Segunda parte de la entrevista realizada por Shirley Rebuffo al artista argentino Alejandro Bovo Theiler.
Estructuramos la extensa narrativa y profusa producción de Alejandro en dos posts, el primero con texto en castellano y este segundo en inglés.
Second part of the interview conducted by Shirley Rebuffo with Argentine artist Alejandro Bovo Theiler.
We structure Alejandro's extensive narrative and profuse production in two posts, the first one with text in Spanish and this second one in English.
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Alejandro Bovo Theiler
(Bahía Blanca, Argentina, 1971-)
Alejandro Bovo Theiler, con / with "Mavelo". Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
Born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina on August 13, 1971. He is a plastic and visual artist with a degree in Sculpture from the National University of Córdoba (UNC). Since 1990 he develops and exhibits in solo and group exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects. He works in production, research, training and management in Art. His work is part of several collections around the world: Argentina, Portugal. France, England, Brazil, USA, Canada, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Holland, Chile, the CFI Collection (Federal Investment Council) and the Official Collection of the Province of Cordoba. He has also received several awards.
Since 2002 he has been a member of the Archaeological Collective "Friends of the Ambato Museum of La Falda", working as a scriptwriter and curator at the Museum.
"Bovo Theiler's work is undoubtedly located in this tradition of contemporary art, and thus manages to continue delving into the crisis of Western culture through the updating of totemic objects and scenarios of primitive impulses. The handmade reconstructs the question of the very existence of art to plant a memory of manual labor from materialities such as ceramics and textiles. Mineral quantities build archetypal forms that range from dolls assembled with wood, fabrics and ceramics, or totemic heads, to a Blanket-Garden that, stretched on a rope, hangs between childhood and old age, a map of the territory of memory between - children's buttons, grandmother's buttons, lovers' buttons? - and flower beds and fountains-mandalas that trace a geometry of evocation". Idangel Betancourt López
"Mavelo, escultura-objeto / object-sculpture
ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado / assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2018
Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
"Llamado / Call", tríptico / triptych, Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-dimensional Textiles Series
costura, ensamble y bordado sobre bastidores (cerámica, textil, madera) /
sewing, assemblage and embroidery on frames (ceramics, textile, wood), 82 x 129 cm., 2013
Foto / Photo: Jorge Ramacciotti
Interview by Shirley Rebuffo
Shirley Rebuffo: How did your path with art begin?
Alejandro Bovo Theiler: My path with art began in childhood. Like many paths, it did not begin in itself, but was born from other paths.
As far as I remember, as a child, I showed an expansive personality and also a concentrated, restrained one. There was in me an innate desire to capture and leave a mark with a permanent observation of all the details, which I commented and amazed my family. I was always one to look into the eyes and listen attentively to what adults were talking about. Those traits, I understand, were my first tools of expression.
Perhaps nothing out of the ordinary, but I keep the sensations and the memory of impulses later enhanced.
I received simple and clear stimuli with the accompaniment of my mother and father to experience the expressive, without further formatting. The environment of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and teachers in an art nursery when I was 3 and 4 years old was also receptive. I remember kindergarten with the challenges of nailing wood, assembling structures, cutting papers, simple and common actions that I also remember with the frustration that my self-demandingness produced in me, together with the pleasure of making and transforming. At that time I used to say that I was going to be a painter and a carpenter. Later, the sum of valuable sensitive and artistic references continued to stimulate my expressive longing.
Thus, from my childhood to my adolescence, I lived all these experiences as habilitations. That allowed me to put a seed in my future and I could naturally give myself a prospective of advancement to dream of doing what I liked. All this immersed in a childhood and adolescence that, at times, was painful and difficult. There were also some periods, a few, at times peaceful and beautiful, but crossed by other stormy instances. Since then art, or my desire for it, began to save me, I knew then what was good for me in such a complex context.
I also understand that my own drifting, until I was 18 years old, of family and community life in Monte Buey, a small town in the great Argentinean plains, nurtured a subsoil of intensities, trades, affections and experiences, which later would be the fertile ground for my imaginary of mourning and celebrations.
