CURATORIAL TEXT: /E’A/

Juan Yapari Museum, August 2025, Posadas, Misiones, Argentina

What traces does a territory leave on artistic practices?

The history of the Misiones region—ancestral Mbya-Guaraní territory, now divided between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay—is marked by open wounds: the evangelizing colonization of the Jesuit Missions, the devastation of the War of the Triple Alliance, the destruction of Paraguay’s productive hub, waves of migration from a hungry and war-torn Europe, and the political shifts that shaped the province.

All of this forms a mboyeré cultural landscape—scrambled, intertwined, contradictory—or ch’ixi, as defined by the theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The ch’ixi concept does not seek purity, but rather celebrates the coexistence of dissimilar forms, the power of the mestizo, that which vibrates between opposites and embodies unresolved tensions.

Within this complex fabric, art can be a compass. The title of this exhibition, /E’A/, captures this spirit: a borderland, bodily expression that erupts when words are not enough, when the unexpected imposes itself. As semiotician Ana Camblong points out, these phrases from popular speech reflect the everyday spatiality we inhabit without thinking. /E’A/ proposes to interrupt that inertia: to unsettle the gaze, to allow oneself to be affected by what grows in the cracks of the territory.

To reclaim /E’A/ as a name also implies recognizing that art is deeply anchored in social, historical, and institutional webs. As Ticio Escobar suggests, the contemporary is not a style, but the capacity to activate multiple perspectives from specific contexts. The works gathered here do not float in abstraction: they are rooted in the context from which they emerge, in its history and its accent.

The image of the capuera—the forest clearing where vegetation regenerates spontaneously—becomes a symbol of this process: a place that defies order and the logic of control, inviting us to imagine other ways of being and seeing. Is it merely a remnant of the forest, or can it be a fertile territory for redefinition?

To translate a territory into an image, an object, or a gesture is a situated act. If art is work, it is also translation: making the invisible visible, giving form to what vibrates. In this density, subjectivities intersect, meanings are stretched, and languages are reconfigured. The works in this exhibition do not illustrate a linear history; they celebrate what already exists and resists: minimal gestures, unofficial narratives, voices that spring forth between stones and roots.

To inhabit the Juan Yapari Museum also raises a question: what is a museum today? More than a display case for objects, it can be a living archive, a network of traces left by those who try to inhabit the world differently. Art, as Escobar says, deepens the real through play with the imaginary. This exhibition proposes to open that play, to trace new paths through the thicket of meaning.

We therefore ask:
— What legitimizes an artistic practice?
— What conditions cause an image to become a work of art?
— What role does art play in a geography like this?

Making art is a form of community. To persist in creation is to weave networks, share knowledge, and sustain affections. /E’A/ is also that: an affective magnet that draws together bodies, materials, and desires into an expanded field of art. Not to provide answers, but to keep asking:

What accent does art have when it walks on “tierra colorada”*?