La Internacional Argentina
- Syd Krochmalny
- 18 jun
- 6 Min. de lectura
A Census of the Elusive: Migration, Displacement, and Artistic Networks
Censuses are designed to count, classify, and frame. They are tools of order, attempts to capture in numbers what, by nature, remains in flux. But what happens when a census is not an inventory of the stable, but a mapping of the fleeting? The Argentine International at The Slip is a record of the ungraspable—an impossible inventory of an Argentine artistic community that is dispersed, ever-changing, and in transit across languages, geographies, and modes of production.
This census does not adhere to static categories or official criteria. It does not attempt to define what it means to be an Argentine artist in New York but rather opens up questions about how Argentine art exists and transforms within the diaspora. Is Argentine identity a territory or a tone? Is it defined by origin, by language, by shared references, or by the act of distancing from them?
Unlike curatorial practice, which selects works according to a predefined discourse, this census does not impose a singular narrative but instead documents a series of presences in motion. If curation organizes and gives shape to an exhibition through an interpretive framework, then a curated census—if such a thing could exist—would involve selecting from within the act of documentation itself, acting as a filter that both acknowledges and structures shifting categories. In The Argentine International, curation and census intertwine, exploring the limits of both concepts and leaving open the question of how much an inscription in an archive is also an act of interpretation.
In this sense, The Argentine International engages with demographic and sociological studies on migration, particularly those that analyze mobility as a structural rather than an exceptional condition. Since the 1960s, Argentine artists in New York have developed adaptation strategies and support networks to sustain their practice, forging connections that transcend national boundaries and create a transnational artistic ecosystem. This archive of Argentine artists is part of a broader tradition of creative migration that redefines cultural production in diasporic contexts. As theorists like Saskia Sassen have pointed out, migration is not an isolated phenomenon but a consequence of transnational flows of capital, culture, and power. Within this framework, the Argentine artistic diaspora in New York is not merely a personal exodus or a search for opportunities but an insertion into global circuits that reshape both identity and artistic production.
Here, artists are not just names on a register but agents of a living cartography: Cecilia Biagini, Ivana Brenner, Rafael Bueno, Bibi Calderaro, Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez, Beto De Volder, Dolores Furtado, Julio Grinblatt, Nicolás Guagnini, Fabián Marcaccio, Sabrina Merayo Núñez, Luciana Pinchiero, Liliana Porter, Sofía Quirno, Analia Segal, Pedro Wainer, and Syd Krochmalny.
Their inclusion in this “census” is a fleeting gesture of presence, a mark on water that reshapes itself with each exhibition, each migration, each new work.
Materiality and Memory: Inscriptions in Transit
Every census implies an act of inscription. The Argentine International confronts us with inscriptions that resist permanence. The works gathered here explore material and conceptual transformation, expanding the borders of contemporary art and challenging the persistence of established forms.
Dolores Furtado investigates the relationship between body, form, and history through a physical and spiritual process of direct interaction with matter. Her work documents the transformation of materials as an expression of regeneration and memory, revealing the deep connection between matter and spirit.
From another perspective, Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez works with memory and identity through photography, printmaking, and sculpture. In her ephemeral visual landscapes, time and texture i ntertwine to generate narratives that reimagine the spaces we inhabit.
Bibi Calderaro, in contrast, explores perception, non-duality, and eco-centrism through immersive experiences. Her work challenges the stability of established discourses and proposes new modes of coexistence and regeneration beyond modernism.
This exploration of transformation and materiality extends to artists who expand traditional media. Fabián Marcaccio examines the survival of painting in the digital age, developing Paintants—hybrids between digital images, sculpture, and painting that incorporate industrial and technological processes to address spatial and temporal concerns.
Similarly, Ivana Brenner blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture through abstract bodies that evoke sensuality and organic matter. Through intuitive and experimental processes, she transforms materials such as clay and paint skins into entities that suggest flesh, fluids, and fertility.
Rafael Bueno, in his painting and drawing practice, explores layering and erasure on canvas and paper to construct tactile landscapes that deal with memory, identity, and color perception.
