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Mariela Scafati

Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Mariela Scafati

Born 1973 in Buenos Aires, AR – lives and works in Buenos Aires

A painter, printmaker, and queer activist, Mariela Scafati challenges the formal conventions of modernism in her three-dimensional objects and installations, while imagining transformative utopian scenarios that evoke collectivity and solidarity. Scafati creates a kind of intersectional feminism of forms, migrating between diverse artistic disciplines and media. Her sculptural scenarios are made of panels of monochrome paintings—anthropomorphic shapes modeled after people close to the artist. They are resilient compositions adaptable to different choreographies.

Since it was first conceived, her new piece, Movilización [Mobilization, 2020], has undergone a process of transformation that reflects the global pandemic which brought daily life in so many countries to a grinding halt, as well as the protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Meanwhile, in her own country, far-right demonstrators took to the streets to protest lockdown measures; until then, popular dissent in Argentine cities had been more typically associated with feminist groups protesting patriarchal violence against women. A painterly composition originally consisting of upright bodies preparing to engage in some sort of demonstration, the piece now comprises sixty-five prostrate bodies in a state of attentive horizontality. Their stillness pays homage to those unable to rise up on their own but also acknowledges the political potential of fragility as an “oblique form of imagining a [better] tomorrow,” in the words of art historian Nicolás Cuello, who collaborated with Scafati by contributing a poetic text that forms part of the installation. Movilización thus embraces the choreography of the pandemic moment with its temporary suspension of social life to reflect upon the future forms that collective political and social action may take.

Övül Ö. Durmusoglu

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