Online Residency 2022

Biography

Río Cuarto, 1995. Melina studied at  National University of Córdoba in High Teaching and Bachelor of Visual Arts.

Over the years she participated in various collective exhibitions. In 2018, she began her career in individual exhibitions with the show “Topotesia -of something I don’t know yet-” at the House of Culture in the city of Río Cuarto. That exhibition was the beginning of a conceptual journey that forged and gave meaning to her later works, investigating the tension between the concepts of topography and topothesia. Her thoughts haunt the perceptive experience of the landscape. The act of walking, of entering the landscape and being surrounded by it, the act of traveling, have been the main engines of her production.

She received creation grants from the city hall of La Falda on two occasions and from the National Fund for the Arts. She was also awarded an exchange scholarship with the University of Chile (2019) participating in the Network of Interrelation of the Arts (RIA-TDL) and participated in the BIENALBA Young Art Biennial in 2022.

She currently resides and teaches artistic exploration workshops in the city of La Falda, she is an attached professor of the Final Work Seminar at the UNC and participates in the research team “From the drawing. Drawing processes and practices in the expanded field of contemporary art. Case studies”.

 

Artistic Statement

From 2017 onwards, I have been investigating the relationship between the con- cepts Topography (description of a real place) and Topothesia (proposal of a non-existent place) and their implication in the reality perceived through the landscape.

The search originated in the exploration of materials and forms to represent the landscape, moving away from the iconic, and how the fragmentation of the image works as an opening to new interpretations. One of the methodologies that I have used to materialize these explorations has been the representation of the shadows of the mountainous reliefs, in this way, when facing the work, the mountain is not
identified despite having been the model of representation, here it is would gestate the topotesia.

The act of walking, of entering the landscape and seeing myself surrounded by it, the act of traveling, have been the main engines of my production. The impossibility of travel in this pandemic era has led me to other searches, drawing the topogra-phy from past photographs, trying to remember the experience of the landscape from the line and the gesture, trying to build a fictional landscape for confinement
circumstances.

How to remember the landscape.

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