Altar
Andrés Garavelli

Andrés Garavelli is an Argentinean artist born in Quilmes, Province of Buenos Aires. He is a professor in Visual Arts and is a member of several artist collectives, among them the group “La mutual art-gentina”, which carries out street actions together with Juan Carlos Romero, León Ferrari, Diana Dowek, Hilda Paz and Eduardo Medici, among others, and coordinated by Pelusa Borthwick.

Andrés was selected to participate in our Semillero 2023 programme, an opportunity thanks to which he was able to exhibit his work Altar, de la serie electrodomesticadxs in our studio. In the December ´aceNITE, we invited Andrés to install his piece in our Central Hall, sharing the opening with our artists in residence from Korea (present thanks to the agreement we have with ARKO-Arts Council Korea), Zerré (artist from Venezuela based in Argentina and beneficiary of a grant-awarded in the OPEN Buenos Aires 2023) and Greg Dzurita (North American artist in Residence Exploration).

ARTIST STATEMENT

According to Walter Benjamin’s Capitalism as Religion, commodity-producing capital fictitiously feeds on its own future. Capitalist religion, according to Benjamin’s thesis, lives on a permanent indebtedness, which cannot and must not be extinguished. Capitalism generates “objects of desire” with an expiry date, which need to be constantly updated. In response to this desire, credit is taken as an act of faith. Individuals and families who increasingly resort to credit (or debit) are analogically implicated in this continuous and pervasive act of faith in the future. In the work Altar, de la serie electrodomesticadxs, the icons of a possible religious altar are replaced by symbolic elements of a mercantile and digitalised society, as an ironic way of warning about certain cult practices in relation to the objects of enjoyment of contemporaneity, exalted as “religious idols”.