When children and adolescents are so open, so attentive and so innocent, how do we know which circumstances and events will connect us with our inner treasures and the symbolic capitals of our clan?
Definitely my artistic path began in that child I was, with his uniqueness, his great sensitivity, his vulnerability, his fears, his whims, his dreams, his tenderness.
"Vieja y Parca / Old Woman and Parcae", tapiz / tapestry
Serie Las Viejas / Old Women Series
costura y bordado sobre bastidor / sewing and embroidery on frame, 40 x 40 cm., 2015
Foto / Photo: Jorge Ramacciotti
"Irene (hija del mar, ballena invisible) / Irene (Daughter of the Sea, Invisible Whale)"
escultura-objeto / object-sculpture, ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado /
assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 190 x 110 x 50 cm., 2016
Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
SR: Tell us a little about the way you work, in what stages have you become the artist and professional that you are?
ABT: Recapitulating the cycles and moments of the "Artist", in order to observe which are the stages that account for his process, provokes me a certain vertigo, amazement and a lot of gratitude.
A succession of so many days through the years and decades, where life and work began to be an indissoluble weave, a consequence of the absolute certainty of becoming an artist, that is how I lived it without any other option. Burning the ships has high costs, but it is a huge boost to oneself. They are cycles that intertwine and overlap.
The stages that I can discern today are the following: the initiation games, training and study, vocation, trade, profession, authorial conscience, community life.
By my own temperament, but also by a policy of exercising my profession, I spent days, months and years experimenting for the primary impulse of doing, for the pleasure of building and expressing myself with different projects and challenges. There are milestones that allow me to identify how some stages open and close more than once; how they coexist simultaneously, even though I know that the journey has logical and irrevocable learning and overcoming.
I think that the first stage was the process that refers to play and that innate desire I referred to, surely favored by the games with my brother, a year older, and my sister, a year younger. In addition, my parents shared their artistic skills and aptitudes. My Mother with sewing to dress us and my Father dabbling with ceramics and inviting us to play with clay. It is and was, to this day, a magical and divine entity.
The vocation then was already activated and I knew that nothing would stop me. And, in favor of it, was the forced need to channel very difficult situations of emotional and emotional order.
My entrance to the UNC (National University of Córdoba) was then a definitive before and after. There I graduated with a degree in Sculpture. The academic and emotional journey meant an immense opening for my formation and conformation. I reaffirm in it, and for me, the indissoluble evolutionary and integrating principles of "life-work" and "person-artist".
There is much to tell about each stage and its implications in the consolidation of my imagery and the formal/poetic solutions and resolutions in my work up to the present. I had and have the tools acquired in my process of survival of those situations and traumas that I went through. In this way I learned to recognize my author, that inner ally that flows free. Free to be able to make and manifest the sensitive, the symbolic in the way that is within my reach.
I can affirm without hesitation that my art has evolved in relation to my personal maturation, resilience that in parallel generated bridges between the person and the artist. Professional growth happened to the extent that I managed to put myself within the reach of others, to make myself known to new audiences and to remain sensitive to all voices, beyond their approval, rejection or indifference.
"Mamá Serpiente (fuerte como el cielo que sabe esperar todo florecer) /
Snake Mom (strong as the sky that knows how to wait for everything to bloom)"
Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-Dimensional Textiles Series
tapiz políptico de 7 partes, costura y bordado sobre bastidor, telas y papel de pared intervenido /
7-part polyptych tapestry / sewing and embroidery on frame / fabrics and intervened wallpaper
Dimensiones / Size: Total: 55 x 910 cm., cada bastidor / each frame: 50 x 130 cm., 2017
Foto / Photo: Jorge Ramacciotti
"Nieves Gordita / Fatty Nieves", escultura-objeto (frente y trasera) / object-sculpture (front and back)
Serie Guerreros/as / Warriors Series
ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado / assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 160 x 45 x 35 cm., 2017
Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
SR: Do you think it is necessary to have a solid theoretical base in order to be able to deconstruct it later?
ABT: Paraphrasing the Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch, I think that the "cultural soil" is the base that sustains us. Basically because it gives us the possibility of living to inhabit the tension between nature and culture. Perhaps it is the foundational fact for an individual and collective conscience in the construction of any field of knowledge.
