Natalia Iguiñiz – “Ansío lo que crece mientras cae”

Reception: November 1st, 2024

_VIGILGONZALES Buenos Aires - Presidente Roque Saenz Peña 628 - P4 - Buenos Aires

_VIGILGONZALES Buenos Aires is proud to present I Long for What Grows as It Falls [Ansío ver lo que crece mientras cae], the first solo exhibition by Natalia Iguiñiz Boggio in our Buenos Aires gallery. The academic path of Natalia Iguiñiz Boggio as a teacher and researcher remains in constant dialogue with the current expansion of Latin American feminisms. Ansío ver lo que crece mientras cae is the Peruvian artist’s essay that continues the exploration initiated with Dejo este cuerpo aquí  (2021).
Each body of work addresses one of the two sides of patriarchal power. While Dejo este cuerpo aquí focuses on the effects and impacts imprinted on feminized bodies that resist in a horizontal position, the present exhibition shifts its focus to vertical symbols, prominent in the patriarchal order.
Iguiñiz’s work is part of a broad social movement that seeks to reestablish in political imagination the idea that the common good has been the value that allowed our species to survive, reminding us that humanity is sustained not by competition but by collaboration. I Long for What Grows as It Falls aims to bring these questions to the surface, enriching them through dialogue between diverse political realities.

 

Exhibition texts (spanish)

 

 

 

Faced with the question of how to intercept the vertical order, Iguiñiz decides to make visible, both from personal experience and historical reflection, the symbolic and epistemic aspect that sustains that order. In his interpretation, it is not the phallic in itself but its establishment as a constant point of reference, as a measure against which everything is subalternized, which has been functional to consolidate the blind valuation of individual success. This obsessive attitude towards the possession of power is traceable in the history of the West in canonical monuments to various heroes, in Greek columns and obelisks, which repeatedly replicate the same geometry in architecture. Thus, the underlying concepts that sustain patriarchal power are those of going upwards or rising, when this gesture has originally been for humanity a form of contact with something greater that contains us.

 

Iguiñiz seeks to identify the cracks in the system, highlighting all that grows and lives in spite of it, wondering how fragile that same system must be for so many actions and accessories to be necessary to insistently maintain it. It is the piercing and the piercing the actions that seek to dethrone the symbols of patriarchal power; it is the seeping through its cracks and weaknesses that will gradually make it "fall". It is the tides that come in and out of the columns that weaken the arrogance of patriarchy and capital: rivers, ivy, mycelium, bushes, elements of the natural world that, in their perseverance, are stronger and more durable.

 

Cardboard, the main support of the pieces, presents the aesthetics of consumption. However, the essay pronounces its capacity for reuse and recycling, where the rebirth of meaning is made possible by the alchemy of the exhausted. In the choice of this materiality, Iguiñiz gives us to understand that art can be a means of social communication accessible to all. The cartons are piled up and superimposed, as well as the layers of interpreted historicity. Faced with an awareness and sensitive positioning in the Anthropocene, where life forms are destroyed in pursuit of the fulfillment of unbridled ambition, Iguiñiz proposes us to understand that the system is as violent as it is fragile, and that a vital power -which we all seem to carry- is capable of slowly transforming it in its path.