Pleamar Inmersiva 2025, the great sensorial celebration of digital and electronic arts, concludes.

Water . This has been the conceptual axis of the Pleamar Inmersiva 2025 Festival , a classic and fundamental event on the electronic arts agenda, which has decisively influenced the expansion and dissemination of this branch of art. It brings together music, visual art, and technology, with a strong emphasis on the immersive and experimental. Curated by the experienced Luciana Aldegani, the event featured water as an enveloping core, a sensorial experience that began on June 4 and ends on July 14 at the Palacio Libertad (formerly the CCK).

For nearly six weeks, a wide and curious audience engaged with all their senses in the immersive room and in another conference room, featuring performances, installations, and lectures by artists, musicians, experts, and key figures in the increasingly diverse and diverse world of digital and electronic arts.

“I think it has been and continues to be very interesting to incorporate artists in both live experiences and video installations, under the guise of establishing a central theme: water as an object of discussion, which can be approached in a variety of ways,” explains Aldegani, a curator and pioneer in this field. “The artists offered a very interesting interpretation of that idea.”

Pleamar was founded in Mar del Plata by Aldegani and Ernesto Romeo, composer, keyboardist, synthesizer specialist, and founder of the electronic music group Klauss. In 2018, they taught their first courses on this conceptual universe, and in 2019, they received support from the National Endowment for the Arts for the first edition of the Pleamar Scholarship. Since then, they have organized series at the MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, worked with the Manzana de las Luces Historical Complex, the Kirchner Cultural Center, and the National University of Tres de Febrero. They also held activities in 2023 in Buenos Aires, specifically at Artlab and the Recoleta Cultural Center, and in Bariloche. Until 2021, the festival was more oriented toward the field of sound, but since then, the visual arts have gained ground and representation.

“The Mar del Plata Festival is designed from an environmental perspective. We start with water, we return to water, and then we create that liquid metaphor,” says Aldegani, referring to the Mar del Plata version of the series, which will take place this year on November 22 and 23 at the MAR Museum.

“The themes begin to take on borderline situations, shorelines, and concerns emerge that have more to do with a scanning of geographies, from the ocean to the plains to the mountains. Pleamar's growth is organic and sustainable, doing what it can with a strong footprint in reality, based on the immediate response that the artists give us,” explains Fernando Molina, architect, audiovisual artist, and curator of visual arts at Pleamar.

The exCCK's activities cycle featured highly valued moments such as the audiovisual performances μruguay (Sebastián Seifert), Quintessence (Audiota + Esteparia), and Premonition (Sol del Río), which explored water as a fluid, sensorial, and hypnotic medium. Curators Jazmín Adler and Agustina Rinaldi also presented presentations on the first computer-generated works through to the development of immersive sensorial environments and the intersection of art, science, and technology. Also highly praised were those by Molina, Hernán Caratozzolo, Ernesto Romeo, and Lucas DM.

Molina's talk was linked to the concept of immersion. He addressed the paradoxical question of the fascination generated by this experience. "Before we are born, we are already in an immersive environment. We are conceived in a womb, in something that shelters us. Our entire life unfolds in immersive situations. Our three-dimensional reality has a floor, a ceiling, and sides. So, what is it that fascinates us so much about going to a room to be immersed when we are already immersed in life? It is the intentionality, the artist's fantasy focused on those six faces of the cube that contain us and that are, in reality, as ancient as life itself."

It was then that Molina referred to the sensation felt by those who inhabited places like Lascaux Cave, France, 12,000 years ago: "That primitive civilization that was enclosed in the Cave begins to reproduce on the walls and ceilings the reality of what it saw: the animals, the house, the search for food." The architect and audiovisual artist concludes: "I wonder why we are fascinated by a situation like this, which is nothing more and nothing less than the artist's perspective that defines the immersive space and the experience we will have inside as a somewhat contradictory and paradoxical form of this new paradigm of the arts."

Aldegani walks through the immersive gallery on the fourth floor of the exCCK, while Seifert develops her striking work, which expressed a sense of being in nature and was highly praised by the public. Shortly afterward, the curator reflects on the intersection of these expressions with the world's environment in all its variations: "I find the politics that are imprinted on the selection of devices, the components to which artists have access, and all the decisions and differences that arise from being an artist in Latin America and Europe interesting."

–So, how does the Latin American electronic artist position himself in this context?

Electronic art is influenced by situations that are the artist's own decisions, but that are also circumstantial. Access to certain technologies leads to more or less development of digital artists than in other places. And all of this gives the Latin American scene, ours, a very strong push because we're constantly working within the gaps, inventing what's missing, and that trains creativity in an explosive way. There's a lot of wire and a lot of soldering, while in the European scene everything is impeccable, perfect, neat.

–That "lack" necessarily makes a difference, doesn't it?

–Our scene is prolific, powerful in the conceptual aspects of its works, in its journeys. I have the opportunity to speak with many artists who change the way we see the world, and that's fabulous. They are deeply involved in their creations and addressing the lack, the absence. Sometimes, the negative reality presents is backed by a giant positive that strengthens the conceptual aspects of the work, because to reach the technological element they need, artists have to go through other workshops, other studios, and that strengthens the community of artists.

By Hernán Caratozzolo and Ernesto Romeo, Friday, July 11, 6 p.m. - Auditorium 411 of the Libertad Palace (Ex-CCK) Sarmiento 151. CABA

•Thursdays and Fridays | Video installations in the Immersive Room from 2 to 8 p.m.