In the specific of the question I believe that, from the cultural, contextual and familiar baggage of our first stages as subjects, is that we can incorporate, digest and acquire information that transforms and increases our subjective and rational integrality. This is to say that, the formation that we carry out with the inclusion of theoretical and intellectual materials of all kinds (academic or not), provides us with powerful tools to advance along the way, separating us from our infinite and mysterious ignorance.
I perceive that when praxis and daily work, artistic or other occupation, coexist with any intellectual acquisition, they operate as coherent references for the person. This coexistence of knowledge is very valuable in any path of individuation.
In short, the operation of aggregating-disaggregating makes it possible for our base to decant and consolidate in availability.
"Dámaris y Calixta" (abrazadas / embraced)
ensamble y modelado madera-textil / assemblage and modelling wood-textile
cada una / each: 135 x 60 x 30 cm., 2018. Foto / Photo: Jorge Ramacciotti
"Dámaris y Calixta". (brazos cruzados / arms crossed). Foto / Photo: Jorge Ramacciotti
SR: What does it mean to you to enjoy what you do?
ABT: Enjoying my work means, in principle, to be able to be dedicated and to carry out processes and projects.
To enjoy this trade is to discover myself in the vital performance of the aforementioned framework of life and work; to stand in this mysterious commitment, to let go in that sea of compensations that is the day to day.
To enjoy is also to have learned to deactivate the self-critical look and to give way to the healthiest, most conscious emotions and adrenalines. At this point in my process I know that "the bitter and the sweet" implies everything, a popular saying with so much primordial wisdom.
At the beginning, my greatest obsession was to preserve and defend the space of play, sometimes lost or sometimes stolen, due to the contingencies of different personal, family and social moments.
Then, that achievement was put in tension with other aspects of adult reality and gradually multiplied. The important thing is how we value the journey and allow ourselves to learn with gratitude. I did not always see it that way, that is why I emphasize it.
I recognize myself in the enjoyment of small pressable moments, in seeing how a plan or a call unfolds. It excites me when I can see that those objectives I set myself are surpassed by what the experimentation gives back.
There are also the revelations, the result of the various interactions with people-spectators, with colleagues, with institutions and organizations that want or require my work or advice.
It is very curious the map that is configured from each experience in so many years, that is also the joy of the profession, of time. But I could not refer to the enjoyment in the work without contemplating the extraordinary function of displeasure, as the obstructions in the creative development. There would be no enjoyment without the moments of "dis-pleasure" such as the wonders that difficulties and unforeseen events can offer us. Paradoxes that fascinate me and to which I am very attentive.
"Vigilan / They Watch". Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-Dimensional Textiles Series
costura y bordado sobre bastidor / sewing and embroidery on frame, 40 x 60 cm., 2012
Foto / Photo: Nico Bucci
SR: "La Dicha" (The Joy), the name of your house-workshop, is a sublime appellative that says it all about full satisfaction and joy. Was it that circumstance that led you to choose it?
ABT: La Dicha, the name of my house-workshop in La Falda (Córdoba mountains, Argentina), is truly a powerful story.
On the street wall of the house is mounted a ceramic plate accompanied by blue glazed ceramics. In January 2016 I came across that ceramic in El Carmen de Viboral (Colombia) a small and beautiful Antioquian town, distant one hour from Medellin.
I understand that it was a real "Ouroboros", which was also the name of the exhibition I was doing at that time in the Art Gallery of the EPM Library in Medellin.
El Carmen de Viboral stands out for being a community where diverse and exquisite hand-painted ceramics are produced, attracting thousands of lovers of this art. In the pedestrian and other streets, for blocks and blocks, the facades of its houses and stores are full of bowls, fountains, plates and mosaics literally inlaid. It was already dusk and we were finishing our research tour, together with my colleague and friend Diego Ruiz Gómez. I then set out to review with great curiosity some second-hand pieces, with some flaws and there I found the plate with those two words: "La dicha".
