Micro
residency project at ACE Foundation – Buenos Aires, Argentina – 2019

During the years 2017/2018 I carried a project called Return/Erosion, which consisted in a return to different places I inhabited throughout my life, including the town of Los Cóndores, where I was born. In these tours I registered audiovisual material and collected wood pieces from each place that were later carbonized. All this material was then processed in different actions by drawing, documenting and destructing.

I’m interested in this process of material transformation as an analogy of the nostalgic gesture of the functioning of memories. The degradation of images, the materials and the drawing as a possibility of the appearing of a catastrophic landscape or scenery that concludes in an instance that reflects an identity, an identity that starts from the rests, the rubble and the imprint of an ephemeral moment.

For my micro-Residency at ´ace‘s Transversal Room I decided to wear away different carbon pieces that I accumulated over these years, pieces of different origins and woods. This action manifested itself in a drawing on the wall that was done during the first three days of my residency, inhabiting and acting on the space.

In a second stage of the process I extracted stains and marks on papers that, by being dragged over the wall, captured parts of the volatile material present in the drawing. By doing so, I managed to obtain a sensitive registry of the action in a format that makes possible its preservation, unlike the wall, which is ephemeral and will disappear.

https://www.proyectoace.org/en/artistas/guillermo-mena-2/

Special thanks to: Alicia Candiani, Adriana Moracci, Cecilia Candiani, Daniela Ruiz Moreno, Andrés Knob, Proyecto ACE.