| My practice involves a series of experiences taking place mostly in the public space. To do so I use street actions, installations and performances, organization of events, or interventions in the media, strategies that are points of departure of what a work might become. I usually seek the collaboration and participation of people that come from different professional, social, or cultural backgrounds, but also like to operate anonymously in non-artistic environments. Post-card and Post-er are probably the most “successful” projects—in terms of reception and reach—I’ve developed so far, both related to the consequences of the economic crash that affected Argentina by the end of 2001. |  |
Florencia Reina
My practice involves a series of experiences taking place mostly in the public space. To do so I use street actions, installations and performances, organization of events, or interventions in the media, strategies that are points of departure of what a work might become. I usually seek the collaboration and participation of people that come from different professional, social, or cultural backgrounds, but also like to operate anonymously in non-artistic environments.
Post-card and Post-er are probably the most “successful” projects—in terms of reception and reach—I’ve developed so far, both related to the consequences of the economic crash that affected Argentina by the end of 2001. In April 2002, unemployed and with no prospects of any future (30 percent of the population unemployed and more than 50 percent under the poverty line) I took a residency program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Together with my personal belongings I packed 200 tourist postcards of Buenos Aires to be later overprinted at my new destination. Now, a white silkscreen layer was covering the photograph almost completely creating a new surface to be used. The postcards were sent to a network of relatives, friends, and friends of friends, all of them Argentines, most of them living abroad, who were encouraged to use the postcard to describe the place where they were living at the time, or to imagine an ideal place. The addressees were asked to send the intervened postcard back to Maastricht to conclude the experience.
Post-er is a series of ten black-and-white photo posters of disused billboards around Buenos Aires. The empty surfaces, once portraying gigantic stunning models in underwear or the latest, coolest mobile phone became, all of a sudden, one of the most visible signs of the economic collapse. I started shooting at these immense white surfaces, collecting, and documenting them in all their manifestations. The series was later printed in a print shop run by a cooperative of workers, one among other 150 companies and factories organized under the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (bankrupt and abandoned factories that had been saved and recovered by its workers in a desperate act to keep their jobs). An interesting cycle was created when those images of abandoned surfaces were reproduced by hundreds in an occupied, recovered space. The posters were later placed in some of these facades, a way to establish who is occupying that space and why.
