RESIDUAL USES AND CONSUMPTIONS: A SOCIAL LANDSCAPE AT FUNDACIÓN OSDE

The Espacio de Arte at Fundación OSDE presents Nada Personal, a solo exhibition by artist Nicolás Martella, born in La Plata. The show brings together over twenty years of visual production organized into seven projects, featuring screenshots, found images, printed documents, books, and digital archives that go through processes of classification, assembly, and editing. Each piece reveals its own internal logic: a mixture of visual overload and obsessive order. “It seems chaotic, but it’s super administrative; Nico’s drive is a marvel,” said curator Joaquín Barrera.

One of the core projects in the show is Photographs from My Birthday (2013–2022), in which the artist bought all the major national newspapers published on June 7th each year and meticulously cut out the images. With 1,184 photographs archived and mounted like a visual atlas, the project becomes a third-person portrait and a possible political, economic, and cultural history of the present. It highlights how information is organized, repeated, and eventually discarded.

A similar intersection between the personal and the collective appears in Self-Portraits (2012), where Martella collected screenshots of his contacts’ computer desktops—before the concept of the “selfie” even existed. The result is a choral portrait built from digital intimacy: folders, wallpapers, and open windows displayed as the “underwear” of their owners.

In parallel, the artist presents a series focused on the images used to study art history—photocopies of photocopies that circulated in academic summaries—which shows how, through reproduction and mass circulation, these images acquire the status of new originals. Far from being degraded copies, they become visual references in their own right: the versions through which many people first encountered the great works of art.

Another clear focus of the exhibition is digital residue, explored in depth in My Received Files (2009). This series gathers 1,507 photographs salvaged from public computers in La Plata cyber cafés, where users often forgot their downloaded images. Martella does not delete or alter anything: he copies and preserves everything—portraits, early selfies, and intimate photos. It serves as a testimony to the democratization of image access at a time when not everyone had a computer at home.

Across these works, Martella operates as archivist, collector, and editor. His pieces document the ways we produce, organize, and discard images. He does so with rigor and accumulation, but also with a certain tenderness for everyday gestures. The question of the archive’s future—its form, its scale, its meaning—runs throughout the exhibition.

The show is on view through August 30 at Fundación OSDE’s Espacio de Arte, Arroyo 807, Buenos Aires.

*Cover image: Nicolás Martella. Self-portrait from the series Autorretratos (selection), 2012. Screenshots mounted on stretcher, 18 x 28.80 cm. Courtesy Fundación OSDE.