READ MY LIPS

Irina Kirchuk, Tomás Maglione, Gian Paolo Minelli, Alejandra Seeber, Pablo Siquier, Anna Kazumi Stahl

Artists give voice to La Boca, a traditional part of the city of Buenos Aires. What do they have to say? What does it mean to have a say?

READ MY LIPS presents bodies of work that redefine the city, specifically the district of La Boca, as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry. These artists reveal unexpected relationships and affinities, engaging new ideas on domesticity, history and memory, art and architecture, globalization, marginality and sustainable development.

READ MY LIPS offers a view of the rich landscape of La Boca that defies the district’s best known traditions and reveals hidden aspects of the neighborhood and its surrounding areas. This exhibition is located within a particular cultural moment, when La Boca is undergoing significant urban changes.

The Riachuelo river basin has been, ever since the foundation of the city, its natural harbor. As proper for a center of trade, the basin fostered warehouses, meat-curing plants, and tanneries. La Boca emerged as a working class neighborhood of European immigrants who lived in conventillos, crowded tenement housing. By the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, La Boca became the first demographic and industrial ring surrounding the city’s historic limits.

This economic and social heritage is the focus of this exhibition, which aims to reconceptualize the historic and material features of the neighborhood, including the social networks of the past workers and the area’s unique architecture. We trace the formation of economic inequities and the struggle against social exclusion in La Boca’s history, and are motivated not to abandon the population in an area of vulnerability. For all of this, the artists participating in the exhibition creatively anticipate a possible future without denying the past.

Fittingly, the exhibition takes place in the “Usina del Arte,” a monumental industrial facility that produced energy for the city of Buenos Aires during most of the 20th century. This “palace of light” marked a milestone in La Boca by virtue of its large scale and its reminiscence with the Florence’s palazzos. The building has been recently remodeled and refurbished into a kunsthalle. New artworks by Irina Kirchuk, Tomás Maglione, Gian Paolo Minelli, Alejandra Seeber, Pablo Siquier and texts by Anna Kazumi Stahl were created especially for this exhibition, which was curated by Florencia Malbrán with Paula Carrella.

We consider the artist as an experimental being, a researcher, someone who does not accept the conditions given but proposes alternatives and fissures and connections. Artists are beings who, opening new possibilities of meaning, invite us to transform the “I” into “us.” We believe, consequently, that the artist’s eyes on the city are fundamental and that their works provide new ways of seeing the future.
 

This exhibition is made possible by the support of the Council of Cultural Promotion of the City of Buenos Aires.

Major support was provided by Fundación Tres Pinos, New York University Buenos Aires and the Critical Collaboration Working Group, a project of NYU’s Department of Art & Public Policy with support from the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research and the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study.

Additional assistance was provided by the Swiss Embassy in Argentina, Centro Munar, Sofía Willemoës, 361 Argentina, and Santiago Luzuriaga.