Carmen Díaz
Together Apart: #Nest

14.10.20 04.11.20

I am interested in recording the experience of meditation and expressing the sensitive relationships between languages and body sensations during this meditation practice. In my work with watercolor, graphite, inks, pencils, papers, assemblages, sculpture or video, I am interested in exploring the sign in chaos, chaos as the dissolution of contours, in a search for universal territories. I discover that the sign manifests itself in constant change and draws the universal language of the elements of nature.

CARMEN ABOUT TOGETHER APART: NEST

The experience at ´ace’s Nest was very enriching. In times of pandemic, an opportunity to carry out poetic exchanges with artists and their productions. In reflecting on my nests, I went back to the past, I came across works that coexist in my nest and I reissued them, like the screen in a time capsule that links other realities, my own and those of another.

In ´ace I meditated in unison, from the experience I reflected on the breath and the air, how the body perceives the element and the importance of contemplation. I am interested in the air element, in my body, and how in a synesthetic operation it becomes light that defines the forms of presence and absence. Thus, I investigated the materiality of the vegetable paper for its ethereal quality, I worked with light and shadow in an alternative to compose images that are Imagined Presences.

BIO
Carmen Ines Díaz
1974 | Vicente López, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lives in Colegiales, City of Buenos Aires

STUDIES
2020 | Postgraduate in Media and Technologies oriented to pictorial production, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Bs As, Argentina
2015 | Senior Professor of Visual Arts, Inst. Prof. Cons. Catholic Education, Bs As
2003 | Graduate Studies In Information Systems, System Analyst, Universidad Nacional de Luján, Bs As

EXHIBITIONS
2019 | Realidad Vibrada, Urban Space, City of Bs As, Argentina
2019 | Realidad Vibrada with Electroacoustic Video, Empty Set, LAB Centro Cultural, Recoleta, Bs As
2019 | Cartografías Existenciales, Emerging Artists. Canal a, Museo Quinquela Martín, Bs As
2019 | Cartografías Existenciales, Canal a. Artear S.A., City of Bs As
2018 | Viscosidades, Espacio Urbano, City of Bs As

Related Activities

Exhibitions, Together Apart

#2 | NEST: results
Artists in dialogue

09.12.20

During 2020, we carried out the first two sessions of Together Apart. The first session took as a conceptual and practical framework the REFUGE and the second, the NEST. Through those starting points, both of which refer to caring atmospheres and structures for coexistence, we were able to think and create in a wide variety of directions and layers. We reflected on our pandemic context, a situation for which we had to find ourselves in the virtual non-space, but also a situation thanks to which people from many different countries were able to work simultaneously. Assuming this complex situation, more than 20 participants per session created new pieces –some in exercise format–, took up projects that they had already worked on in the past or collectively set out to create new projects that will continue to develop beyond the scope of our meetings. This exhibition, virtual as well, reflects what the artists produced during this program.

CURATORIAL ESSAY
by Daniela Ruíz Moreno [Curator-in-residency]

Taking these refuge and nest issues also in their complexity, we asked ourselves questions that made each of the participants involve their personal experiences, memory, memories and experiences from each of their territories. We addressed questions that sought to keep us in constant movement; at times we went through very optimistic or pessimistic visions about the possibility or necessity of having a shelter or a nest, and at other times, we were able to articulate more complex visions, enduring in intermediate and liminal states. For both, we took as a theoretical structure of support and dialogue the thought of Félix Guattari presented in The Three Ecologies (1989). His ethical-political approach that highlights the molecular domains of sensitivity, intelligence and desire, as well as his articulation of the three ecological registers (environment, social relations and human subjectivity), helped us to expand our creations and thoughts in relation to shelter and nest.

During the second session –nest– the gaze towards natural structures was also very present. We watched and learned about different types of nests made by birds or protective structures for other animals. We thought of the house and the workshop as nests. The diversity in age and origin of the artists allowed a great richness of reflections on different states in relation to the nest. We spoke of nests from the past, nests that we are building in the present, nests that are no longer nests since they oppress or suffocate and of new nests that we imagine or wish to build in the future. Projects were presented that included the use of organic materials, creations with what was available in the workshop, project of shared files, new photographic views on everyday life, new views on the past and even reflections on language as a generator of identity as well as limiting structure. We went through different sensations in relation to the nests, some presented it as an impossible state to reach, others as a space full of melancholy and others, instead, as structures of freedom where we could explore the becoming of existence. Other works presented the feelings of paranoia that can arise when human nests or states of refuge are threatened and the feelings of discomfort when it feels like losing the intimate conditions of a nest.

Together Apart has functioned as a program that opened up possibilities for meeting and collaborative creation. It has made possible the creation of new rhythms and synchronies for a limited time but whose reverberations and echoes continue to affect in unexpected directions.

Related artists