La Internacional Argentina II

The Soft, the Broken, the Living

The world today isn’t falling apart—it’s shifting, cracking open along hidden seams, like skin shedding itself to reveal layers of time, desire, and residue once buried beneath the surface. Climatic, epistemic, technological, and affective crises converge and echo through the uncertain terrain we now inhabit.

The Argentinian International – Part II is not merely an exhibition; it’s an open wound, a deep exhale, a rebellious gesture against resignation and indifference in the face of collapse. Here, art doesn’t just peer into the abyss—it learns to dance on its edge, embracing the convulsive beauty of what’s unstable, precarious, and alive.

Bringing together eight Argentine artists based in New York, this exhibition offers a constellation of practices that respond—through sensibility and material intuition—to the entangled crises of our time: digital surveillance and algorithmic censorship, the erosion of intimacy and labor, environmental devastation, structural violence, and the collapse of shared meaning. Rather than proposing stabilizing answers, it explores how to inhabit the fissure itself: the soft, the intimate, the residual, the deviant, the hybrid, the unresolved.

Art here is not an escape nor a diagnosis—it is an affective and aesthetic laboratory for imagining what does not yet exist. The works assembled share a restlessness: to disturb, to invoke, to unsettle.How do we resist from within fragility, without surrendering to cynicism?What possibilities lie in what is discarded, altered, performed?What kinds of memory awaken when bodies are exposed to archives, to desire, to trauma?How do we forge new alliances—between the human and the animal, the vegetal and the digital?

Far from monumentality, the gestures in this show insist on the strength of what is minimal, ambiguous, tactile. Bodies emerge as sites of historical inscription, as living terrains where the political and the emotional coexist without hierarchy. Each work opens a fold, a fracture, a potential—not to mirror the world, but to transform it, from its very edges.

La Internacional Argentina II

In an era governed by screens, algorithms, and automated constraint, Jazmín López’s work compels contemporary perception into a state of critical dislocation. The Origin of the World is no longer a painting—it becomes an expanded terrain of symbolic contestation. Her video re-creation sets the stage for a collision between algorithmic censorship, desire, and the artistic gaze.

The opening shot—direct, frontal, unmistakable—is swiftly interrupted by destabilizing gestures: the clapperboard enters the frame, the director speaks from offscreen, the sheets fold awkwardly, technical uncertainties arise. All that Courbet’s painting sought to exclude in pursuit of contemplative eternity reappears here as vital noise. The body no longer functions as a passive object of contemplation, but rather as a mutable site of negotiation—between what is visible and what can be said, between intimacy and exposure, between art and its behind-the-scenes apparatus.

López doesn’t simply resurrect an image suppressed by digital censorship; she subverts its historical monumentality by injecting error, breath, laughter, failure. As if to insist: there is no origin without artifice, no nudity without construction. What is revealed is not sex, but its scenography—the staging of power, of desire, of the masculine gaze that has long dictated which bodies may be seen, and how.

Her work echoes Lacan’s proposition that the Real of sex cannot be represented—only circumscribed through the symbolic and the imaginary. López’s video dwells at this boundary. What we see is not sex, but the impossibility of its full capture. The body on screen is not the object of desire, but its inassimilable remainder. And it is in that crack—where the image fails to complete itself—that something most unsettling emerges: an intimacy that refuses to be domesticated.

This ambiguity deepens through López’s use of artificial intelligence to reconstruct fragments of dialogue. Memory becomes spectral, speculative, fallible. The machine doesn’t remember—it hallucinates. And through this slippage, the archive of desire begins to parody itself. What was once fixed and sacralized turns into a staged fiction, where each gesture ruptures the logic of visual mastery. Who speaks? Who remembers? Who grants authority to the image?

This strategy resonates with Harun Farocki’s inquiries into the labor of images, and with Hito Steyerl’s post-cinematic investigations, where post-production becomes a battleground for ethical and political struggle. López’s work sits comfortably within a lineage that includes VALIE EXPORT’s ironic subversions, Chantal Akerman’s narrative dismantling, and Laura Mulvey’s critique of patriarchal visuality. Yet her gesture is not merely theoretical—it is also intimate, tender, conspiratorial.

The dialogue between director, model, and camera operator opens a space of uncoded affection. Desire seeps in, but never settles. It circulates as glitch, as rumor, as queer complicity.

In a world saturated with sexualized imagery stripped of context, The Origin of the World, according to Jazmín López, reintroduces context as resistance. Desire is not captured—it is rehearsed, framed, interrupted, filmed again. Against the automated economies of visibility and censorship, López advances a politics of the fold: what’s revealed is never quite what’s seen—but what escapes.

