Counterleak

Video and embossed metal sheets

Variable Dimensions

The interrupted horizon
 
Many years ago, Claudia Casarino carried out an intervention in the rooms of the Citibank Cultural Center. It was called Exercise for the recovery of the horizon (from the harmless) (2003). The rooms were empty and a dotted line was drawn at their corners; In some places an image of scissors was seen indicating that the line had to be followed to cut. Casarino was looking to tear down a wall, perhaps here the artist was referring to the exhibition space seeking to tear down the walls of the art gallery, but it serves us to return to a strategy that she took at one time and to which, in a tangential way, the work presented here can be related. , fourteen years later.
Although, in the 2003 work, the idea was to recover something lost - the horizon -, in the current installation a loss is evident, perhaps the loss of a possibility: that of the wide world that can be traversed, the idea of migration as a horizon of possibility. In Contrafuga (2017), Casarino reflects roughly on colonization and its consequences.
The colonization processes have served to sustain a way of life in the metropolises that would not have been possible without everything that colonization brought with it. Today this long process, which took various forms, has been evident in migration.
The old metropolises have decided not to take responsibility for their actions, their historical decisions, and have built much more concrete borders. The images of the aristocratic gardens, that metaphor that Casarino chooses, are destroyed as classified documents - whose access is limited to certain people - while a cage is built whose objective would be to not let anyone enter the privileged territory. But, the question may arise, who will really be caged?
 
Lía Colombino