A Retrospective Exhibition of Roma Blanco.
Curator Nekane Aramburu
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta presents Conjunction, Time, and Cosmogony, a retrospective exhibition of Roma Blanco. The exhibition showcases her work from major series, such as Pharmakon (2010), to her current Essays and Studies.
Under the curation of Nekane Aramburu, an art historian and specialist in transmedia practices, the exhibition offers a journey through Blanco’s research methodologies and approaches. In her most recent work, Blanco delves into the cosmovision of the Tastil community, culture, and people, which are unique in the characteristics of their territory and anthropological and historical development. “Roma Blanco integrates into rituals, listens to stories, and notes traces of myths and signs,” explains Aramburu. From this experience, the artist builds a system of representation in which “immersion in Tastil Culture focuses on real and recreated planes that can be traversed like a large, visitable drawing.”
Blanco’s work belongs to a genealogy of creators who have explored spiritual and conceptual dimensions through a distinctive visual approach. Aramburu notes: “Her studies, essays, and formulas reveal a structure that aligns with a particular vision of confronting multiple realities. The Study is the first translation of experience into graphics; the Essay is the result of a study taken to a deeper level of abstraction; and the Formula extracts the essence of this process.” In the exhibition, these categories connect the viewer to the transformation of her practice, from mastering drawing and printmaking to exploring video, installation, and spatial intervention.
Roma Blanco invites us to immerse ourselves in a sensitive web where art and research converge in the pursuit of knowledge intertwined with sustainability and preservation of the context. In her approach to the Tastil people, the artist embodies her alter ego as a healer, a hybrid role between creator, social researcher, and demiurge, with which she seeks to decipher the traces of an ancestral past still alive in the community of Santa Rosa de Tastil. “How do we make a world? How can we recover the accumulation of silenced human knowledge that might offer us some perspective for the future? The answer comes to the artist as an inescapable mantra: translate the experience into symbols, organize memory into maps, preserve ideologies in utopian formulas”, Blanco expresses.
The exhibition reviews her trajectory and unfolds a dialogue between time, body, and territory, revealing the persistence of collective knowledge and how art can reframe the past to imagine other possible futures.