Mandala de ingreso a "La dicha", casa-taller / Entrance mandala to "La Dicha", house-workshop
»As soon as I saw it, I observed its solar center. I knew at that moment that I had found with it something as important as the name I had long wanted to give to my house-workshop. A ceramic plate with a beautiful mandala with yellow and blue flowers surrounding the center of a luminous yellow with a small run of glaze that reveals the earthenware. I thought and reaffirmed then that any authentic joy is the one that manages to add the "flaws" to a real integrity and beauty. That which allows us to remove the outer layer, to learn and to know ourselves more deeply.
This story means a lot to me. It means to understand how to open ourselves to transcend the idea of perfection, to see and take charge of what we are. It allowed me to ratify in part that function of Art. A work touches the wound of living and it is through small and immense treasures that we can reinforce our connection with existence and the truths that sustain us.
"Albita", escultura-objeto / object-sculpture, ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado /
assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2012. Foto / Photo: Rodrigo Fierro
SR: What are the challenges involved in making such elaborate works?
ABT: In relation to the "baroque" and cumulative aesthetics that result from the constructive modes of my work, one of the biggest challenges, for me, is the procedural. That is to say that, being very involved with the work, there are moments in which it is urgent to give myself a fair perspective, to take distance. This implies always remaining in contact with the process, with its more routine aspects, and trying to open myself to the identity that emerges with each work.
It is always a presence different from any other that precedes it. Therefore, in a way, it is necessary to stalk what I naturalize and at times to unfold my gaze, attentive at the crossroads of the journey into the unknown.
And in contrast, the other challenge, no less, is to remain with the sufficient humility that can only guarantee a meaningful game. This implies always trusting in the GPS of my unconscious, in the innocence and ferocity of that deep agenda that crosses the personal and collective reality.
SR: Where are logic and experience separated from fantasy?
ABT: I understand that both logic and fantasy help us as mammalian-human animals to coexist with the enormous ignorance of that immeasurable whole that we inhabit and that also inhabits us. That whole/matrix that expresses a dual and antagonistic nature. In a good part of the contemporary paradigms of diverse disciplines, and also in artistic research-production, it is with the notion of tension that we can connect with duos such as "logic and fantasy" without polarizing ourselves. I find it sterile to try to separate opposites instead of tensing these connections in a fertile way. I understand that the antagonistic pairs of the arc of subjectivity and rationality are complementary elements and relative to what each socio-cultural context such as the biological one allows.
From my experience of therapeutic work, with the gestalt perspective, I sustain the exercise of discerning between fantasy and imagination. Fantasy, as I mentioned before, seems to me to be more of an intellectual control mechanism, as opposed to imagination, which I perceive as a gift we receive. An invitation to drink from a deep spring, a water that carries synchronicities and the great challenge of leaving the known, of trusting in the unthought.
"Goloso / Greedy", tapiz / tapestry
Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-dimensional Textiles Series
costura y bordado sobre bastidor / sewing and embroidery on frame, 40 x 60 cm., 2011
Foto / Photo: Nico Bucci
"Sra / Mrs. Nata" (frontal y trasera / front and back), escultura-objeto / object-sculpture
ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado /
assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2017. Foto / Photo: Rodrigo Fierro
SR: In your works, you have not only experimented with the two-dimensional, but also with the three-dimensional, sculpture with noble materials, but unconventional for that. Tell us about those materials.
ABT: From the beginning I have been inhabiting the plane, the volume and the space naturally. That was logically problematized from the academic instance. But, for some time now, plane, volume and space have been coexisting in my production in a virtuous dynamic. However, since I was a child I have had an instinctive propensity and specific ability with the volumetric, the objectual, the additive. To approach the volumetric was very stimulating for me. Already in the work with different materials and from the experiences of being able to deepen with them, is that I perceive all materiality from a perspective, not only physical, but also metaphysical. Experimenting with different materials has implied being able to recognize that all matter has its own voice and an internal will to take shape. Just as the maker works from the complexity of his own identity, it also allows that in the development of the work a conversation, not only technical but also spiritual, with all matter and substance can take place. In my works, matter is also the subject and content that give meaning to my art. It is not only a carrier or support of an alien or colonizing discourse from the artistic point of view. Hence the nobility that it gives to the realizing will and it is because of that complex and inhuman nature that the work is unprecedented and with a singular power.
