RESILIENCE THINGS:
Presentation, Open Studio and Discussion

After a full month of writing, art-making, networking and thinking together, SAVVY Contemporary’s artists-in-residence Alejandra Mizrahi and Agustín González Goytía will present their art project Resilience things.

The backbone of SAVVY Contemporary’s residency programme is the question of how arts and culture can be thought of beyond geographical and national constraints, and how conventional discourses, perception frames and reception modes of the Western art canon can be reconsidered and redefined. Our residents are encouraged to interact with and relate to local artistic and cultural productions, as well as Berlin’s socio-political, economic and cultural realities, and relay these to their own practices.

On Resilience Things

People from Tucumán say “somebody has died” but never “somebody died”. Death and any random actions, is always a process and never a state. In this North-Western province of Argentina, people abuse in their daily lives of the present perfect tense and rarely employ simple past. Here time is not seen as a linear sequence of actions but as a constantly growing multi-layered complex of entangled temporal loops.

In the same way they speak, Alejandra and Agustín work with tangible images and objects as well with surroundings and abstract atmospheres, mixing times, making the past appearing in the present. Their works propose an anachronical meeting of elements, emulating the process of remembrance. Ernest Cassirer [1] said that imagination is a very important part of this effort to reconstruct the past. Bread basket, El Bajo, memory, rolling pin, Berlin victory column, remember, drawing, memorials, sanguche de milanga, wallpapers, monuments, Randa: resilience things that appear in their works as flashbacks.

Alejandra “I feel a great curiosity for things that don’t find a place in the contemporary life. I think about them as if they have lost their worlds: old carpets, forgotten weave techniques, tablecloths, curtains, wallpapers. All these elements have become ruins. Some materials account for what they were, why they existed, where they came from, how they were placed, and if they cannot tell us this kind of things, we can speculate about their beginnings, uses or destinies.”

Agustin “I am interested in the way painting gets thinner upon raw fabric, how it has been absorbed by the support, dyed more than painted. Forms getting thinner, like a memory vanishes, disappears and emerges from the haze, this is the way in which the painting appears. I work with local images as a reference and some pictures that belong to other cities. I translate all this material to the painting, composing an architectural pastiche style, emulating the way in which they were put together into my country.”

Alejandra and Agustin will present their resulting work from this one-month residency as well their more general personal aesthetics and artistic practices that propose a “virtual coexistence” of “old and new presents”[2]. Alejandra Mizrahi and Agustín González Goytía are born, live and work in Tucumán, Argentina. They are highly active within the art and cultural landscape of Argentina. Together with other artists they run Rusia Galería, an independent contemporary art gallery in San Miguel de Tucumán. The event will include a open studio visit, a talk and a discussion.

1

Ernest Cassirer. Essay on Man, 1944.

2

Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, 1991