"Insecta": Julia Padilla's hybrid insects at the Centro Cultural Recoleta

August 21, 2024 | nadiaevangelina

Insecta” is a solo exhibition of the Argentine artist Julia Padilla that brings together a series of sculptures made for the occasion. These hybrid structures arise from assembling disused industrial materials with organic elements. The exhibition curated by Javier Villa can be visited at the emblematic Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires.

Julia Padilla
This proposal invites visitors to reflect on the world's environmental crisis. Particularly in Argentina, approximately 49,300 tons of waste are generated daily. This is equivalent to about 18 million tons per year. The production of goods, wealth, and by extension of subjectivities, has an unavoidable counterpart, a forced complement: the production of waste, leftovers, and surplus. Now, as leftovers, they persist, they are transformed in the most diverse ways: as polluting agents of the environment, as elements to be recycled and reinserted in the market, as raw material for the most basic survival, or, as materials available for their poetic usufruct.

In this last instance, it is possible to inscribe Julia Padilla's approach to this category of objects. Her sensitivity is attentive to the dimension of the residual in collective life. If we bear in mind that the etymology of the term investigates refers to vestigial (trace, ruin), the keys to the research that the artist carries out on waste go back to the interior of the perspectives that they are capable of expressing, they go beyond the closure of their original and obsolete function and take advantage of the possibilities of conjugation and transformation of all kinds of materiality. By making them be seen again, by making them awaken other valences, he makes them exist in different ways and their new realities become thicker.


Centro Cultural Recoleta

To clarify the strategy adopted by Padilla, according to the curator, Javier Villa, she “decides to intrude into the materials like an insect, either with the precision of a bee that surrounds the flower to then launch itself to release its pollen and thus transform it into food, or with the anxiety of a fly that circles the rottenness to generate new life there. To imagine becoming a non-human entity, to practice other receptive ranges to metabolize what has been acquired, and to propitiate the mutation of the environment.

The confluence of the defamiliarization of objects and the de-automatization of perception converge as two simultaneous operative intentions set in motion in Insecta. It is difficult to recognize, in this tumult of soft surfaces that extend, contract, or wrap themselves around the space of the room as if they were an exuberant plant species, the remains of tires or other products. Among them we can observe protuberances and pipes, orifices and charred roughness, anomalous imbrications, reminiscences of animal life; all displacements, fracture lines of the conventionalisms of the world that make up an authentic autopsy of the daily life of the post-industrial society.



Centro Cultural Recoleta
The heteroclite forms found in this exhibition are animated by historical, economic, and affective forces, they are not an accumulation of inert matter. They require, on the part of whoever experiences them, an acute disposition of memory and an unusual perceptual and sensory openness that, in the best of cases, will also provoke a rectification of what is considered residual.

Julia invites the viewer to approach her creations as an insect: to surround them, approach them, and consume what they have to offer. Sculpture is a medium through which the artist explores the materiality that surrounds us, discovering the aesthetic and narrative power that still resists it. “Insecta” invites us to imagine ”new types of relationship with nature and the waste we provoke. A relationship that could arise from the exchange of information with the non-human and the fantasy of an interspecies performativity”.

"Insecta"
Location: Recoleta Cultural Center, Junín 1930, C1113 CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Opening Date: 11th June 2024
End Date: 17th November 2024
Working hours: Tuesday-Friday: 1.30pm to 10pm
Saturday-Sunday: 11.15am to 10pm

Official website: 

Artist:

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