Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
GUIDO YANNITTO
1981, Mendoza, Argentina
ARTISTS
GUIDO YANNITTO
1981 Mendoza, Argentina
GUIDO YANNITTO
WORK
SOMETHING THAT ALWAYS ESCAPES
Something that always escapes
Something that always escapes is a series of collages that Guido Yannitto has been working on for four years. They are made with wool glued on canvas. The designs are made from the bars of the houses of the cities that he inhabits. The project began in Bogotá where the artist spent a year doing the Flora scholarship. The interest in the artisan and anonymous work of bars in the city was a starting point to think about these collages and link them with ceremonial masks from the Chocó region in Colombia and the Cholets, a type of Bolivian architecture typical of the Alto de La Paz zone in Bolivia. These combinations and hybridizations of both conceptual and formal resources result in these collages that recall aerial views of territories, as well as a type of system or imaginary concept maps.
BREALITO
Brealito
The tapestry arises from superstitions around a lagoon located in the Salteños valleys: the Brealito lagoon. Many things are said about this lagoon, one of them is that there was a submerged city, replicating the history of the city of Esteco (a city that was located near the city of Salta and that in the 16th century was destroyed by an earthquake and flooded). The geometric pattern used in the tapestry is the same as in a tapestry by Pajita García Bes, an artist from the 1960s from Salta, the tapestry is called "Mermaid of the Swamp". I was interested in this reference because in the Brealito lagoon it is also said that there are mermaids, so I took this pattern that represents water and with the weaver we worked on it from the concept of "Glitch" or error as a system failure, referring to the translation problems I have whenever I work with weavers, someone who technically translates a design that I propose, I am interested in these communication processes that produce a new and out-of-plan image.
The video is a more direct reference to the myth of the mermaid. The sound, the music and the images have a hypnotic character that ends with the last scene with a hive of wasps that for me refers to a tragic end of death.
HEMISPHERE
Hemisferio (Hemisphere Project)
Hemisphere is a project made in Antartica. It refers to a dialectical, geographical (North/South hemisphere), mental (right/left hemisphere) situation. With Antarctica being a radical environment that could be considered as a geographical shift, Hemisphere is presented as an undefined state where the body is located in an idea of territory and landscape and also in an undetermined state of mind.
Initially, my project consisted in research about the use of fresh water at the military bases. The fact that Antarctica is the largest fresh water reservoir in our planet was related to works I have been developing where water was conceived as an essential material. “Hacer agua” (making water) is an expression used by people who work at the bases to refer to the activity of producing the water to be consumed, because, despite the fact that it is the largest water reservoir, it is hard to obtain. I filmed this video, while the members of the base were performing this activity.
Initially, my project consisted in research about the use of fresh water at the military bases. The fact that Antarctica is the largest fresh water reservoir in our planet was related to works I have been developing where water is conceived as an essential material. “Hacer agua” (making water) is an expression used by people who work at the bases to refer to the activity of producing the water to be consumed, because, despite the fact that it is the largest water reservoir, it is hard to obtain. I filmed this video, while the members of the base were performing this activity.
“Avistaje” (sight, view) is an abstract drawing made from footprints while walking on the slope of a volcano where the directions of the lines are marked by mirrors left on the ground. They also work as spontaneous nodes of direction. The audio in this video is the live recording of the statics produced by the radio at the military base.
INSTALLATIONS
Through his artistic production Guido Yanitto explores how and why the very medium that spawned the digital’s historical advent, textiles, so aptly serves as the post-digital medium and message to unpick it. The similarities between textiles and digital technologies are uncannily pronounced. Parallels begin with their shared vocabulary: grid, network, web, thread. The genesis of digital terminology is the language of the loom. Thus, a return to this very apparatus, the loom as a symbol for textile craft, aids in grappling with the nature of an all-consuming digital existence, and digital technology comes full circle. The digital mirroring of textile methods that underpin the concept and structure of the internet is refracted back from the virtual realm by this artist who has grown up parallel to its inception.
Guido Yanitto, is now reclaiming textile practices to reinstate their own (humanly flawed) identities, relationships and connection to the world by subverting technological control through textile practices. Meaning is both inscribed and derived through the inherent tactile nature of textiles as they forefront a post-digital consciousness in contemporary art. Will hard tech be smooth enough to replace genuine touch and our tactile desire as creatures that need to come together for survival? It is here that this series counters what the digital realm has widely forfeited: touch and texture. It considers this turn to the digital, contemplating how textiles—marked by the touch of human error, laced with the scent of the human body, and inscribed with memories of the human experience—can usurp our techno-utopia one pierce of the sewing needle at a time.
