Self Portrait
Artists in Dialogue

Isabel Martínez de Hoz, together with Paz Crotto and Monserrat (Monsy) Delgado, is one of the three artists from Buenos Aires who were selected from the inQubarte call and invited to hold an exhibition of their works in the context of this program . Although each of them presents an individual work, we were interested in bringing them together because their proposals have a very strong self-referential content, dialoguing in the narration of three stories with personal connotations. On this occasion, Isabel presents a work that, based on a complex family condition, intends to retrace the path that resulted in separation and seek union.

ARTIST’S CONCEPTUAL MEMORY
“The brothers be united because that is the first law. Have true union at any time that is because if they fight each other, the outsiders will devour them ”-JOSE HERNANDEZ, El gaucho Martín Fierro.

My family identity is the nature of this job. I started by cutting, piercing and breaking old books that belonged to my paternal family. My dad is the ninth of eleven siblings and I have 32 cousins. We all share a house that used to belong to my grandfather. In Comalal spend the best summers with the family, between games, laughter, tears and expeditions. But there were differences, needs, interests, stories from the past that caused the family to separate. Turning summers into shifts, brothers into enemies, conversations into complaints, and meetings into legal dates.
This process began as a catharsis of the anguish that it caused me to see the family separate. Show them the importance of a true marriage, at any time. Considering the house as a symbol of union and family. Using paper as a support. In the first instance I worked transferring images of the house on old papers, forming a collage. I broke that integrity into parts, each of those parts formed a ring. Eleven rings belonging to eleven siblings. An almost ridiculous metaphor for dividing an inheritance. In a second instance, I worked with the document letter and what it means. I wrote down words that caught my attention and made eleven sentences. Eleven phrases that express the feelings of eleven siblings.

A house, a collage, a letter, a dynamited family.