By Cintia Mezza and Javier Villa
Buenos Aires, 2025
“We have never been apart. Electricity is also a network of kinships.” Donna Haraway, in Cyborg Manifesto.
“Women have learned to move in broken worlds. We make art with what burns.” María Lugones, in Coloniality and Gender.
“Emotions are also electrical forces: they affect us, move us, pass through us (…) the archive does not store the past, it makes us feel it again.” Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotions.
“There is a wound in language, and also a way out.” Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera.
Alternating currents are not just intersecting lines, but flows that resonate on contact, energies that share the same magnetic field. Matilde Marín and Margarita Paksa are poles of the same cultural charge, where their works are activated with different intensities. In them, art is not only form but also emptiness or voltage. Electricity, here, does not power machines: it ignites gazes, activates memories, and proposes seeing the fractured world in other ways.
Matilde, a continuous stream of silences, slow times, and archetypal forms; Margarita, an insurrectionary political-electric discharge that bets on mistrusting words. Both artists crossed paths, shared contexts, and even silences, but they did not form a continuous stream but something more powerful: an alternation of energies, a generous vibration. Two trajectories that, when walking together, illuminate each other, revealing different ways of reading the collapse.
Paksa was a key figure in Argentine conceptualism from the late 1960s onwards. Her work explores systems of control and the political condition of the body and language, with a rigor that articulates the formal with the experimental. In her work, the sign becomes a field of tension between meaning and repression; between the possibility of enunciation and censorship. In Marín, the image becomes a silent document of a vanishing world: ruins, timeless or abandoned landscapes, accumulated silences that turn emptiness into a zone of interrogation. Both artists seek, in the fractures of language and the shadows of the image, possible forms for a critical sensibility.
Throughout her career, Paksa challenges language as a technology of power. Her work Fire (1969) is presented as a target, but acts as a poetic shot. It alludes to the urgent, the threatening, the incendiary, both in sociopolitical and artistic terms. Its graphic design, in red and black, functions as a visual warning. But in truth, something in the image is already out of time; the word is already on fire. In the series Silencio (Silence, 1967), she creates a hermetic but transparent space; vibrant, yet suspended. A visual field where the said and the unsaid coexist in tension. It is not a peaceful silence, but one imposed by trauma and institutional violence. The crystal acrylic cubes are containers without content, volumes that materialize silence, the impossibility of expression. Transparency reveals nothing. On the contrary, it amplifies silence by exhibiting it.
Marín works with light and shadow as sensitive materials, using the black-and-white language of archives as a precise form in his visual poetics: altered newspapers, frozen frames, or the fragile memory of ephemeral paper. In her works, the past is not nostalgia, but record. A broken sky that burns in abstract smoke and tells stories that hurt without screaming. In her work Cuando divisé el humo azul de Ítaca (When I saw the blue smoke of Ithaca), she does not document the world, but evokes it. The images are not closed narratives, but thresholds to a future memory. Ruins under construction. A time that cannot yet be fixed. Unlike the cold precision of acrylic, Marín’s smoke is fleeting matter. It floats menacingly before fading away. It does not promise transparency, but opacity. It does not reveal: it suggests, clouds, diverts.
In Paksa, silence is structure; in Marín, atmosphere. One builds with emptiness, the other with dissolution. But in both, there is a desire to give shape to the ungraspable, to that which cannot be fully expressed. In this sense, both acrylic and smoke operate as materials of ambiguity: what seems transparent, what becomes opaque, what seems to float, what cannot be grasped. Both artists work with minimal strategies—the image of smoke, of emptiness, words, and graphic signs—and with a keen awareness of the political and emotional weight of language. Paksa’s work is set in a context marked by repression and surveillance. Marín’s work meditates on the diffuse and devastating effects of mediated reality.
Where politics and words fail, where meaning becomes opaque or vanishes, artists lead us toward an ethic of attention, toward a way of being in the world that does not deny its complexity, its violence, or its beauty. The exhibition proposes to open up this zone of interference with a selection of works by each artist, and to activate a chamber of resonance between the two trajectories, which here mirror each other, alter each other, and dialogue in identical or remote vibration.