THE SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION BY JOAQUÍN SÁNCHEZ AT CASA M
Within the framework of Pinta Sud ASU 2023 in Asunción, Paraguay, Casa M becomes for a few days the perfect setting for the site-specific intervention by artist Joaquín Sánchez, entitled The architecture of the body. Poetics of space and other fictions.
The installation will be displayed on the ground floor of the building –still under construction to become an exclusive residential project. Curated by Adriana Almada, the intervention will cover over 300 square meters with an installation, photography and video art. She explains: "It is a proposal that conceives the space as a corporal architecture and the house as the place where the creative happens. Gathering pieces that evoke different moments of his life, the artist tests his work in the pure and hard space of a construction that advances without stopping. And what else is art but a work under construction? Joaquín Sánchez proposes an ecosystem of light transparent membranes that configure a multipolar entity that perceives, generates and modifies everything inside and outside of it".
The work is an immersive space that creates an alternative reality based on visual and corporeal interactions. "The intervention collects and traps everything that exists around it to become the environment of a living simulation, a fiction interpreted by a network of unpredictable mutations. What happens inside the intervened space, as a geochemical or biological activity, originates changes in behavior in real time, altering the existing with an unknown possibility, or with the promise of good living and assured habitability, progressively modifying the appearance of the site, whose nature is always changing," explains the artist.
Joaquín Sánchez (Barrero Grande, 1975) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been nourished by the knowledge and know-how of indigenous and popular communities in Bolivia and Paraguay, with whom he has been developing collaborative processes for more than two decades. Although his proposals cover a wide spectrum of languages and discourses, he recognizes precise axes linked to the history and ancestral culture of the people who have long inhabited the territory that both countries disputed almost a century ago, as well as to his own history, in a sort of personal ethnography made up of fragments of memory.
Sánchez participated in several international biennials, such as those of Venice, Havana, Mercosur, Sao Paulo, Antofagasta, Valencia and Curitiba, and in large-scale projects such as the 2009 Chile Triennial. In 2016 he was invited to the International exhibition Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand. Also, and presenting himself as an artist-curator, he was in charge of the general curatorship of two editions of the SIART Biennial held in La Paz, Bolivia. On the first occasion, in 2016, his conceptual proposal was "Seeing with the ears: poetics of temporalities"; on the second, in 2018, he invited artists and curators to work and reflect on "The origins of the night".