Victoria Pastrana and Nicolás Rodríguez
In the Western imagination, the house is categorically separated from its inhabitants—it is a container we enter and exit, a commodity we purchase and sell. This conceptual division belongs to a broader ontology that has systematically divorced human beings from their surroundings. Victoria Pastrana’s work emerges from an alternative tradition, one that understands shelter not as an external object but as an extension of the self.
An uncanny domestic form anchors Pastrana’s first major presentation in an institution, Centro Cultural Recoleta, where the artist is showing new work in a joint exhibition with Mendoza-born Nicolás Rodríguez—part of an annual program dedicated to decentralizing Argentina’s cultural production beyond the capital. Woven from industrial onion bags that were previously submerged in the artist’s handmade adobe mix, Minga de lo Frágil (Communal Work of the Fragile, 2025) operates within productive contradictions. While the suspended house-shape structure commands the space through its monumental presence—embracing the shape of the Centro’s vaulted cloisters—its construction asserts its own vulnerability. Around one hundred disassembled bags become the crucial third element—fiber, which serves as a binder—in her reinterpretation of traditional adobe, alongside almost ninety pounds of soil and clay from the artist’s ancestral territory.
A recent art school graduate, Pastrana belongs to the Amaicha Indigenous Community, one of the few Indigenous groups in Argentina with communal land rights recognized by the state. Pastrana’s Centro commission hinges on what anthropologist Alcida Ramos critiqued as “the hyperreal Indian”—an idealized, static depiction of the “true Indian” originally promulgated by nonprofits but broadly upheld in contemporary art frameworks. The installation’s materials complicate romanticized visions of Indigeneity: While adobe signals traditional Andean architectural techniques, the polyethylene mesh—the kind Pastrana’s grandmother repurposes for transporting hay—also points to the commercial networks that shape contemporary migration patterns, an element tellingly absent from much discourse about Indigenous identities today. Minga de lo Frágil acknowledges that labor (all labor, Indigenous labor) follows commodities across landscapes: Onions in petroleum-derived plastic containers travel routes that bodies subsequently navigate in search of economic survival.
Argentina’s foundational colonial mythology—encapsulated in the pervasive assertion that “Argentines descended from ships”—has systematically excised Indigenous presence from its national identities. Against this erasure, Pastrana’s house without ground persists. Fragility becomes not weakness but strategy: a way of moving through colonial structures without being fixed by their logics, carrying the memory of the land in its very fibers.