The materials of my present are accessible materialities and also accompany me from early on: clay, wood-boards, branches, textiles, plaster, paper and cardboard. It is the way and the intensity with which I have linked myself to them that has implied a great resignification, their anthropological manifestation, since they are mostly everyday materials and at the same time part of an ancestral legacy. The rural origin of my family of Italian and Swiss immigrants (I am 3rd and 4th generation in Argentina) with centuries of rootedness to the peasant life in Europe and America. That is the specific historical context from which I emerge, with which I identify and claim, through these simple materials and the crafts that their use implies. It is a tension between continuity and rupture, since in experimentation there are tacit transfers linked to that immense history that precedes us. As an artist-author, I again rely on them to exercise an appropriation through other uses and discourses. It is with my own poetic practice that I manage to re-inhabit, through them, the shadows and lights of my clan. A new affective order is thus established to give free rein to my searches, problems, desires, decisions and dissidences.
"Error amado / Beloved Mistake"
Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-Dimensional Textiles Series
tapiz / tapestry, costura, bordado y ensamble de carozos /
sewing, embroidery and cob assemblage, 19 x 19 cm., 2014. Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
SR: Research and innovation. These are two words that identify your work. What can you tell us about them?
ABT: Research and innovation are aspects that are produced from certain synergies. There is no guarantee that the results will be satisfactory for the author, in my case, or for the audience that consumes the proposal.
Both researching and producing are linked to an erotic mood exacerbated by a playful predisposition. At least that's how it is for me.
My work processes consist of mostly unplanned and non-linear explorations. In fact, the ideas are usually not there before I set out to develop "that'' which calls me and for which I put myself into action. They are processes of simultaneity, which include materials, visual triggers, ideas, feelings, concepts, etc. It must be said that, more than once, the desire to innovate in the "field of art" works with the logics of advertising, and at the same time, in the name of research, connections are forced that do not reveal a real advance in relation to what is stated. Research and innovation are two words that, like others, can be pronounced without real support, "snobbishly". I make this clarification out of ethical principle and in the knowledge of these possible distortions that are often the basis of disloyalty, plagiarism and unconsulted "borrowing" without citation that result in damage to those who research and innovate with sufficient care and empathy. Perhaps making it explicit can stimulate new reflections in the knowledge of the impossibility of universalizing one's own experience.
"Nena Magallanes", escultura-objeto / object-sculpture
ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado / assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2009
Foto / Photo: Pedro Roth
"Dos esfinges y un chancho / Two Sphynx and a Pig"
Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-Dimensional Textiles Series
políptico de ocho partes, costura y bordado sobre bastidor /
eight-part polyptych, sewing and embroidery on frame, 40 x 40 cm., 2009
Foto / Photo: Rodrigo Fierro
SR: The polyptychs are real puzzles, what's behind all that fantasy?
ABT: The development of the image through very diverse fabrics, through sewing and embroidery, indifferently, is a very hypnotic task for me. It resembles a collage dynamic and entails a complex process that oscillates between the pictorial and the objectual. I came to work on the textile plane after experimenting it in abundance, applied to sculpture, artist's books and also objects such as costumes and blankets.
With this background, the way of working was marked by the linkage and cooperation of the obverse and reverse. Both in the operative way of producing, as well as in the compulsive and obsessive climate of expression. I did not want to lose sight of the threads or the stitches. I still keep that simultaneity and duality, but with the tapestries on canvas the experience moved to the tapestry where the movement of the needle is of a cardinality of 360 degrees. This way of doing it, with mastery and spatial control, allows the hand stitching to modulate not only the thickness, but also graduating the expansion of the wefts, according to each genre.
I also assimilated the assembling of some ceramic elements, corks, buttons, etc. That is why I work on quadrangular wooden frames with the base fabric fixed with tacks, in the traditional way, in order to be able to exert force on the plane.
The way the image is generated is very random and incidental. The fabrics and stitching are part of unexpected visual and tactile combinations. When I organize the tapestry as a polyptych it is not always premeditated. It often happens that an initial image in a frame asks for more space to unfold into a larger scene and this generates this new "puzzle".
