Del Cielo a Casa [From Heaven to Home]
Connections and intermittences in Argentinian material culture.
03.23-07.23,
MALBA
Photo: Santi Orti.
As in an archive of the ordinary, the exhibition brings together more than 600 pieces, including objects, works of art, and documents, that constitute Argentinian daily life. It is committed to an ethnographic perspective that, beyond authorship or methods, invites us to approach material culture from the uses, customs, rituals and symbolisms that things generate in a society.
“The interlaced objects, spaces of life and work, weave an expanded network of meaning: it connects us emotionally with our own from a slice of that archive of everyday life where design, art, industry and history are hybridized. They call upon us to travel to a recent past, to conjure once again the events and longings for the future that were inscribed there,” as emphasized by the curatorial team, a multidisciplinary group made up of historians, graphic and industrial designers, architects and editors in charge of the exhibition concept and setting.
A series of thematic constellations articulates the route where things are grouped without chronology, hierarchies, nor distinction of disciplines, thus transgressing the limits of use and blurring the boundaries between art and design. The exhibition covers three major areas: territorial identity, design outside the canon, and the political, social and economic vicissitudes of our country.
Del Cielo a Casa does not indicate Argentine design historiography, but an essay on ordinary life condensed in things: from great utopian visions to everyday life, from a helicopter to a sneaker, from the Stent to the Pulpo [Octopus brand] ball. “Things for life,” according to the definition by avant-garde project designer Gerardo Clusellas (1929-1973).
The pieces come from different archives, public and private collections from all over the country. The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires collection stands out: this pioneering institution put design in the map by exhibiting it as a cultural production and as a tool for development in 1963. Also Fundación IDA (Investigación en Diseño Argentino) [Research in Argentine Design], a non-profit organization created in 2013, dedicated to national design research, recovery, conservation, awareness and assessment, is also added.
Del Cielo a Casa takes place sixty years after the first design exhibition in Argentina (CIDI, 1963), and coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the return of democracy in the country, a turning point in our social and institutional life.
Curatorial team: Adamo Faiden, Leandro Chiappa, Gustavo Eandi, Carolina Muzi, Verónica Rossi, Juan Ruades, Martín Wolfson and Paula Zuccotti.
WORK LOAN
Suárez, Pablo
Tiempos de Guerra [War Times]
1982, oil on canvas, 158 × 120 cm
Pablo Suárez (Argentina, 1937-2006)
He entered Agronomy School but devoted himself to art as a self-taught artist. His first exhibition was at the Lirolay gallery in 1961. He took part in Instituto Di Tella and Tucumán Arde [Tucumán Burning] in 1968. He retired to San Luis and Córdoba in the seventies, embracing a realistic style. He returned to a critical social denunciation approach merging humor, pop art and grotesque realism in the eighties. He had a huge influence on the artists at Centro Cultural Rojas in the nineties. He was awarded, among others, the Premio Costantini in 1999.