Grupo Anarquitectura (Rama Argentina)

ARCHIVAL INSTALLATION, appropriated objects/ephemera, varied media, variable dimensions (project under development)

[CLICK IMAGE BELOW to view Grupo Anarquitectura: Atlas (Uncompleted)]

An ongoing visual research project and multi-media installation that explores the connections between art and public space in the context of neoliberal economic policy and authoritarian government. Springing from a fascination with the remnants of several large-scale infrastructure initiatives begun and later abandoned by Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983), the project also contemplates certain ideas and practices associated with the work of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) and the so-called Anarchitecture Group, a short-lived avant-garde collective connected to Matta-Clark and active in New York City in the early 1970s. Grupo Anarquitectura conjures an alternative history whereby the emergence and rapid demise of the New York group coincided with the parallel activities of multiple “anarchitectural” movements around the globe. Chief among these was a clandestine South American avatar or “Argentine branch” (Rama argentina) of the Anarchitecture Group, operating primarily in Buenos Aires (with alleged satellites in Rosario, Santa Fe, and the small city of Villa María, in the province of Córdoba). Working in the shadow of the repressive military regime, the Grupo Anarquitectura forged sui generis, often highly idiosyncratic anarchitectural precepts, ultimately to transform them into a radical anti-functionalist aesthetics and a system of “constructive sabotage.”