In a world where bonds collapse, bodies accelerate, and networks of care erode, imagining sensitive forms of resistance becomes not just necessary—but urgent. While dominant structures promote fragmentation, hyperproductivity, and uprootedness, some gestures—small, affective, textile—persist in holding together what can still be braided: a community, a memory, an alliance.

La Internacional Argentina II

Elisa Lutteral transforms the domestic into a site of affective resistance. In Braided Hands (2023), three pairs of woolen gloves are interlaced into a long, soft braid that hangs like a suspended ribbon between two walls. This minimal gesture—knitting, joining, hanging—activates a poetics of care that recalls historically feminized tasks, those that, as Silvia Federici reminds us, have been systematically erased from the economies of time and the body.

The work evokes bonds, complicities, and quiet forms of solidarity woven at the margins of power’s normative structures. In its material fragility, Braided Hands does not only shelter—it connects, insists, resists. As bell hooks once wrote, the act of caring can itself be a radical gesture of community building. And in its visual ambiguity—neither garment nor sculpture, neither rope nor body—the piece opens itself to a queer reading of the object, where the braided form becomes a code for escape, echoing the material gestures Paul B. Preciado describes as non-normative gender technologies.

Between the soft and the political, the minimal and the tactile, Braided Hands proposes an aesthetics of entanglement: a way of making memory with the hands, of holding the world together in its fragility—one stitch at a time.

In a present marked by conservative backlash, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, and the normative aestheticization of masculinity, Lucas Michael offers a sensual and disobedient critique of the heteronormative visual regime.

With sharp irony and queer humor, Michael dismantles the codes of normative masculinity, activating a sculptural language that is both playful and incisive. In Threesome, he presents a trio of padded numbers—3, 2, and 1—upholstered in glossy black, their finish evoking sweat and latex, fetish and fantasy. But this is not mere allusion. The work directly appropriates the signage from the private gay sex club “321” in Fort Lauderdale, transforming a space of exclusive eroticism into a visual emblem of desire, belonging, and homoerotic power.

The piece converses with the visual strategies of artists like Félix González-Torres—particularly his way of encoding desire through what is minimal and exchangeable—and with the irreverence of queer ready-mades, camp aesthetics, and a queer reimagining of minimalist history. Michael subverts the cold monumentality of artists like Donald Judd or Carl Andre by eroticizing it, feminizing it, and resignifying it through an abject and affective visual language.

In the play between what is visible and what is suggested, Threesome also activates what José Esteban Muñoz called the “queer utopian horizon”: a space still to come, where norms of gender and sexuality dissolve in favor of new forms of affection, desire, and community. The work doesn’t simply represent desire—it embodies it, dramatizes it, renders it available as a critical surface. The original sign—designed to demarcate territory—is now a soft sculpture, touchable, desirable, moveable. A reversal of hierarchies where the hard becomes soft, and the normative becomes an object of play.

In a world where gender-based violence, systems of bodily control, and the lingering effects of social trauma continue to mark millions of lives, Natacha Voliakovsky transforms the wound into a site of political power.

Through visceral and deeply political performances, Voliakovsky embodies a sudaka feminism that resists through the body and its vulnerability. Her practice weaves together pain, memory, and agency in actions where the intimate becomes collective, and flesh—marked, exposed, intervened—operates as a surface for inscription and reclamation. Her work enters into dialogue with a genealogy of artists who have explored the body as political territory and ritual space for transformation: Ana Mendieta, Regina José Galindo, Teresa Margolles, among others. Voliakovsky activates these languages through her own temporality and urgency, blending direct action, visual poetics, and tools of activism.

The two photographs presented here condense a fragment of her video performance The Denied Body, a Refuge of Trauma (2023), produced in New York and exhibited as part of the New York Latin American Art Triennial. In them, the artist appears covering her face with blood, as if applying vital makeup before a mirror. Her hands do not merely caress—they pierce, mark, and reclaim.

Blood, far from symbolizing death, becomes a substance of reappropriation—what Silvia Federici might call an “act of re-enchanting the body” after centuries of discipline and dispossession.

The performance, inspired by experiences of trauma and dissociation, also resonates with Judith Butler’s concept of “performative survival”: the possibility of resisting through the exposure of the vulnerable body, through precarity, through an ethics of appearance. In the act of covering her face with blood and holding the gaze, one also hears the echo of Sayak Valencia’s notion of gore capitalism: the body as battlefield and symbolic trench in contexts marked by structural violence.

