Santa Isabel 52, 2008. Horse bristles and foam board, 100 x 70 x 12 cm.

Second Skins: A Conversation with Marcela Astorga

Marcela Astorga, an Argentine artist born in the province of Mendoza, creates work with both visual and conceptual impact. For the last 20 years, she has used art as a means to face issues of importance to her: violence, memory, identity, and construction/deconstruction as represented through architecture, as well as the marks that we leave and the deficiencies that we suffer. Her installations establish a dialogue between materiality, physical space, and symbolic power. Skin, hair, and fabric– scraps representing tears as well as traces–testify to those who once inhabited and wore them. In creating these witnesses of existence, Astorga works from a silent place, appealing to the forcefulness of the image, not to the word. Her search leads to the boundaries between outside and inside, to natural borders, like skin, and those that we create to demarcate territories of our own. …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.