Claudia Fontes

            Claudia Fontes' production, throughout its development, takes the form of an extensive auto-anthropology: an investigation into the forms of human behavior once it is stripped of the common discourses and clichés that surround it. While from her early works there is a glimpse of the interest in probing the self as if it were a strange universe, it is from her formative experience in the artistic residency of the Rijksakademie in the Netherlands between 1996 and 1997 and the encounter with another culture, another nature, and another language, that the tensions between identity and otherness become problematic and interesting. In this sense, each of her artistic interventions seeks to generate a reflection on the nature of our social life to the extent that it is contrasted and articulated with other modes of existence and with strange material devices.

            Starting from varied technical explorations, ranging from drawing, video, and sculpture, the horizon of her work projects a notion of artistic experience and of the artist himself that moves away from the mere maker of beautiful artifacts, to suggest the possibility of thinking of art as a poetic radar that manages to capture and anticipate transformations in the world and whose operation requires collective participation and collaborative agency between humans and non-humans. Along these lines, she has generated networks of cooperation among artists and spaces of critical thought, including TRAMA, while the historical-political dimensions of her work gain relevance.

            Interested in the strategies and processes of resistance and memory of minority and subaltern traditions and subjects, Reconstrucción de Retrato de Pablo Miguez, located in the Parque de la Memoria - Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado or the anti-colonialist project Plan of Invasion to Holland are evidence of this. Based in England, she represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with her installation "El problema del caballo." A year later, she was part of the curatorial team of the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, where she devised the section El pájaro lento. Her work has been part of the Documenta in Kassel (2012) and Frieze Sculpture Park, among other events of great importance. Her work is included in collections in museums and private collections in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Australia.