Laura Códega

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977

            Laura Códega cultivates her world as if she were a chronicler in a science fiction world. Perhaps her training as a journalist allows her to erase any hint of optimism and naivety and explore the wastelands of contemporary culture to figure out what forms of community life can germinate there. Old medical journals and medicine charts, a vegetable garden made from electronic scrap or the installation of an art space in a locksmith's shop located in the subway, mark the beginning of her work, oscillating between a plastic language, an interest for  her drawings and objects' almost scenographic installation dimension and a vocation for the management of collective projects.

            This heterogeneity will be her research’s permanent feature; the driving force of her career: a continuous search for the impure, the other, the strange, the mixture. Selected for numerous local grants and awards, her production is projected as a great confluence zone between the natural and the artificial, the everyday and the marvelous, the forces of life and the forces of death. Her production returns again and again to one of its great problems: that of tales and fiction.  As a film editor, her studies and work endow her with an awareness of the artifices of narration, be it the history of the constitution of national borders in the United States, the scenes of Sarmiento's Facundo, or the creation of conjectural cosmogonies based on drawings in bleach. 

            Códega experiments with the way in which narratives are constructed, but also with the way in which the public is shaped around them. Through exhibitions, cooperative projects, films or theatrical pieces, Códega reflects on the dynamics by which discursive, performative or graphic acts shelter the possibility of becoming foundational and communitarian. Thus, with tar, lemon juice, banana, bread or cowhide, she gives birth to a universe of creatures that populate both historical stories and the most extravagant fictions of her universe.