Translations:Graciela Sacco/6/en

Graciela Sacco was able to lay the conceptual foundations for her artistic work through the graduate thesis of her bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts. In said thesis, she carried out research into the Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns) avant-garde group of artists (1968) and their anti-establishment activities, which condemned both the precarious living conditions faced by sugarcane farmers in the province of Tucumán and the soft position taken by the media to benefit the large monopolies of the crop in the late 1960s. Tucumán Arde undertook interventions in public spaces in Buenos Aires, Rosario and Santa Fe, openly laying bare the crisis in the province using posters, graffiti, statistics and photos. A significant proportion of Sacco’s pieces were produced in the early 1990s, and were gradually transformed and activated as many times as the artist deemed necessary, redefining them in accordance with the social eruptions of each era and region. For instance, Bocanada (Mouthful; 1993-2014) is a series of heliographs showing close-ups of mouths, open as if shouting; her first installation took place in a kitchen that supplied meals for public schools in Rosario, and whose workers were on strike even though they were aware that their work provided what was for many children the only meal of the day. Over the course of a decade, with Bocanada Sacco left her mark on walls and buildings in cities such as Buenos Aires, São Paulo and New York, making waves and being critical of political campaign propaganda and other types of advertising hoardings. Graciela Sacco authored a book, published in 1994 and entitled “Sun Writings: Heliography in the Artistic Field”, in which she developed her research into heliography, a technique that enables images to be fixed on any medium, such as wood, acrylic, spoons and plates. The use of heliography would be decisive in her work, as she gradually strengthened her conceptual needs for movement, transition, transformation and quotidianity through the various mediums she employed. In Cuerpo a cuerpo (Body to Body;1996-2014) Graciela Sacco would use heliography on splintered wooden spoons to imbue photos of student demonstrations with new meaning, such as those of May 1968 in France, the Cordobazo and Rosariazo uprisings in Argentina in 1969, or the 1971 protests in Colombia that ended in the massacre of dozens of people. In this series, political violence was revived by constructing a universal memory of struggle and social protest. In 1996, Sacco was the only artist to represent Argentina in the 23rd São Paulo International Art Biennial in Brazil, participating with her works Las cosas que se llevaron (The Things They Took; 1996), El incendio y las vísperas (The Fire and the Eve; 1995), Esperando a los bárbaros (Waiting for the Savages; 1995-2014) and Bocanada (1993-2014), where she presented her notion of “interference” and explored the impact that occurs when images materialize before the world’s eyes by dematerializing everyday objects. In addition to the São Paulo biennial, Graciela Sacco would participate in others such as Mercosur (1997), Havana (1997 and 2000), Venice (2001), Shanghai (2004) and Bienalsur (2016-2017). Transition, borders and limits are themes that were also probed by Sacco; in M2 (2007-2014) she used the square meter as a unit of area to explore the minimum living space that human beings need in society, and the circumstances through which said space is reduced or violated. In it, her experimentation with mediums shifted to video installation and the effects of site-specific lighting.