With suitcases converted into a portable workshop, the visual artist Lucía Calabrino traveled through Argentina, Italy, France and Spain with a simple and powerful premise: transforming the emotion of her migrant roots into work. Today, the closing of that journey is exhibited in the Cultural Corridor, 5th floor, of the Ministry of Economy of the Nation, Av Hipólito Yrigoyen 250, 5th floor (CABA) and can be visited until December 12.
The international exhibition tour was deployed with Mar del Plata 150, part of the ATAVICO project, as a living cartography of the territories between 2024 and 2025. The tour began in Mar del Plata, in the Art Room of the Municipal Palace, during the Italian Week and continued through Europe. I was invited to exhibit at the Casa Argentina in Rome; Ischia and Sorrento (Naples); Mascalucia, Acireale and AciTrezza (Sicily), in Italy. In Paris (International University City); France, Barcelona (Experimental Photo Festival), Spain; then returning to Rome in February 2025 at ContartGallery. Returning to the country, he joined Rosario in September 2025 and today in Buenos Aires. A total of twelve presentations.
The curatorial heart of the exhibition beats in Atávico, a project that investigates identity, family memory and traditions. It is a bridge between Europe and America that investigates Italian migration to our country.
The series Mar del Plata 150 that stars in this tour, honors Lucía’s hometown on its 150th anniversary. The development is through experimental photography techniques, cyanotypes, transfers, pinhole photography and solarigraphs intersect with textile interventions, paper embroidery and aerial embroidery, to weave its own grammar: family and contemporary images, letters, maps.
The personal history of Calabrino, the daughter of Italian immigrants, acts as a sensitive compass. In his pieces the red thread appears as a blood legacy, nets that evoke those of fishermen and a sea that is not a landscape but the protagonist of the journey.
The project was selected by the COMITES of Mar del Plata, accompanied by Italian institutions, declared of Cultural Interest by the municipality of General Pueyrredón
“Mar del Plata 150 / Atavico” is not limited to showing: it invites us to look closely at layers of technique and memory, to understand that migration is not a closed chapter but rather an ongoing conversation.
That conversation arrives today in the City of Buenos Aires: the closing exhibition at the Ministry of Economy of the Nation can be visited until December 12a last stopover to allow yourself to be traversed by images that, like the tides, return again and again to what we are.
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by CONTENT NEWS