GUIDO YANNITTO
EXHIBITIONS
10.10.19 - 23.11.19
Lagoons. Guido Yannitto
A strand of wool can tell the story of the world. Seriously. It could go through the vicissitudes of time like the bone thrown by a primate that lands in a spaceship, while playing That's how Zarathustra spoke by R. Strauss. Unlike the flight of the femur from 2001: A Space Odyssey ̶ which is dizzying ̶, the wool strand would float and have the gift of ubiquity. It would be in Bruges, Ghent, Manchester, the Andes and Damascus. In yarns, spinning wheels, factories; it would link the construction of roads by water and land; it would draw sacred cosmogony and dark workshops. It did as much to engender capitalism as to illuminate the forces that oppose it.
The exhibition Lagoons, by Guido Yannitto can be read as a fragmentary narrative of this strand that contains traffics between hemispheres, to rural and urban communities. Of course, in the middle there is an ocean and Guido travels through it like Mercury. His textile pieces travel the spectrum that goes from handicraft made in collaboration with weavers from Salta to execution by cyber-android machines, such as Brealito, the tapestry he made at the Textiel Museum in Tilburg.
The roads appear insistently in his work, for example in Search here, a video that records a moment of the journey between Buenos Aires and Salta, 1,282 kilometers of eternal tedium. Seams are drawn on the rickety road that look like snakes of tar crawling fast and nervous; on the margins is glimpsed the arid earth and at times some tufts of green weeds, not attractive to the contemplative gaze. Plain, soybean, desert.
Google Maps points to a town north of Santiago del Estero, called Ahí Veremos. Guido drew the name on a large map that mirrors the screen of his cell phone. It sounds like a place invented by Borges, where some cutler arrives to fight ̶ again ̶ with his sinister twin. He also has something from Bolaño, Ahí Veremos could be in the Sonoran desert or could be another name for Santa Teresa... We can see that at 2:58 p.m. he was running out of battery and the signal was low. Another drawing reveals that an hour and a half before, connectivity was better, and the road was straight. In Search here and in the drawings mentioned, the gaze is zenith; The same is true at Brealito, where mountainous formations and grooves etched into the earth are captured by a satellite camera orbiting the earth. Interfaces, passages between wool and lithium, desertion of the bucolic landscape or what would be equivalent to say that Lagoons is a constant collision of glitches.
Florencia Qualina
GUIDO YANNITTO
BIO
GUIDO YANNITTO (Mendoza, Argentina, 1981)
Guido Yannitto’s major interest is exploring popular cultures. He has been working with tapestries, exploring what they have to offer, and thinking about the sculptural aspects of this planimetric technique. He is also interested in what he sees as major characteristics within this representational system, aspects of communication and translation. Ideas like identity, dissolved identity, oral transmission,translation, genealogy, subjectivity and collective work are conceptual axes for his exchanges with weavers.
Yannitto has a Bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts in painting from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. From 2005 to 2007 he lived in Mexico City where he continued his artistic training in different workshops. Since 2007 he has been living in Buenos Aires where he attended art clinic seminars dictated by Fabián Burgos, Mónica Girón and Tulio de Sagastizabal, among others. In 2009 he was selected to participate in the Artists’ Program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.
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He featured his work in numerous solo exhibitions such as: Laguna (Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019); Algo que siempre se escapa (SB34, Brussels, Belgium, 2019); Zonda (Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015); Tics Modernos (Zavaleta Lab, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014) and Mientras (La Ribera, México City, México, 2006), among others.
Additionally, he participated in group exhibitions in various national and international institutions These are some of the most relevant: W139 (Amsterdam, Netherlands); Coral Gable Museum (Florida, United States); Museo de Arte Moderno (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Centro Cultural Kirchner (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Museo De Arte Contemporáneo (Bogota, Colombia); Museu da Moda e do Design. Coleção Francisco Capelo (Lisbon, Portugal).
In the last four years he was selected to carry out different international residencies such as: Kiosko Galería (Santa Cruz de las Sierras, Bolivia, 2020); Oxenford Scholarship (Oaxaca, México, 2019); RAVI Résidences Ateliers Vivegnis International (Liège, Belgium, 2019); Pivo Pesquisa (São Paulo, Brazil, 2018); Jan Van Eyck (Maastricht, Netherlands, 2017); Beca Roberts Escuela Flora (Bogotá, Colombia, 2016) and residencia Sur Polar (Antarctica, Argentina, 2012).
Regarding awards, in 2019 he received the first prize in the Bienal Fulgor in Rafaela (Santa Fe, Argentina) and in 2018 the first prize for the category Textile in the National Salon of Visual Arts (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Moreover in 2013 the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires granted him with the Lucio Fontana Award.
His work is part of renowned private collections and museums such as: Maastricht University (Maastricht, Netherlands); Banco ITAÚ (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Museo Castagnino+macro (Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina); Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Caraffa (Córdoba, Argentina) and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Salta, Argentina).