These images do not document an act—they embody it. They render visible a scene where the self fragments, but does not surrender. In a present where bodies continue to be regulated, wounded, or denied, Voliakovsky builds, through performance, a space of mourning, denunciation, and reconfiguration. A space where the wound is not only political—it is also transformative.

La Internacional Argentina II

In a global context marked by overproduction, resource extraction, and the systematic discarding of bodies and materials, Tamara Kostianovsky proposes a counter-aesthetic of waste as a form of survival.

Her sculptural practice transforms the body into a site of friction—between the intimate, the organic, and the industrial. Using recycled textiles—her own clothes, domestic garments, discarded materials—she constructs soft, fragmented anatomies that evoke bodily landscapes in transformation. Her work articulates an ethics of reuse and an aesthetic of visceral excess, reconfiguring everyday remnants into forms that interrogate systems of consumption, structural violence against bodies, and contemporary logics of production.

In conversation with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Annette Messager, Teresa Margolles, and Cecilia Vicuña, Kostianovsky works within a feminist and material tradition in which the body is not represented—it is materialized. As in those practices, the textile is not merely a medium but an affective archive, a tactile memory, a biography undone and recombined. Her sculptures also resonate with the unsettling imaginary of Mona Hatoum, the interspecies sensitivity of Patricia Piccinini, and with contemporary proposals such as those of Anicka Yi or Tamara Santibañez, who explore the entanglements between flesh, desire, gender, and environment.

In What it Once Was, the artist composes a suspended sculpture reminiscent of a slab of meat hanging in an abattoir. But what hangs is not meat—it is fabric; not waste, but composition. Frayed garments, scraps of underwear, and domestic remnants are transformed into vertebrae, muscle, folds, fat. The metal chain and butcher’s hook evoke the mechanisms of industrial restraint, but also the fragility of a body traversed by forces beyond its control. The sculpture hangs as a body between worlds: between the home and the slaughterhouse, between the intimate archive and the mass production system.

In this process of transfiguration, the material retains its history: what once touched skin now stands in for flesh. This is a poetics of residue and a politics of recycling that does not seek to restore what was lost, but to insist on what survives. In the artist’s words, “an alchemy takes place in the studio,” where the discarded mutates into an unsettling beauty, loaded with texture, memory, and contradiction.

From a theoretical perspective, her work can be read through Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman proposal, which invites us to think of the body not as a closed unit but as a node in a network of material, ecological, and symbolic interdependencies. It also resonates with Donna Haraway’s  claim that kinship may be formed among species, fibers, waste, and memories—undoing the hierarchies between the human and the more-than-human. Finally, from a decolonial perspective, the gesture of reusing textiles and converting the domestic into sculptural form may be seen as an “aesthetics of remnants” that subverts monumental art hierarchies through an ethics of care, as theorists like Marisol de la Cadena and Suely Rolnik have suggested.

In What it Once Was, the body appears as residue—but also as potential. It is not about returning to the origin, but about inhabiting what remains: what no longer serves, what hangs, what aches, what persists.

In a society that renders care work invisible, devalues feminized bodies, and trivializes collective memory, Lucía Reissig activates a critical poetics that condenses denunciation and material tenderness.

Reissig reveals the invisible layers of communal memory and feminized labor, expanding the boundaries of the personal into the collective. In Embutidos (Sausages), she presents an installation that immediately evokes the cold space of the slaughterhouse: meat hanging on hooks, the body reduced to portion and utility. Yet here, nothing is quite what it seems. The hanging forms are made of recycled paper—a humble, time-worn material—molded into the shape of sausages, wrapped in tubular netting and suspended from butcher hooks on a metal structure. The piece subverts the language of the slaughterhouse without resorting to the visceral impact of real flesh: formal gestures and the chilling sterility of the apparatus are enough to activate a critique that cuts across gender, labor, and memory.

In this work, what hangs is not an animal body, but a material archive. Each sausage is a capsule of papercrete—a mixture of paper pulp and cement—ground-up remains, accumulated and transformed stories. The use of papercrete is not only ecological; it is symbolic. It evokes a reworked, recomposed matter—a logic of preservation, repurposing, and resistance.

Embutidos enters a genealogy of artists who have explored oppression and invisible labor through bodily forms—from Martha Rosler’s critiques of domesticity, to Teresa Margolles’s reflections on expendable bodies, to Tania Bruguera’s political activation of physical space. At the same time, it aligns with a lineage of artists working with precarious materials as forms of resistance: Mónica Mayer, Delcy Morelos, Claudia del Fierro, among others.

