8.6.21 - 24.7.21

Reino Pretérito. Florencia Amirón

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The work of Florencia Almirón is a chorus of different voices that sound like echoes, from all the places where she was and also from those where she arrived through ideas, wishes, readings. The enormous amount of plastic resources is folded to give rise to an intimate, emotional and tactile relationship with the materials. As if that moment of his early youth, discovering art for the first time in a workshop at the School of Fine Arts, was still there to always receive it.

In this exhibition, Reino Pretérito, Almirón asks herself in different ways about the zero degree of the experience of the world, which is also that of art. These are works that build a universe that could be located both at the beginning and at the end. At times he turns his gaze from a dystopian future, which is already emerging in the present. He is an archaeologist who, in order to unravel the guarded secrets of a planet on the verge of extinction, collects fragments and subjects them to sensitive and precise observation operations.

Florence's artistic reflection bridges the gap to contemporary problems, without abandoning the language of the trade. A feminist ontology permeates the surfaces of objects that transcend dichotomies, articulating what could be presented as an opposition: the living and the inert, the liquid and the dry, the human-industrial-animal, bringing to the workshop the cyborg premise, which allows us to retrace the genres, in the first place, but immediately opens a question about the strict division of the definition of the categories, in all the registers. Armed with the best of theoretical feminism, art allows you to stop thinking just before the closed definition of things. Instead, point out the space between them, the doubt suspended just before the resolution. It's about, as Donna Haraway says, staying in trouble. That detention appears in the petrification of women whose gaze is blocked. In one case, due to the accumulation of waste materials that could be industrial or organic. The same happens with the metallic sculpture of the youngest, whose work goggles turned binoculars, completely opaque, contradict the desire to see further. Inspired by cyborg feminism, all works are about hybrids between machines and organisms, real creatures, but also fictional, mythological.

The primary gestures return to the problem of origin, but of an ontological rather than historical origin, which supports the question of the meaning of life. Florencia avoids opening judgment, eluding the temptation to solve the dilemma: is the bite the primitive gesture or, instead, is it the grasping instinct, to grasp, to squeeze the malleable matter with force as if grabbing onto something so as not to fall into the abyss? Perhaps the experience that this exhibition proposes is the unresolved, pendular movement, between on the one hand the fear of the other, the preparation against the imminent external aggression, and on the other, the always renewed desire for attachment to something or someone, the impulse to living together in this world and finding words to name it.

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Mariana Cerviño