Cristina Piffer

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1953

            Claudia Piffer's work draws from the intersection between the rhythms of an intimate sensibility and the space of common, collective, and public history. In this double movement, her work makes use of materials endowed with a huge semantic load for Argentine past, while also employing a set of specific strategies that require her technical versatility in the production of objects. Thus, grease, meat, dehydrated blood, metal, leather, glass, combined with techniques of printing, photography, carving, and transfer, constitute the formal skeleton of a production engaged in detecting what was silenced by official discourses and established narratives about Argentine history.

            Trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires, her foray into the art world began thanks to Alejandro Puente's workshop, from whom she acquired a passion for methodical asepsis and formal neatness. However, even from her early solo exhibitions in the late 1990s, this modesty encountered the visceral motifs of her particular approach to historiographical art. Her production reveals itself as a permanent task of presentifying minor scenes and forgotten episodes of our tradition intertwined with slaughters, exterminations, exiles, and other violences. An example of this is the work "Senda patria," made in 1999, where a path of beef tiles, acrylic, and transparent polyester resin is presented on an iron sheet. Or "41 millones de hectáreas" from 2010, for which, referring to the area occupied by the army over indigenous peoples, she used dehydrated bovine blood on a stainless steel and acrylic table.

            In recent years, the artist, alongside her material work, has added intense archival labor. Using a series of documentations, such as baptismal records or records related to indigenous prisoners and captives on Martín García Island or photographs taken in the early 20th century in the sugar mill colony of La Esperanza, Jujuy, Piffer constructs devices to sensibly recover names, places, and communities, emphasizing the significant power of these administrative remnants as traces of a repressed time.