Domínguez Dentrecasa and Museo del Fondo del Paraná: (Modern) Art as an Archive of (Contemporary) Art

Abstract

This paper addresses the works Domínguez Dentrecasa (2003) by Lila Siegrist and Museo del Fondo del Paraná (2012) by Santiago Villanueva, exhibited at the LVII and LXVI Salón Nacional de Rosario, respectively. Both retrieve some works of local art from the mid-20th century that had remained excluded from the institutional arrangements of the museum and art history. These returns alone are holders for the revision of the established cartographies of modern art and, in addition, multiply this capacity by relating to different figures of the Paraná River through their underlying archival operations. By meeting in the fluvial, the archive and the region, notions linked throughout this essay, counteract the fixity of their definitions, multiplying themselves into questions defined from two specific artistic practices. In a continuous movement of additions, the region is sometimes perceived as a developmental remnant of substantial identity to be immediately questioned by the plurality of meanings that the image leaves in suspense. The archive, in turn, shows the constitutive power relations of its different contingencies: location, shelter, preservation, exhumation, tech support. The river, as archive and region or archive of the region, is questioned as landscape or subject of painting and is exposed to another conception different from these generic demarcations: the experimentations in the territory, its connection with the autobiographical construction, the multiple edges of its discursive emplacements. Domínguez Dentrecasa and the Museo del Fondo del Paraná seem to hold themselves on these complex intersections; in both projects, the reevaluation of symbolic expressions of the 20th century persists, returning to the fluvial as open questions to the future.