In Santa Cruz River and No Longer Creek, you have represented the natural world that is disappearing in Argentina. What do you pay the most attention to when representing the original landscape of Argentina through your works?I live in a country where the norm is we exploit our natural resources, agriculture and farming, mining, our government sees in the use of land a means to make our country big again. Argentina was el granero del mundo (“the barn of the world”). This point of view is installed. Working with the land took me to connect with the aboriginal communities of the Tehuelche and Mapuche, these communities have always had a different relationship with the land, they take care of it, they actually have a relationship. Ironically they are portrayed as terrorists, since they are against the exploitation of nature.
A carpet is a testimony, textiles have told us about the way humanity used to live. If a river is about to disappear, it is imminent its destruction. I am drawn to make a carpet that reproduces it. And offer it to be experienced, the damming of the Santa Cruz River, the last free flowing river of Patagonia, the feeling that this act of corruption and destruction produces in me, my task is to preserve a slice of it. That work is a document of that fraction that no longer will be. But the weaving of it turns into a prayer, a mantra that is constantly being repeated each time the stitches navigate the river.
I spent ten years depicting fading lands and ecocides mainly from Argentina. I created hundreds of works that represented the pampas pastizales, an ecosystem that disappears as transgenic farming goes forward. I have gone deeper into specific ecocides like the two hydroelectric dams that are being constructed in Patagonia, which will kill a river cutting its free flow and violating all regulations.
What always comes up in the projects I work in Argentina, is that there is a sort of corrupt situation that mixed with politics makes use of the landscape as a good that belongs just to them. I am not intentionally looking for this, but this always is the case so I do pay attention to these political conflicts.