Tierra de las emociones perdidas [Land of lost emotions] is an exercise in which the artist asks herself: “How can we show the possible dialogues between art and education? Is a visual manifesto possible? Art is the great land where we rehearse other possible worlds and is undoubtedly a space for sharing. School is the great land where we rehearse other possible worlds and is undoubtedly a space for sharing.”
The exhibition can be visited until Friday, September 10, by appointment and respecting the COVID-19 protocol.
Schedule your visit HERE
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How many images are inside each image?
How many words are inside each word?
What is in between?
These are some of the ideas and actions that I pursue and that pursue me when I think about art and when I think about education:
Autonomy
The politics of small gestures
Ideas that bleed/fade into others
Multiplying social imaginaries
Weaving until reaching the reality of desire
Encountering dissonant teachers
Why are norms disrespectful of our subjectivities? Can we imagine learning outside of them?
A school of lost emotions, a school of Leisure, of nocturnal transparencies, a school without reason… An accidental school that happens anywhere, at any moment, through a friend, an image, a sound, a stranger who appears and disappears suddenly, a phalanstery of the arts.
Is a visual manifesto possible?
The image, the works that appear before us in this exhibition, unfold at every step, in every space, in every instant, across multiple sensibilities. The viewer has the floor.
In the land of lost emotions, each inhabitant draws their own map, unique, multiform, and ever-changing.
Marina De Caro.
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Marina De Caro, an Education Through Uncertainty
Interview conducted by Marie Maertens.
What will your next exhibition at Ruth Benzacar Gallery of Art be about?
It is a project developed around the relationships between art and education, an attempt at a visual manifesto. This topic interests me greatly because, for me, art is a learning process in which one takes something and redistributes it. Different media, including oil on double-sided sewn paper or sculptures, will reflect the way my work and my thinking are formed. Several years ago, I carried out experiences around other possible schools, in reference to the anarchist picnics that were in vogue between the 19th and 20th centuries, which revolved around the idea of the Modern School. “School” is a word I do not like, but learning is a place of micropolitical experimentation that I am indeed interested in. So I ask myself: What is a school? To which other words does it refer?… My schools are utopian, without reason, accidental, of lost emotions, phalansteries for the arts… These works combine my writing projects with my approach to art, which consists of encounters among diverse identities, materials, images, works, and also spectators. I question that empty space where exchanges and experiences occur between everyone.
You also introduce yourself in your writings as an artist and an art historian. How is that significant?
My work considers physical and haptic experience before the conceptual analysis of what I have produced. I begin with intuitions or ideas and then seek to materialize them visually. Part of my work is to understand why I choose one image and not another, then I leave interpretation open so the viewer can find the connections between the various elements.
Could you also speak about the work of the Argentine women artists who preceded you? I am thinking in particular of Eileen Agar, for the surrealist aspect we can find in her drawings, or Marta Minujín, for happenings or the multiplication of the art object…
Yes, this is important to me, especially because in Argentina the tradition persists of not dialoguing with our own genealogy, but rather with foreign visual artists. I admire Marta Minujín a great deal, as well as Raquel Forner, Delia Cancela, Lidy Prati, and contemporary artists. Women are always a little off to the side, which gives them a larger space of freedom to develop their own language. These paths are silent, but they allow for greater provocation. I am part of a group of artists called The Desperate for Rhythm (Ana Gallardo, Marcela Astorga, Cristina Schiavi, Mónica Millán, Adriana Bustos, and Elba Bairon) with whom we have composed songs in homage to women visual artists. I also work with a feminist collective of art workers called Nosotras Proponemos. However, I do not like classical activism and I defend poetry as the least hegemonic space; it is where one can exist outside the norm. And I like that very much!
You speak of music, but you also do performance, sculpture, and sewing, as well as drawing and painting. How do you experiment with or prioritize these different media?
My first approach to art was through dance, because as a child I wanted to be a dancer, and I continue practicing. Currently, I work by taking the body as a place of knowledge; I develop blind exercises in which conceptualization comes after the exercise and haptic experience. In my studio, I work by formulating hypotheses, and it is the work with the piece that allows me to answer my questions.
I really enjoy crafts, which I do not always know well. So I am trying to master them, to learn how to use them. Each work has its technical needs that I listen to and propose simultaneously. Technique is a place of reflection where metaphor appears; the gestures are the meaning. During the pandemic, for example, I wanted to create sculptures and, since I could not gather a team around me, they ended up being made with a very simple technique, possible to construct in a small space. They are made of wire, with which I build spaces or create voids. Drawing is a place of reflection, where I collect ideas. It is a writing and a representation of the energies of my body. I try to approach emotions differently through drawing, very slowly, with or without prior ideas…
You are preparing your second opera for the FRAC Franche-Comté, which will be presented there in 2023. How does this integrate into your broader trajectory?
I participate in another group of poetic and transversal activism, Cromoactivismo (Guillermina Mongan, Victoria Mussoto, Daiana Rose, Mariela Scafati, and myself), with whom we reflect on colors, their poetics, and their political dimension. Outside of industrial coded norms, we name tones based on our individual, social, and political experiences. In 2018, for an exhibition at MUNTREF, I wanted to make anarchist immigration in Argentina visible by researching its main agitators and their texts, which resulted in a color chart reconstructing their main affective characteristics: Bolten Red, Direct Action Blue, Plural Emancipation Green, Collective Power Black.
To continue the research, I was invited to the FRAC Franche-Comté. The city of Besançon, where the institution is located, is the birthplace of Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, precursors of anarchism and utopian socialism. Since then, I have continued working and writing the texts for the opera I will present in 2023, based on bibliographic citations from anarchist women. I like observing when poetry converges with history, because that creates utopias.
