ExhibitionMay 23, 2022
Garden of Mixtures: Attempts to Make Place, 1995 -… by Alejandra Riera
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia presents, until September 5, the exhibition “< Garden of Mixtures: Attempts to Make Place, 1995 -… > by Argentine artist Alejandra Riera, who has lived in Paris since 1989.
The exhibition presents a series of works that take up part of the one she showed at the Museum in 2013. The exhibition is conceived as a set of singular places linked through an open narrative plot with freedom of movement, which underlies the idea of interweaving, interweaving lines and ideas, images and texts, braiding poetics whose common thread is intuited through the rooms. There is no linear route, neither beginning nor end.
The project occupies different spaces: The vault rooms of the Sabatini building, where the action “poetics(s) of the unfinished” of 2013 is recovered, in which a hole was opened in one of the walls allowing a passageway of natural air and light to the basement and at the same time uncovering the site’s history. On the ground floor of the same building, that same gesture of “opening” is transferred to the garden of the former hospital where, since 2017, the Garden of Mixtures collective, open and made up of people from inside and outside the Museum, rehearses forms of coexistence by questioning about “human-and-not-human presences.”
“Attempts to make room” alludes to the importance of building a space that is always ours and that of others and seeks to break with individualism and segregation of all kinds (race, gender, roles). The Garden of Mixtures has involved, for example, curators, security guards, artists, and people from the neighborhood. What is done in this space has to do with the history of the building, looking at other presences, not necessarily humans, vegetation as presences and thoughts in movement. This is how the artist expresses it: “how to make room for assemblages that undo the imaginary of agreed separation between what is called “human” and what is considered “non-human,” between what has the right to speak and what is considered voiceless, how do they speak and support each other, what do we learn from the attention to the place where we are, how do we transform and transform?
The third floor of Sabatini also houses over ten spaces, a group of artists’ works, where she once again revisits previous works. This part is conceived as a fabric in which there are works by other artists and non-artists with whom Alejandra Riera has carried out projects, as a collective painting, as a poetry of the whole; they are evocations, with works or without works.
Alejandra Riera’s artistic practice is always relational and collective. It is a process in which many people collaborate and in which the exchange is continuous.
The exhibition presents a series of works that take up part of the one she showed at the Museum in 2013. The exhibition is conceived as a set of singular places linked through an open narrative plot with freedom of movement, which underlies the idea of interweaving, interweaving lines and ideas, images and texts, braiding poetics whose common thread is intuited through the rooms. There is no linear route, neither beginning nor end.
The project occupies different spaces: The vault rooms of the Sabatini building, where the action “poetics(s) of the unfinished” of 2013 is recovered, in which a hole was opened in one of the walls allowing a passageway of natural air and light to the basement and at the same time uncovering the site’s history. On the ground floor of the same building, that same gesture of “opening” is transferred to the garden of the former hospital where, since 2017, the Garden of Mixtures collective, open and made up of people from inside and outside the Museum, rehearses forms of coexistence by questioning about “human-and-not-human presences.”
“Attempts to make room” alludes to the importance of building a space that is always ours and that of others and seeks to break with individualism and segregation of all kinds (race, gender, roles). The Garden of Mixtures has involved, for example, curators, security guards, artists, and people from the neighborhood. What is done in this space has to do with the history of the building, looking at other presences, not necessarily humans, vegetation as presences and thoughts in movement. This is how the artist expresses it: “how to make room for assemblages that undo the imaginary of agreed separation between what is called “human” and what is considered “non-human,” between what has the right to speak and what is considered voiceless, how do they speak and support each other, what do we learn from the attention to the place where we are, how do we transform and transform?
The third floor of Sabatini also houses over ten spaces, a group of artists’ works, where she once again revisits previous works. This part is conceived as a fabric in which there are works by other artists and non-artists with whom Alejandra Riera has carried out projects, as a collective painting, as a poetry of the whole; they are evocations, with works or without works.
Alejandra Riera’s artistic practice is always relational and collective. It is a process in which many people collaborate and in which the exchange is continuous.
