On December 19th, 2018 we kissed the year goodbye together with the artists from the last period, who presented their projects in an Open Studio together with invited artists. The participants were:

IAN BALLANTYNE (USA)
Polo

ALEKSANDRA ILKIEWICZ & PRZEMEK HOFFER (Poland)
Shadows of the City

CARLOS DORIA (Argentina/USA)
Underwater

GUILLERMO MENA (Córdoba, Argentina)
Redundant and Irrecoverable Landscape

ANDRÉZ MARTÍNEZ (Uruguay/Argentina)
Crossing the Line

In Search for the Andes: Ambiguous Loss and the disappearance of the Mnemonic Landscape

In Search for the Andes is born from the need to go deep in the experience of immigration beside the politics, economics, and social aspects. What is the experience of losing memories and losing also the referents that allow you to connect with the loss? 
A disembodied loss that disjoints your identity and what you knew to be familiar and stable?

THE PROJECT 

This is a project that explores the experience of instability brought by the lack of referent to recall identity. I have been recording interviews with South American immigrants to the US and people that had been relocated due to industrial developments or contamination. The core of these conversations are the vivid attempts to bring back what is lost in memory and the missing pieces that build a complete sense of self. Today, Guillermo Mena and I work, from this failed attempt to retrieve memories, to create inside the exhibition space a new place that resists consumption and points to the emptying of memory. We are working from the exhausting experience of relocation and displacement.

Guillermo Mena and I are working with and from drawing, a language that is familiar to both but made foreign through collaboration. We are using copper to create each mark, pointing to the origin and history of the material in the Andes region, its many economic and political transitions in ownership, its history in relation to urban development and displacement, and the characteristics of the its mark. Copper sits on top of the surface rescuing all its accidents highlighting the memory and history of the walls that now host it. The drawing takes over the gallery space tilting it and pointing to the instability generated by the disruption of memory. The time-consuming process of the metal point refers back to the laboured landscapes of this industrial sites and its complex history. The audio of the exhibition is an accumulation of testimonies, audio of the Andes, and recordings of the making of the piece, a different but reciprocal type of mark in the space.

Familiarity and displacement are the tension that lies at the foundation of this project.
Javier Bustos comes into the project bringing his expertise as musician and sound artist, manipulating audio files and creating new ones. It is in the midst of a creative dialogue that we all attempt to give body to the experience of Mnemonic loss.

Three distinct and unfamiliar voices attempting to create just one sound to represent home.

The World IS a Handkerchief : El mundo es un pañuelo
A Wandering Genealogy curated by Claudia DeMonte & Cecilia Mandrile
The World IN a Handkerchief : El mundo en un pañuelo
Guest Curator, genealogy Proyecto’ace: Alicia Candiani
Exhibition of pieces
selected from the Fundación´ace´s collection and Alicia Candiani’s personal collection of the participating artists in “The world IN a handkerchief”

For a month and a half, the Políglota Room is hosting three exhibitions on a rotating basis. From March 23 to April 1, “The world IS a handkerchief” and “The world IN a handkerchief: the genealogy of ´ace” were exhibited simultaneously, paying special tribute to the Argentine artist Graciela Sacco. While the original  series returned to New York from where it will soon travel to England, the ‘ace genealogy collection was joined by a new exhibition of  large format pieces of the participating artists, some belonging to the Fundación’ace collection and others to the private collection of Alicia Candiani.

The World IS a Handkerchief is a travelling exhibition rooted in the Spanish saying ‘el mundo es un pañuelo,’ which translates into English as ‘this is such a small world’. The project traces serendipitous encounters, moments of discovering personal connections in distant places or unexpected contexts. The project began with the meeting of Claudia DeMonte and Cecilia Mandrile as a mentor and student respectively at the University of Maryland, United States in 1995 and has expanded through an international collaborative network between mentors, students and
peers.

The World IN a Handkerchief is a new chapter of the project, a graphic, soft and traveling portfolio curated by guests artists from the core genealogy. Artist and curator Alicia Candiani, essential mentor of this genealogy, Founder and Director of Proyecto´ace, has been invited to curate this new collection that reflects her close creative family.

ABOUT THE WORLD IN A HANDKERCHIEF  by  Cecilia Mandrile

Handkerchiefs have accompanied people in celebrations and farewells in many cultures for centuries, offered bodily protection and coverage, and sustained expressions of political tenets and spiritual beliefs. In this project, handkerchiefs become vessels of memories and itinerant narratives; containers of emotions; translators of wounds, signals of ideological resistance. Each piece epitomizes a soft space that holds disappearing recollections of homeland as well as reflections on displacement and identity that can be carried as a tangible memento. In times when touch appears as a dangerous sense, every single printed handkerchief means a meaningful testament of the continuous nurturing mentorship among artists and educators, reminding us that the soft touch remains both an intimate and universal need of communication.

To celebrate this constant and sustained creative dialogue, in 2019 the curators developed a portable exhibition of 50 handkerchiefs that explored the meaning of belonging and interconnectedness that this Spanish saying so tangibly evokes. In the reconstruction of this alternative family made up of artists and collectives from different latitudes and generations during the last two decades, both printed an edition of 25 handkerchiefs, and sent a printed handkerchief along with a blank handkerchief to 50 invited artists to intervene with their own reflections
on home, identity and belonging. From this exchange a “wandering genealogy” was born, a tribute to the strong threads that have woven this shared territory as itinerant artists and educators.

A limited edition catalogue including the work of 50 invited artists was published by Impact Press, Bristol, UK and includes an essay by Gill Saunders, Senior Curator of Prints, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Currently, the catalogs of workshops and portfolios remain as digital publications, thus allowing to document the constant growth of this genealogy. Chris Knollmeyer, a sound artist in residence at ´ace at the same time, composed for this exhibition a special piece: “Sound of the Handkerchiefs”. The piece is a piano study made up of 25 melodies. Just as the handkerchiefs are tied to each artist’s history and sense of home, Chris feels a connection to the piano.