Author Archives: morri597

SCHOLAR’S GARDEN

Gardens are sites of nourishment. They equally serve the mind and body, cultivating cultural values alongside an appreciation for the natural world. While their purposes have evolved over time, gardens are often designed to embody the belief systems and values of the societies that create them. Thus, gardens are complex microcosms offering opportunities for intellectual […]

Elemento de rescate: piernas (Rescue Element: Legs)

Carlos Leppe identifies the body, fragmented and bruised, as the receptor of violent social wounds inflicted by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. These works were shown in an exhibition entitled Reconstruccion de escena (Reconstruction of a Scene), which also included works based on photographs of him posing in uncomfortable positions that suggest acts of violence. […]

Lleno de Sonrisas serias

Dalila Puzzovio emerged as a young artist in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s, before Jual Carlos Ongania’s repressive military regime (1966-70). The plaster casts were given to her by a friend who worked at a hospital. Each cast holds a story of a fracture that is unknown to the viewer, yet offers a precise […]

Anteproyecto de espacio represivo

Trained as an architect, Horacio Zabala examines the physical structures –particularly prisons and jails — that serve authoritarian systems. Espacio represivo recontextualized the punitive space of the prison inside the gallery. The architectural model, preliminary drawing. And photograph on view describe the original installation, which was constructed to human scale at the Centro de Arte […]

Habito/Habitante (Habit/Inhabitant)

Against the cultural and political framework of the dictatorship in Brazil (1964-85), women artists, oppressed by both patriarchal society and military power, produced experimental artworks that radically changed how the body was represented. Martha Araujo began creating what she called “performatic objects” during the country’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. These wearable textile pieces […]

The Edge of Things: Dissident Art under Repressive Regimes

What is art for? Can it have a political function by making visible what has been erased or disappeared? During a time of violence and political repression, artists from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile questioned their role in society and the purpose of art itself. Expressing resistance to coercive military dictatorships, they navigated fluid lines between […]

Considero mi cuerpo (I Consider My Body)

In a climate of social and political repression, where bodies of citizens were targets of state violence, the body of the artist became a political arena that reflected the wounds of a society in crisis. The text in spanish reads as follows: “I consider my body (the body of the artist), as receptor and sender […]