Of course, behind each work there are particular stories linked to dreams, obsessions, memories and confessions. The construction of these pieces has a special narrative and polysemic stimulus. I understand that a certain simplicity that these images carry, enables and interconnects the mythical realm of the observer. Thus, a receptive sphere arises, which compensates for what is missing, or remains ajar, through the language and the close poetics that I propose with them.
"Vieja y Vieja / Old Woman and Old Woman"
"Nena Magallanes", escultura-objeto / object-sculpture
ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado / assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2009
Foto / Photo: Pedro Roth
"Savia Sofía" (cabeza despejada y cabeza cubierta / clear head and covered head)
escultura-objeto / object-sculpture, ensamble y modelado mediante costura y bordado /
assemblage and modelling, sewing and embroidery, 2009. Foto / Photo: Nico Bucci
SR: What place do you assign to the poetic dimension in what you do? Because I see that you work with nature, but with fun and suggestive titles, but when you give them a second reading there is a deep meaning behind them.
ABT: In my perspective, every construction of meaning has a poetic dimension. It flows simultaneously to all intrinsic operations, to every artistic manifestation and to every human expression. I understand that it is not only about intentionality or poetic desire but about the sensibility of coexisting with the lyrical presence of reality, with the commitment to inhabit and share that poetic dimension. It is definitive for the sensitive recognition of each element with which I work and for the linking plot from which I express myself. As the authorial work unfolds and with each of the formal resolutions, this baggage of poeticity is manifested. Each lyrical journey offers that "behind" with its layers of depth, common and transversal sensibility for whoever wants and can.
Like every artist I tell stories, not always because I propose to do so, sometimes the stories are juxtaposed to my searches or survive my inventions and I can only recognize them later. But I can also affirm that the stories and narratives are exercised by the works themselves and then the artist is also what is told, what is said, what is poetized. In no way could humor, the incidental, the banally random be excluded from these events; on the contrary, they are the agents of the precious reality of the instant that spills free.
"Papá Salmón / Salmon Daddy"
Serie Bidimensiones Textiles / Two-Dimensional Textiles Series
costura y bordado sobre bastidor / sewing and embroidery on frame, 160 x 110 cm., 2017
Foto / Photo: Ulises Barranco
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Vientos / Winds
Libro de artista / Artist's Book
ensamble textil mediante costura y bordado / textile assemblage, sewing and embroidery, 2019
Fotos / Photos: Pablo Maximiliano Ruiz Diaz
"... entonces el viento con voz honda y muy cercana dijo a sus amantes
- Como ustedes yo también soy un ser, siento mi cuerpo en el abrazo de la respiración de cada vida latiente.
Y sus amantes le respondieron
- Si!! Por ello nos sabemos siempre tus amandos, deseantes y moradores en el bolsillo planetario de tu corazón.
Y el viento con un sostenido susurro se despidió afirmando
- Vuestras bellas palabras no me las llevo porque para mi ustedes son el viento."
"...then the wind with a deep and very close voice said to its lovers /
- Like you I too am a being, I feel my body in the embrace of the breath of each pulsating life. /
And his lovers answered him /
- Yes! That is why we always know ourselves to be your lovers, desiring and dwelling in the planetary pocket of your heart. /
And the wind with a sustained whisper said good-bye, affirming /
- Your beautiful words I will not take them with me because for me you are the wind."
Portada / Front Cover
SR: Could you tell us something about your artist's books?
ABT: I have been making artists' books for twenty years now and it is one of my favorite tasks. The experience of making an artist's book is to enable a micro editing space to generate a convergence of sometimes fragmentary and disparate borderline-like elements. Specifically, I have developed and presented more than a dozen and I have many others in process. Some of them: Happiness, Temperance, Transmigrations, Viceversa, Palms, Welcomes and Winds. With those seven pieces I participated in seven editions (2013 to 2019) of the New York Artist Book Fair held at MOMA PS1 together with the Argentina section, curated by Pedro and Matías Roth. In addition, I have exhibited and worked with some of them in numerous cities in Argentina and the world: Medellin (Colombia), Madrid and Barcelona (Spain), Cochi (India), Rome, Pescara, San Pietro al Natisone (Italy).
