Opening Thursday December 26 from 6 pm

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti led Futurism, an avant- garde artistic movement that originated in Italy and was introduced to the world through a manifesto published in the Le Figaro newspaper. Among its dogmatic premises, he included a motto whose subject, the passage of time, would serve to strengthen it. “We affirm that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” wrote Marinetti. A century later, at the World Government Summit in 2014, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum stated, “In the new world, it is not the big fish eating the small fish; it is the fast fish eating the slow fish.” This statement would mark a direct and stark evaluation of the implications associated with the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution or technological revolution.

There is no doubt that speed is one of the inherent principles of this era. Communication, movement, espionage, and intelligence are just some of the many areas in which its impact is evident. In this environment, the contemporary individual, an active participant in obsolescence, tends to live in a hurry, searching for signs of a future yet to come. Meanwhile, the past and present lose value in the equation, and the space of memory suffers in the face of this reality.

As in Epic and Stars (I asked you about the construction of faith and you said it was a matter of empathy) (2010)—a work awarded the 54th National Visual Arts Prize (National Museum of Visual Arts, 2010), and later exhibited at Sur-Sul Arte (Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 2013) and A Escala Humana (Contemporary Art Space, 2015)—the pieces that make up The Archives of Light (2024) are visually dominated brepresentations of fragments of that immeasurable space we call the sky.

The choice of these fragments is not based on a random criterion or the subjectivity each fragment might evoke. Rather, it is linked to a set of carefully chosen anniversaries that occur within a commemorative time window between 2024 and 2025.

These pieces combine elements from different sources. Specifically, there is industrial material related to modern textile production and various natural elements from the genus of perennial plants. Scientifically known as tribulus, their species are commonly called burdock. These are complemented by medicago species, including laciniata, minima, disciformis, polymorpha, and arabica, which are named carretón, carretón chico,melgó disciforme, carretón de amores, and mielga pintada, respectively. All of these fruits have a hard consistency, with spiny mericarps or lateral thorns that give them a prickly and adhesive character. Precisely, the ability to cling to a surface and move along with it are the functions upon which the conception of this device is based, allowing the past to be brought to the present through events that might stir interest today. The design of these pieces involves selecting a set of events based on the temporal framework mentioned, considering both the content of each and the potential connections and subsequent interpretations these might generate when compared to the present. The sky fragments were primarily materialized through the use of Stellarium, software that simulates a planetarium and generates a star map based on time and location data. Additionally, the exact cardinal orientation of each piece was defined using Navigraph, an aviation navigation application. With this, the stellar arrangement corresponding to each event was represented using the aforementioned natural elements.

In an era defined by ubiquitous technology and constant interaction with ICTs and social media, information overload, excessive exposure to digital stimuli, and a decline in concentration and the ability to be present are some of its defining consequences.

In this context, this device highlights both the new formal function revealed by the thorns after their adhesion and the spirit behind this selection of inspiring stories, as well as the set of interpretations that may arise from the articulated temporal displacement.

Diego Focaccio

Recognized as a multidisciplinary creator, his artistic career is grounded in research and reflection aimed at bridging various fields of knowledge and aesthetics. He has exhibited at the National Museum of Visual Arts, the Subte Exhibition Center, the Gurvich Museum, Xippas Punta del Este, the Alberto Elía Gallery, the Contemporary Art Space, Innova, the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires, the Paseo Gallery, and the Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, among others. He has received awards and grants for research and project realization. He was a juror for the Cultural Competitive Fund in the Visual Arts category and for the National Prize for Letters in the category of Essays on Art and Music.

Distinguished for his pictorial work, since 2005 he has developed new formalizations and narratives, crystallizing them into projects, installations, interventions, sound and musical concepts, pedagogical devices, tributes, and productions using new media, mobile phones, and web navigation.

In 2019, his book [Rapsodia] Projections from the space of geometry was published,and in 2023, El Buen Salvaje Ediciones published the work Rapsodelica (2020-22), an inaugural piece born from a strategy designed to foster encounters with a tour of stories, connections, and narratives, within the context of a regulated interactive present with data and metadata.