Theoretically, the piece connects with Silvia Federici’s analyses of feminized bodies as the invisible foundation of capitalism—not only as labor force, but as available flesh, unpaid care, and everyday sacrifice. It also echoes Cristina Morini’s reflections on the affective dimensions of contemporary labor, and Judith Butler’s thinking, where suspended and embodied forms acquire a performative power: these are object-bodies, paused bodies, bodies that persist.

Embutidos doesn’t scream, but it weighs. It doesn’t bleed, but it hurts. It’s an installation that, in its brutal silence, reveals how labor, flesh, and history intersect in the most invisible forms of violence. And yet, where hope might seem absent, the artist proposes an act: to hang, to preserve, to show. Because resistance is also about drying the damp, hardening the soft, allowing time to transform matter without erasing its origin.

La Internacional Argentina II

From another angle, in a time of digital overexposure, archival anxiety, and collective memory manipulation, Reinaldo Laddaga proposes a visual practice that dismantles the notion of the archive as fixed truth. His installation does not aim to preserve, but to unsettle: it activates an unstable archaeology, where memory becomes mobile, editable, and therefore political.

This Winter Green presents 80 photographs taken during the New York winter, arranged on a rotating display rack that recalls a postcard stand in a mountain shop. Only forty images are visible at once; the rest remain hidden, available to be exchanged by the viewers. Through this participatory mechanism, the work opens a perceptual drift in which landscape—and with it, memory—gradually transforms through the anonymous gestures of others. Whites, greens, and golds may give way to new tones, making visible the fragility of any attempt to fix remembrance. Here, to see is also to intervene, and to perceive is to reconfigure.

The piece enters into dialogue with Aby Warburg’s research on the atlas as an open form of cultural memory, and with the concept of a living archive, as explored by artists like Christian Boltanski or Walid Raad, where documentation does not prove—it suggests, summons, undoes. At the same time, it resonates with Jacques Derrida’s ideas on “archive fever,” and with contemporary practices like those of Trevor Paglen or Forensic Architecture, which interrogate how regimes of visibility are constructed and manipulated.

Yet Laddaga’s gesture leans less toward denunciation than toward invitation: a politics of the image that avoids monumentality and embraces mutability. His archive seeks not authority, but openness. As Georges Didi-Huberman proposes, to see is to burn in the flicker of images: to let them transform us even as we touch them.

Amid a landscape fractured by tensions between humanity and its environment, a renewed sensitivity emerges toward the more-than-human—a new ethics of interdependence that challenges extractivist imaginaries and our obsession with controlling the ephemeral. Fernando Sucari articulates this sensitivity through watercolor, exploring liminal territories between nature and urban life, where illustration, painting, and comic narrative intertwine to tell stories charged with symbolism.

In the works presented here, Sucari traces an ecology of the everyday in which plants, animals, objects, and urban fragments coexist on the same affective plane, without hierarchy. These  seemingly modest images open a fissure through which to imagine alliances beyond the species divide.

His proposal resonates with Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” beyond the human, and with Anna Tsing’s invitation to “pay attention to unexpected assemblages” that emerge in the ruins of capitalism. In Tsing’s words: “life always sprouts in the cracks.” Sucari, with delicacy and precision, paints those cracks—places where life persists, blends, and reinvents itself.

At the end of the exhibition, no certainties remain—only a fertile vertigo: a tremor that doesn’t paralyze, but opens. These works do not come to redeem us or offer comfort; they come to unsettle us just enough to remind us that we can still feel, see, and inhabit differently.

In the face of the exhaustion of familiar forms, this exhibition dares to sustain what is fragile, uncertain, ephemeral—not as weakness, but as insurgent power. Perhaps there is no other option but to learn to live without guarantees.Perhaps the only possible path is to surrender to the fissure, to let it pass through us, and allow something still unnamed to emerge from that wound: a porous, unstable, profoundly living future.

Text: Syd Krochmalny

Curated by Syd Krochmalny from The Bureau of The Unknown Curator.

Syd Krochmalny participated as artist and curator in the first part of The Argentinian International. This second iteration continues a two-decade-long inquiry into transnational mobility and friendship, initiated with the work Technologies of Friendship, developed in 2006 with Roberto Jacoby for the exhibition Periférica. Their dialogues were published in Ramona magazine (No. 69) and in the special issue La Internacional Argentina (No. 97, 2009), as well as in a postdoctoral research project at Columbia University (2014–2015), titled The Transnational Space of Visual Arts: Discourses, Trajectories, Sociabilities and Networks between Buenos Aires and New York.