Meanwhile, Beto De Volder examines the tension between order and chaos through curved line compositions that create a fluid, expansive movement, transforming two-dimensional space into dynamic structures that suggest instability and change.
Taking a transdisciplinary approach, Sabrina Merayo Núñez explores the intersection of natural processes, technology, and materiality. Her practice integrates contemporary materials with ancestral techniques, using biodegradable collagen bioplastics in interactive luminous sculptures that question the relationship between organic and synthetic life in an age of technological acceleration.
Materiality and memory permeate Liliana Porter’s work, where found objects become silent narrators of suspended histories. Her 'theatrical vignettes' construct enigmatic dialogues between humor and anguish, the banal and the transcendent, inviting the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between fiction and reality, presence and absence.
Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, Sofía Quirno creates spaces where subjectivity is constantly negotiated. Her work, shaped by her experience as a woman and an expatriate, reflects on translation, identity, and domesticity.
At the intersection of theory and artistic practice, Syd Krochmalny works with performance, writing, images, and historical research to examine power, representation, and desire. His work employs strategies of transgression and excess to challenge established structures, exploring intimacy, monumentality, and performance in everyday life.
Abstraction and the poetic exploration of form are central to Cecilia Biagini’s work, where she brings together painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to create encounters between geometry and improvisation. Her compositions challenge the boundaries of perception and space.
Pedro Wainer takes a more archaeological approach, investigating the materiality of the photographic image through expanded cinema and the repurposing of obsolete technologies. His experiments with analog processes recontextualize the history of photographic devices and their means of production.
Luciana Pinchiero deconstructs visual history and its dominant narratives through sculpture, collage, and ready-mades. By juxtaposing images from different historical periods, she generates new tensions around identity, power, and gender, engaging in dialogue with her own queer, feminine, and Latin identity.
Luciana Pinchiero. She Drew a Line 5, 2023. Luciana Pinchiero, She Drew a Line 6, 2023
Julio Grinblatt explores photography as a field of knowledge, pushing its boundaries through both practice and study, while Nicolás Guagnini develops interdisciplinary projects that blend ceramics, critical writing, and text design in installations that challenge dominant narratives on labor, capital, and masculinity.
Finally, Analia Segal works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture, examining the conceptual, aesthetic, and functional weight of everyday objects. Through industrial materials and references to design, her work interrogates notions of domesticity and identity, fostering a dialogue between the familiar and the artistic.
A Census of the Uncontainable
The title The Argentine International suggests a community that expands not through geographic borders but through a shared tension between belonging and dispersion. This census is both an act of recognition and proof that what is named continues to escape.
From the perspective of migration sociology, thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad have analyzed how mobility shapes new subjectivities, caught between origin and destination. The Argentine artistic diaspora in New York is an example of this: neither entirely Argentine nor entirely New Yorker, but something in between—a field of forces where meanings are constantly rewritten.
If this census has a unit of measurement, it is friendship. But in modernity, friendship was confined by its inability to establish a political foundation. Is friendship a political structure or merely an elective bond? In antiquity, as Aristotle and Vernant noted, friendship was the foundation of the community, where the personal blended into the collective. In modernity, however, friendship has been relegated to the private sphere, no longer a political substance but an individual choice. Yet, following Nietzsche, we might conceive of an “impossible friendship”: a bond not based on sameness but on difference, where friends do not assimilate but recognize each other in the space of their distance. This tension between closeness and separation, between affection and dispossession, is part of the fabric of The Argentine International.
This exhibition proposes another logic: one of mutual support, of networks, of encounters—where art becomes a space where friendship is not just a personal bond but a strategy of resistance against precarity and displacement. In this sense, the friendship cultivated here does not seek the fusion of identities but the coexistence of differences, a we that emerges through friction rather than uniformity.
This census is a gesture of gathering rather than classification. A living archive that, instead of closing definitions, opens a space for imagination and transformation. An attempt to register the unregistrable: art as something that always slips away—like The Slip itself, refusing to be contained, sliding between categories and labels, expanding in multiple directions.
* Syd Krochmalny, from The Bureau of the Unknown Curator, reconfigures curation as a space for critical speculation and artistic experimentation.
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