The walls of the Recoleta Shopping Center, plastered by colonial tradition

The difficulty was also that the land is not the same when one moves geographically, so the artist Victoria Pastrana moved the clay needed for Minga de lo Frágil from her home in Amaicha del Valle (Tucumán) to El Recoleta. Together with Untitled (Argentine Pavilion) by the artist Nicolás Rodríguez , the works make up the exhibition Corteza interna (Internal Cortex) in room 5 of the Recoleta Cultural Center, which can be visited until the middle of this year.

Both works are displayed in the room that was once a small chapel , with lower, vaulted ceilings. Its entrance marks an entry into the domestic space, the hearth, the house. The earthy architecture of those houses on the fringes, plastered over by colonial tradition .

“It's a 400-year-old building, with many walls originally constructed of adobe, which were successively clad, giving the appearance of a flat, white surface, highlighting a type of architecture that came from elsewhere,” Rodríguez explains to Clarín . “I was thinking about the effort and insistence of maintaining that plaster and the parallel that exists in maintaining the appearance of something that isn't. And what would happen if one day that cladding gave way and what was always there was revealed,” he adds.

Untitled (Argentine Pavilion) was designed as a site-specific piece that tears open the pristine white wall surface that used to be a ribbed vault before becoming room 5. The earth, mud, clay, the unbridled viscera hidden beneath the wall of the white cube are exposed, the adobe enunciates the fragility of all construction.

At the other end of the room, thin bags covered with clay cast shadows, generating some of the coolness typical of adobe buildings , a precious temperature when the sun rises threateningly in northwestern Argentina. “The main idea of ​​the house was always to allude, first and foremost, to my situation as a migrant, as a person who has to leave the territory,” says Pastrana. “You travel with only the clothes on your back, with a backpack, just as I’ve had to transport work,” he adds.

Internal migration is constant in the Northeast, including migrant migrations regulated by the harvest or lemon harvest ; and larger movements, migrations to the south of the country to work in some of the companies that have set up shop in Patagonia or in the pear harvest.

Pastrana alludes to this forced movement. She herself moves between territories, although her production originates from Amaicha del Valle , where she resides. She strongly criticizes the imposition of "leaving in order to progress," in territories that are becoming depopulated due to the lack of public policies and the lack of institutions that promote vital support for their inhabitants. "The fragility of the house " also alludes to a fragility in sustaining presence.

The house as skin emulates how we wrap ourselves, the colors and textures we use to shelter ourselves on different levels of the skin. “Adobe involves collecting the ingredients, preparing them, applying them as a group, and then maintaining them. These are all stages you have to be present in, putting your hands and body into it. I like that. Gathering with people and sharing—in times of transience and individuality—sharing is a political decision,” Rodríguez explains.

The house as a community structure also appears in Pastrana's work. "It's very crazy, always having to explain that you're part of a community because that already conditions many aspects of your life," the artist tells Clarín . "From a work perspective, a family perspective, a cultural perspective, specifically in how a community is formed—the Indigenous Community of Amaicha del Valle—which, in this case, is established in relation to the town it belongs to. There are different obligations as a community member, specifically participating in politics; on the other hand, there's something much more closely tied to family ties. There, I also feel a lot of shelter, which is linked to the community activities that take place in the houses, starting with food," she explains.

Linked to support, shelter, the house, and adobe as its material, as well as the shared labor of building the dwelling's walls. The allusion is to the fragility of the house due to the migrations that constantly interrupt it, an ethereal home built in the circumstances of unwanted nomadism .

Pastrana's adobe is thin, permeating orange plastic bags, the kind used in grocery stores to store onions or potatoes, with a weave very similar to that of a hand-woven fabric. It floats in the air, hanging from the ceiling, without foundations . "This house would like to take root, would like to plant, but the reality is that it has no foundation; it looks like something floating, unstable," he says.

In Pastrana's and Rodríguez's works, the contradiction of an internal cortex is manifest, the dual tension of endoskeleton and exoskeleton, although the definitive duality is also traceable in the colonized heritage . Between what sustains and what would like to sustain, between the interior that is uncovered and has been covered, between what emerges and what floats, the nomadic and what adapts, both works occur. They intertwine, reveal a common effect/affect, suggest the actualization of the past in the present, the ruptures and constancies in the architectural heart of an ancient chapel, also domestic.

Inner Cortex can be visited in room 5 of the Recoleta Cultural Center (Junín 1930, CABA) with free admission for Argentine residents, from Tuesday to Friday from 12 to 21, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 11 to 21, until June 20.