Muestra 17
Pieles topográficas by Diana Cabeza & Analía Sirabonian

10/06/2017 - 11/08/2017

Monoambiente TRANS

Text curatorial by Martin Huberman

Exhibition #17 opens Monoambiente’s fifth season as a space for creation and outreach, but mostly for experimentation. Five years is about how long it takes, in Argentina, to finish professional school—and for me running Monoambiente has been a second course of study, an endless source of new knowledge and learning. I have had the “luck “ of working with some of the most amazing “professors” in the milieu.

If there is one thing I can single out in these five years of research, it is the importance of encounters with others as engine of creativity. Monoambiente’s point of departure was a single rule, one arbitrary and undoubtedly jarring: the venue should be used for joint projects. We have never housed solo shows, but fostered shared constructions—sometimes independent and sometimes symbiotic—that were able to forge a model that goes beyond the idea of a work in the tradition of the discipline.

On its fifth anniversary, the gallery’s annual curatorial work focuses on this aspect of the venue as meeting point. Its title is TRANS, the prefix that refers to the idea of connecting parameters while also redefining them in a vague field. It is encounter—with a person, an idea, or the space itself—that allows one to transcend, to cease to be oneself and become part of an undefined whole.

Topographic skins, the intervention designed by Diana Cabeza and Analía Sirabonian for Exhibition #17, is a clear example of the trans-disciplinary and trans-generational—and even transformative (to take the prefix to an extreme)—mission of space as engine of encounter with the other and of redefinition of the self. In its very conception, their intervention proposes an intrinsic relationship between object and user through the amalgam of skins. It is a sort of orgiastic celebration where space and user come together as one in a human-material topography. The intervention celebrates human nature and its drive to make in order to make contact and, therefore, to be.

Exploring territory as a topography of uses and as a space of encounter

Project memory by Diana Cabeza & Analía Sirabonian

The idea of the intervention is to generate, on the basis of a topography, a lived group encounter experience. The piece is determined by the conditions of its mutating dimension and the variable nature of the textile surfaces and membranes that cover it.

The topographic territory created can, at times, house bodies, cover them like a blanket, or make them part of it by taking them in under its translucent membranes. It acts like a chyrsalis where bodies become invisible and form part of the whole, losing identity…

“Useful topography, support with variable uses, ergonomic territories with open, chance uses, supports of individual or community encounters, open-matrix geography where each grove makes way for latent uses waiting to be awakened.”

“Experience between skins: fluffy skins and heavy skins, mobile and elastic skins, digital skins, human skins, and textile skins, some of them rugged and others soft or fragile …”

The authors of the project are two designers who have been working with the body, skin, and topography from the perspective of different disciplines that, here, converge to explore a common terrain.

Communication

Flyers by Ariel Di Lisio

Exhibition 17 opening event

B Side

Montajes [Production and installation of the exhibition] is a series of videos on the processes of constructing the space; it tracks the efforts made in the production of the pieces that have intervened in the Monoambiente gallery space.

Direction: Esteban Radice