewhat aristocratic character of art history. They use irons (not brushes), they sew, embroider, recycle old clothes, dye curtains, design ceramics—professing a domestic kind of camp that spreads horizontally and rebels against the white cube. Unlike the subtraction that characterizes exhibition spaces, their home and the shows they develop over months resemble fairs, boutiques, and craft workshops—worlds of daily utopia and improvised connections, where everything is possible since each piece survives through symbolic or playful relations.
Objects marked by class, geography, activity, or gender stereotypes lose identity or become something else through stitches that ornament and decorate: mad things!
Through its abundance, Soft Archaeology allows us to grasp how much these artists have worked over a decade. It also opens the possibility of future relations in which textile practice may extend into other communities—such as the Municipal Institute of Ceramics of Avellaneda “Emilio Villafañe,” whose experimental dynamic brings together artists and students from across the country. When Chiachio & Giannone visited it, they were amazed—not only by the care for things, but by a familiar sense of people embracing labor and persevering in it. I would venture that for them archaeology is not a discipline of excavations uncovering monumental objects of material history, but rather a tactile work on the surface—embracing lightness, feeling textures, and valuing labor in order to make art into a culture of everyday life.
Francisco Lemus. September 2017
