OPEN Buenos Aires | Activities
Workshops, talks and demos by artists

Between August 5th and 7th, 2022, we held the OPEN Buenos Aires: an international meeting of emerging graphics at the Casa de la Cultura—La Prensa Building in the City of Buenos Aires. Throughout its 3 days of opening to the public, the selected artists shared with the public not only their works in traditional and contemporary graphic and printmaking techniques, but they also offered workshops, demos, participatory practices and open talks.

OPEN Buenos Aires is a professionalization event for emerging artists and for the dissemination of graphic and printmaking practices for the local public, whether specialized in these fields or without previous knowledge in graphics in particular or contemporary art in general. As part of the application to the OPEN, it was the artists themselves who proposed different instances of exchange with the visitors of the event, bringing them closer to their techniques, their projects, their portfolios and their working methods.

The activities that the visitors of the event enjoyed are:

• Guided tour by Andrea Auzmendi (CABA).
• Pinhole camera demonstration by María Romero Alves (CABA).
• Approach to contemporary printmaking through the work of the selected artists, by Florencia REISZ (Mar del Plata).
• Fortune telling by Lautaro Parada (CABA): ask a question and the Black Mallet answers, and take your card as a gift at the end. Poetically appealing to the origins of xylography in the West – used to print playing cards and Tarot cards – the artist offered us a personal experience through his xylographic work Mazo Negro.
• Participatory workshop on perennial monotypes por Noelia Toscano (CABA), Wenceslao Paunero (Pcia. de Buenos Aires) y Rocío Barzola (Salta): taller de fabricación de tintas con tierra e impresión botánica con la técnica de monotipos.
• Demonstration on contemporary Gyotaku by Agustina Girardi (La Plata), Jorgelina Buchara (CABA) and Leticia Barbeito (La Plata): Gyotaku is a traditional Japanese method of naturally recording the best catch of the day. Inspired by his processes, this workshop proposed to discover the potential of the things that surround us as possible printable matrices to generate their own discourse from the imprint that they leave printed on paper—the public was invited to bring their everyday objects to print on them and take them with them.
• Intervened photography by Solange Baqués (Pcia. de Buenos Aires): the artist exchanged with the public her work process and photographic intervention on paper.
• Infinite patterns workshop by Mariana Gayoso (CABA) and Ale Giorgga (CABA): this workshop approached the notions of contemporary art through graphic experimentation to the public. From the superposition of various materials, textures and graphic qualities, the importance of repetition and fragmentation is recognized, knowing and internalizing what a pattern is and how it is created graphically and continuously (notion of rapport, stamp, impression and stamp).
• “Processing the digital weaving” talk by Julián Pesce (CABA) and Juan Pablo Ferlat (CABA): memory storage to create repeating patterns, physical and temporary units.
• Participatory workshop “Building a xilomural” by Agustín Begueri (Córdoba) and Ale Giorgga (CABA).