CASA ARDISSONE INAUGURATED ITS PARTICIPATION IN PINTA ASUNCIÓN ART WEEK 2025

This Wednesday, Casa Ardissone launched the program of Pinta Asunción Art Week, which this year chose the emblematic cultural space as one of its main venues. With the presence of artists, curators, cultural managers, and the local public, two exhibitions opened simultaneously, both engaging in dialogue around a shared axis: territory and its political, ecological, and social tensions.

The first, El nombre del mundo es ‘bosque’ (The Word for World is ‘Forest’), presents the work of artist Fernando Allen under the curatorship of Adriana Almada. The project takes as its starting point the celebrated science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1972, in which a planet covered in forests and inhabited by communities living in harmony with nature is devastated by terrestrial colonizers. Allen transposes that metaphor to a landscape he knows well: the Paraguayan Chaco, one of the regions with the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

In the past fifteen years, the Chaco has lost around four million hectares of forest. Through photographs, textiles, satellite maps, videos, and audio works, Allen highlights the clash between a balanced way of life and one rooted in exploitation and domination. A central aspect of his research is the similarity between the camouflage patterns of military and police uniforms and satellite images of deforested land: in both cases, fragmentation and discontinuity operate as signs of power and control over bodies and ecosystems. The exhibition thus seeks to reconstitute the image of the forest in transformation and reflect on the traces left by environmental devastation.

In parallel, the first floor of Casa Ardissone hosts a group exhibition featuring five artists who expand and complicate the view of territory, memory, and materiality.

Mónica González (Asunción, 1952) presents Últimas aguadas, 2025, an installation created with the footprints of endangered birds and mammals impressed on unfired clay. The work reflects on the ecological crisis in the Chaco, where water scarcity forces different species to share the same spaces, erasing each other’s tracks and revealing the fragility of an ecosystem under tension.

Claudia Casarino (Asunción, 1974) exhibits What We Do So They Don’t Know What We Do, 2025, tulle pieces that continue her exploration of transparency, layering, and suspended forms in space. The artist shifts her focus toward the visible and the processual, proposing an experience situated between perception and what resists capture.

Joaquín Sánchez (Barrero Grande, 1977) shows Pullira, 2014–2025, an installation that connects the memory of Aymara women with the communal potato harvest on Isla Pariti, in Lake Titicaca. The polleras (pulliras) here become devices of symbolic and collective safeguarding, intertwining the intimate, the ritual, and the political.

Gustavo Riego (Paraguay, 1983) participates with a work from his series Repression, 2025, created with hydrochloric acid on cotton fabric. His practice incorporates writing as a field of friction between word and image, confronting codes of control and the manipulation of information in everyday life.

Finally, Laura Mandelik (Buenos Aires, 1977), in collaboration with Victoria Mussi and Gabriela Mercado, presents the video Elevator, 2024. With a duration of 2:23 minutes, the piece reflects on the presence and absence of objects and questions how things occupy physical and mental space, playing between geometry and nature, order and accident.