Bestial Art: open air, at the edge of the winery

Although the opening to the public has been planned for May, the program between San Juan and Mendoza Conexión arteba was the occasion for a preview of Arte Bestial , the great open-air project dedicated to different expressions of contemporary art that the businessman Ezequiel Eskenazi has been developing together with the curator Fernando Farina since 2010.

This is a monumental project in the powerful foothills of San Juan's Zonda Valley . A 200-hectare property, surrounded by hills surrounding the Xumek winery, owned by Eskenazi. Grappling with this desert landscape of boulders and stunted shrubs, a clear sky at night and day, has been the artists' greatest challenge, called upon in each case to explore the site before proposing their project.

The first to install a major work in this location was Adrián Villar Rojas , who in 2010 created a 28-meter version of the enormous whale he had presented the previous year, stranded in a lenga forest in Ushuaia, for the Second End of the World Biennial . The image of this striking work traveled around the world and, in some way, triggered the international acclaim the young artist now enjoys.

On that occasion, the curator was Fernando Farina, who was also responsible for the exhibition of his work as the first step in the Arte Bestial project, which already includes four other interventions by Argentine artists such as Charly Nijensohn , Mariana Tellería , Nicola Costantino , and Eduardo Basualdo . Some are practically finished, while others are in advanced development, and their dialogue with the climate and landscape continues to be evaluated by their authors based on any necessary adjustments.

In line with Eskenazi's stated intention to respect and conserve the flora and fauna of the vast property surrounding the winery, Charly Nijensohn's work went even further. Begun in 2022, Regeneration Strategies took the form of three large clay structures that blend into the landscape next to a reflecting pool. With an interior crisscrossed with passageways, holes, and small caves, the goal is to turn it into a refuge for the local animals.

It was conceived as a multidisciplinary art-science-technology research project that the artist carried out over six years in collaboration with a German scientist and other researchers from the University of San Juan and Conicet. As with all of Nijensohn's work, image recording is fundamental to each project. Thus, he installed a series of cameras inside the spaces to observe the behavior of the animals that use them as shelters.

Somewhat more distant, but also integrated into the landscape, Mariana Tellería's work emerges like a drawing on a series of burned trunks aligned toward a hill and the horizon, a disturbing warning sign. This is what can be seen so far from the artist, whose project—according to reports—is completed with display cases featuring motifs of different devotions next to each tree.

Eduardo Basualdo 's intervention, for his part, also transfers some of the problems he developed in the large exhibition Pupila , displayed at the Museo Moderno in Buenos Aires , to an elevated area of ​​this immense landscape. It is a schematic construction, with sloping walls, which can be entered through a thin profile. Once inside, the visitor encounters a large black stone that has pierced the roof . This dark, enigmatic shape that has pierced this unstable architecture—often considered a meteorite—is also an ominous threat that recurs in this artist's work.

Nicola Costantino's set is still in progress and is an adaptation of his Chancho Bola series in the form of spheres of different sizes that turn the chanchobolas into dinosaurs , in keeping with the extinct species of the region.

Elba Bairon and Gabriel Valansi are some of the artists whose projects will soon be added to this striking contemporary art park, which advocates an urgent appreciation of nature. However, according to Farina, each intervention takes time due to the complexity of each installation and inevitably requires long-term planning.