I understand the artist's book as a discipline that allows me to work in infinite plastic-visual directions. To approach each edition is to connect to the experience of form, color, textures, etc. and to open up to other areas of knowledge in order to bring together very fragmentary elements, both foreign and biographical. From my experience it is an object of performative potential since, for its use, reading, experimentation and manipulation requires putting the body. I am moved by these scenes.
With artist's books I explore more intensely the material connection between the obverse and the reverse on the textile plane. It is the reversibility of the plane and the irreversibility of the woven, one of the most interesting aspects in its production through the textile assembly with sewing and embroidery.
For all that has been said and for the textual values, alphabetical or not, for the iconographic or more hermetic elements and for the tactile/visual experience of their journey, the artist's books have become, for me, a transdisciplinary experience that enables unpublished crossings and multiple artistic crossbreeding.
SR: What is your greatest weakness when facing a new creation?
ABT: In relation to creative work, honestly, it is difficult for me to identify weaknesses, unlike those I find in my own person in everyday life. It could be that all the vulnerability and fragility that I recognize in myself historically, have been resignified in the alchemy of working in Art. Of the many paradoxes I mentioned, this is perhaps one of the most profound. About how the fragile and/or weak demands attention and care, which generates a healing conscience about it, to finally strengthen us; at the same time those aspects with which we thought we were powerful or even omnipotent must become more subtle, flexible and porous so that we can really achieve their usufruct or excellence.
SR: Your work is a thread that runs through different artistic territories: sculpture, objects, drawings, textiles, ceramics. What are you working with now and what do you have in mind for the future?
ABT: The different possibilities of the plastic/visual craft, both the more disciplinary and the more experimental ones, I experience them as opportunities to recognize different aspects of myself, being and doing.
I understand that, beyond the facilities or difficulties in approaching formalities, languages or materials, it is about the need to move forward and discover. As you say, this journey through territories makes it possible to deepen one's own authorial perspective and to be able to recognize or miss oneself in relation to what has been done, or to enhance exchanges with other artists and people from different branches; to learn about other sensibilities, intelligences and possibilities. This expansive gift of all circulation refines one's own practice and is for me a plan of action in itself; a guide and prospective towards the future.
Regarding my agenda for the coming months, in this context still marked and limited by the pandemic, I intend to continue producing daily in the series of works, which are always open to new members: tapestries, more objectual and sculptural dolls, some paintings/drawings, artist's books and also two groups of small and medium format ceramics that I produced in the first half of the year.
In addition, I am engaged in the development of an Authorial Perspective Arts Clinic working personally - with physical and virtual presence - with numerous artists from different regions. I am also developing some autobiographical texts as well as the compilation of other writings in relation to the projects I have done since the 1990s.
Finally and in reference to the projects, a last reflection: if these times of quarantines and health restrictions have been useful to me in any way - beyond the common labor and social prejudices - is the fact of becoming more aware of the feedback that moves my own agenda and the "external" agenda.
Thank you El Hurgador for your request.
Contratapa / Back Cover
¡Muchas gracias por la entrevista, Alejandro!
Thanks a lot for the interview, Alejandro!
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Shirley Rebuffo es Licenciada en Bibliotecología y Archivología por la Escuela Universitaria de Bibliotecología y Ciencias Afines (Montevideo, Uruguay), Técnica en Museología por la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias (opción de Antropología), Objeto, símbolo y espacio en Curaduría. Museología Aplicada y Museología Social – Conceptos, técnicas y prácticas (Campo Grande, BR), Coaching (Campo Grande, BR), Planeamiento Estratégico (Campo Grande, BR) y estudiante de arte y pintura con el maestro Eduardo Espino.
Shirley Rebuffo has a Degree in Library Science and a Degree in Archivology by the Universitary School of Library and Related Sciences (Montevideo, Uruguay), Technician in Museology by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (Anthropology option), Object, Symbol and Spance in Curatorship Applied Museology and Social Museology - Concepts, Technics and Practice (Campo Grande, Brazil), Coaching (Campo Grande, Brazil), Strategic Planning (Campo Grande, Brazil), and Art and Painting student under Master Eduardo Espino.
