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Dozens of boxes with discarded objects. It is the first thing seen in Elisa Insúa’s studio in the Núñez neighborhood (Buenos Aires). Plastic toys, deodorants, old cassettes, bijouterie cheap… The list can be endless. Everything is arranged by colors on shelves, next to the works on which he is working. As silent witnesses of other lives, those materials appear that are the basic input of the Argentine artist, who exhibited her work in Mexico, the United States, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom.
When he was 16 years old, he began to work as an autodidact with sculptures and assemblies made from discarded materials. He later chose the career of Economics and Business. And he began to merge the world of art and that of numbers, with an eye on excessive consumption and how insatiable human beings can become. His work is a lucid look at certain economic axioms, with a pop aesthetic of great visual impact and a message of awareness about the reuse of materials.
“I started working with discarded objects when I was quite young. The link between the two things arose with the study of economic theory, which somehow explained those materials that I had been using in my works. From there I started working with works that reflect on certain economic issues that made noise about the linear economy, prices and materials”, says Insúa.
While working on one of her works -a mechanical hammer of those that breaks the streets with inlays-, the artist reviews those axioms that she learned in college; the “truths” of the economy that she tries to question from her work. “A very basic premise that they taught me in my first year of college, while I was studying economics, was the following: ‘The more, the merrier.’ A lot of corollaries follow from that. For example, the one that indicates that companies have to be selling more and more and increasing their profits all the time.
Part of those ideas are in his latest series “Industrial Landscape”, which recreates macroeconomic charts with industrial debris, such as the evolution of the index. Standard & Poor’s 500 and the global income distribution. “The first thing you see in those works is, somehow, a landscape. They even hint at Andes-like mountainous landscapes. The idea is to play with this graphic made of industrial waste, with the dichotomy between landscape and industry; between development and conservation and between civilization and barbarism”.
When he began to make art, Insúa would ask his friends and family to separate the waste to use in his works. With time and professionalization, this material was not enough and she had to search outside her circle and carry out collection campaigns. “I do it through social networks. Sometimes I also need black plastics or technology waste. People come to the workshop and I also set up collection points, in addition to collaborating with some cooperatives and companies that separate things for me that cannot be recycled and that are useful to me. For example, lighters, mascara, toys…”
The use of the material is varied. It goes from plastic to metal and even has some works with candies and resin. “I try to use objects that are not too heavy and that do not corrode due to conservation of work. Then there is a very arbitrary color palette thing, aesthetics and information. I try to keep the labels because they give information about the brands and the products and it is a way of signaling who is leaving that behind. The idea is that the materials make sense as a whole. I compose the meaning from the sum of the objects, which are in our daily life going around. The amount of things we buy, use and throw away is enormous. The idea is to take a dimension of that in some way.”
In this great universe of materials, plastic is one of the most present in Insúa’s work. On the one hand, it allows her to develop the strident aesthetic of his work. And, on the other, reuse the waste that is a growing threat and the most voluminous, harmful and persistent marine litter on the planet.
“Plastic is very much of today and there is the conflict of the number of single-use objects. There is something about plastic that allows me to develop the aesthetic of saturated colors, with a lot of brightness and large dimensions that are typical of the language of advertising. My idea is to use that language as a Trojan Horse and include an opposite language within the same language. The use of metal allows me, at a communicative level, to talk about value and wealth, which for many centuries was associated with this material. At one time I worked in Spain with a junk shop. Being Latin American, I wanted to resume the rescue of certain metals that were destined to be melted down or melted down”.
Fabiana Barreda, an artist specializing in new technologies and a curator, has known Elisa since she was very young. And she highlights her gaze on the consumer society. “Her work of hers is a question about sustainability. She builds new forms of ornament and reinserts them into society from the metaphor of art. Her reflection revolves around how economies can accompany social growth processes. In her work there is also the feminine, fashion, jewelry, the way of life… The metaphor of money is, in reality, a vehicle for the artist to make us reflect on social conditions”.
One of Insúa’s last exhibitions was in Mexico. Ethel Betsaida Ramos is a curator in that country and worked with the artist, whom she describes as “suggestive” in her representation of merchandise, consumption, and the fetish of objects in these times. “She handles the language of the economy in a very clear and tangible way; These are issues that are often not easy to process. Elisa lands them from a very attractive aesthetic field in the first impact of sight, with brilliant contrasts and with winks of an aesthetic of pop art”, says Betsaida Ramos.
The curator finds a hint of nostalgia in Insúa’s work, perhaps because of the bond we build with objects that we think are important but, like almost everything in life, are fleeting. “They are things that you use and that are leaving traces due to their consumption. She makes it explicit in her ensembles. Elisa’s objects are portraits of our contemporary life, which make the constant contamination clear to us. It is powerful and pertinent to reflect on our consumption footprints over time,” she added.
The afternoon falls heavy in this corner of the north of the city. The artist works standing up in her studio. With a glue gun, she gives beauty to a mechanical hammer, a tool that was used to destroy streets and generate noise pollution and is now art. The vast majority of the objects that make up her work had landfill destination. Elisa Insúa’s message is as clear as the power of her work when it comes to sustainability. “It should seek to make visible the processes that are behind and in front of things, with the idea of making consumption more conscious. There is something linked to the need for moderation and not to waste, to give value to things that are deserved, like water. It took a lot of work for her to open a faucet and make it clean and drinkable. Perhaps it is giving value to the things that really should have it”.
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