Sunday June 26, 2022 | 6:00 a.m.
The visual artist Sandra Gularte presented yesterday at the Costanera de Posadas the artistic installation Contornos. It’s not heat, it’s clearing, an exhibition of 70 ceramic seeds that take their colors and shapes from wild, native and Creole species.
This artistic intervention is part of a research work that the artist began a few years ago in conjunction with a group of agricultural producers from the southern zone.
The project consists of the collection and cataloging of seeds found in the mountains or in the city, which are native to this region or which, although not native, have been guarded by generations of peasants and adapted to this soil.
The ceramic seeds are the fruit of an investigation. Photo: Nicholas Arce
“I work with a group of young producers from San José and Santa Inés, they collect the seeds, they bring them, we try to catalog and learn more about them, there are some that are wild and we have not yet been able to identify them, and I make them into ceramics , with colors and shapes that have to do with the soil of Misiones and with biodiversity,” Gularte said in an interview with El Territorio.
The objective of this proposal is to bring people – in this case the city – closer to the “infinity of forms of the mountain and its richness”, indicated the artist. And for this reason, the seeds in the sample do not have a name: “I think of the intervention as a game, in which through the shapes of the seeds, the colors that vary a lot and that have to do with the range of colors of our soil, they can recognize some that are more common to see because they are part of the city’s landscape, such as those of the lapachos, and they can also be surprised by the wild seeds, which have wings or openwork or any other incredible shape”.
In this game -he expressed- “there is also commitment and awareness, because we saw the fires in the summer, we complained about the heat, and of course there is the phenomenon of climate change, but clearing is something we see every day, and that we have to do something, the seed and the circular then symbolize life, an identity and a future”.
Gularte explained that last year he made the presentation of Contornos in a farm in Santa Inés, “there I had 25 seeds, today we have 70 ceramic seeds, and it is a research work that is in process and that I like to present together with other arts and with other activities that tell us about nature, on this occasion we are accompanied by producers, the Municipality, the Ministry of Family Agriculture and the association of visual artists Amtav”.
Surround circularity
The intervention occupied a circular space “a contour” of ten meters, where the pieces were arranged in the form of a semicircle, and in that game of surrounding circularity, the poetry ‘I am a wild seed’, by Ezequiel D’Amoriza, was also played on audio , or Ser Monte.
During the day there were also talks about planting trees, orchards and agroforestry. Photo: Nicholas Arce
In turn, throughout the day there was an exchange of seeds from producers in the southern zone of the Organic Agriculture Network of Misiones (Raom), as well as awareness talks on issues of caring for the environment such as urban tree planting, urban gardening, management of waste, climate change and more.
D’Amoriza, who is part of the ‘Contours’ project and is an agroecology technician, gave a talk on agroforestry, a production model that replicates the forest system and allows different species to be planted that coexist with each other.
“What we evaluate is density and biodiversity, that is, when we enter the mountain we see that it is a blanket of vegetation, that roots and branches intermingle, competition is also supportive and allows life. And that is what we want to systematically replicate,” he said.
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