Archives, Memories, and Fictions: The Use of Documentary Materials in Contemporary Art
Based on works by Martín Legón and Valeska Soares, this class analyzes different ways of working with documents, objects, and memories. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theoretical reflections on the incompleteness of the archive and Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, we consider practices that engage with gaps, silences, and possible narratives.
This class offers an introduction to the archive as one of the central strategies of contemporary art. Rather than understanding it solely as a device for preserving the past, the archive is presented here as an active space for the construction of meaning, shaped by memory, power, desire, and forgetting. Contemporary art appropriates documents in order to revise, reorganize, and, in many cases, fictionalize them.
Through the works of Martín Legón and Valeska Soares, the class examines different approaches to working with archives. In La fenomenología (2013/2025), Legón reworks the logic of the bureaucratic archive to create a monumental-scale installation that functions as a fragmentary memorial: each object, word, or absence refers to a minimal existence, prompting an ironic and melancholic reflection on what is recorded and what is lost. In contrast, Valeska Soares’s Any Moment Now… (Spring) (2014) proposes an affective and mobile archive composed of book covers that evoke personal memories, cultural associations, and subjective trajectories.
During the session, ideas from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever are revisited, in which the archive is understood as a necessarily incomplete structure, and brought into dialogue with Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. From this perspective, the class explores artistic practices that, when faced with fragmentary archives or those marked by silences, turn to narration, speculation, and imagination as ways of expanding and complicating historical and collective narratives.
Precarious Materials and Everyday Objects in Contemporary Sculpture
Artists such as Diego Bianchi, Mariana López, and Nicanor Aráoz, among others, develop works that challenge traditional notions of sculpture by incorporating fragile, discarded, domestic, or mass-consumption materials.
This session proposes examining how these works call into question classical categories such as form, permanence, and value, shifting sculpture away from its historical condition as a solid, enduring object toward an open, unstable field in constant transformation. By evoking movements such as Italian Arte Povera and the so-called “art of crisis” that emerged in Argentina in the late 1990s, the class situates contemporary sculpture within a tradition that privileges process, ephemerality, and a direct relationship with everyday experience.
In these works, the body, waste, and space come together in configurations that invite us to rethink our relationship with materials and with the world we inhabit. Sculpture thus becomes a field in which the sensory and the political converge, raising questions about the limits of form and the meaning of permanence.