Project 43
Bayos Negros Dormidos - Agustina Fioretti
Curated by Jesu Antuña
April 4th - May 2nd, opening on Friday, April 4th from 19h
To coincide with this year’s Sant Jordi celebrations, Agustina will hold an informal talk about her various books and publications. All welcome, join us at Tangent Projects gallery on April 23rd from 19h
For several years now, Agustina Fioretti has been creating strange objects and images that resist recognition and taxonomic classification. This is not only due to the materials she uses—horsehair and bird feathers—which imbue her works with ambiguous traces of animality, but also because of her reuse of elements from the world of construction. Fioretti displaces things from their original context, generating a shift that allows her to produce new machinic-animal assemblages: neither horses nor birds, yet both at once. The cyborg emerges from the fusion of the technical and the animal, from the life of objects. What futures might arise from nests built with horsehair? What promises of monstrosity are announced in these futures?
In the debates that followed the Darwinian revolution, one of the major questions was how new forms of life emerged, whether gradually or surreptitiously. How do new specimens arise from others that, in some cases, bear little resemblance to them? Of course, this question had been developing for centuries. The emergence of life in environments seemingly inhospitable to it, along with the lack of knowledge about how certain species reproduced, made the theory of spontaneous generation a deeply ingrained model in common understanding for explaining the origins of life.
Once that idea was discarded, over a century ago, the Dutch botanist and geneticist Hugo De Vries formulated a response to the post-Darwinian question of how life transforms: “Species do not transform gradually but remain unchanged generation after generation until, suddenly, new forms arise that differ clearly from their predecessors and remain henceforth as perfect, constant, well-defined, and pure as one would expect of a species.”
Following this thread, we can reflect on the objects and images gathered here, where animality, intersecting with a materiality characteristic of human craftsmanship, raises questions about technology as a means of generating new animal-nonhuman-machinic assemblages. Fioretti undertakes a forward-looking escape, creating beings that establish a new system of relations and complicate their taxonomic classification: living entities that promise novel forms of life.
Jesu Antuña
Agustina Fioretti is a visual artist based in Barcelona. With a background in Economics and Photography from the International Center of Photography in New York, her practice reflects on her own migration in dialogue with that of previous generations, questioning the boundaries between the human and the non-human, memory and materiality. Through work with archives—ranging from family to institutional ones—oral narratives, and rites of passage, her work addresses liminality as a space of transit and metamorphosis.
She employs various media such as installation, video, photography, text, and performance to deepen her research on these themes. She has been selected for the Vila Casas Foundation Sculpture Prize (2024) and Art Emergent Sabadell (2023). She has participated in Tandem Books at Chiquita Room and Lluerna Fundació Miró. She has also been a resident at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Proyecto PAC at Gachi Prieto, and Manglar Acéfala.
Jesu Antuña is a Doctoral fellow at the Institute for Critical Studies in Humanities (IECH), UNR-CONICET, Bachelor of Philosophy (UNR), and visual artist. He is co-editor of the Art section of Otra Parte magazine, where he writes regularly. Additionally, he has published articles in books and academic journals.
In 2021, he co-edited the book Community, Territory, and Future alongside Verónica Giordano and Eduardo Molinari. He is a member of the artistic collective Sociedad de amigos y benefactores de las artes de Cañada Rosquín, with whom he develops the Crespín Residency at the Federico Wildermuth Foundation nature reserve in the Province of Santa Fe. In 2019, he received a scholarship to participate in the Artist Program at Torcuato Di Tella University (2019-2020) and was awarded scholarships twice by the National Arts Fund.
His work has been exhibited individually and collectively in institutions such as CCK, Emilio Caraffa Museum, Macro Museum, Palacio Dionisi Museum, and the National House of the Bicentennial.