What bronze doesn't tell us: new anniversaries that activate memory

There are calendars that feature holidays, national heroes, and rosettes. And others, like Otto Soria 's, surprise us with pencils, trains, dictators in toilets, and trees stuck in printers. In Efemérides , his solo exhibition curated by Laura Casanova, he creates an uncomfortable catalog of our recent history . A visual artifact as precise as it is irreverent that turns collective memory into a battlefield... and a playground.
No solemnity. Everything is political. The kind that makes you uncomfortable, the kind that doesn't allow you to look away. Because the artist has a commitment to resist oblivion , injustice, cynicism, or indifference.
“I try to understand what moves me, what hurts me,” the artist admits in an interview with Ñ . He doesn't need to swear. His background spans drawing, illustration, and decades in the advertising world, but his artistic impulse was born in the heat of 2001, like so many other things in this country. Leaving his office in Puerto Madero, he used his camera to record the protests that erupted almost daily in Plaza de Mayo.
Popular, 2022. Installation with an aluminum pot and lighting.
From that personal archive emerged his Book of Complaints , begun in 2017 with Illuminated in the Night of the Pencils , an image that seems straight out of a graphic novel. "It's the first one I made in this entire series. I had the idea and thought of three people being interrogated by the typical image of a desk lamp meant to intimidate people," he adds.
In Efemérides , some 30 works, including paintings, drawings, and installations, operate as a critical history class taught by a disobedient teacher who drags you out of the classroom and into the street . His works address historical events and contemporary scenes marked by inequality with sharp irony and visual precision.
Road Safety, 2019. Watercolor on paper. 30 x 45 cm.
Soria turns the school calendar on its head. Its anniversaries aren't for memorizing: they're for choking on and thinking about. There's a soup kitchen as the inaugural piece (neither decorative nor passive: a symbol of hospitality and resistance), and then rooms open up, organized like chapters without chronology, but with intensity. Ecocide, repression, inequality, wounded memory. Each work is like a blow on the table, but with a kid glove.
And there is also beauty and tenderness in the exhibition , which recovers ancestral knowledge: a textile installation based on the poem The Eternal Weaver , by Goethe, connects with watercolors inspired by legends from northern Argentina: the elf who takes care of the llamas and the vicuñas, the fable of the llama that meets a flame of fire or the guanaco that spits at the sky, are some of them.
View of the room with its role in the NGO Made by Us.
In collaboration with the NGO Hecho por nosotros and the company animaná, Soria researches and works with artisan communities, promoting the use of natural fibers as a political act. What she calls "artisan intelligence" is also a form of critique of fast fashion and the dehumanization of consumption.
“Tragedies, injustices, painful events, and hopes are displayed to keep memory alive, demand justice, and seek the truth,” the artist maintains. Titles such as “They Let Go of Their Hands ” (alluding to the ARA San Juan), “Sheared ” (on the corralito), “Like Cattle” (referring to the Once tragedy), or “Washing with Dirty Water” (floods and political cynicism) aren’t explanatory: they’re triggers. Each opens up multiple interpretations. Each piece condenses a time, a grudge, a question.
There is no carpet that can hide memory, 2018. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 30 x 45 cm. " width="720" src="https://www.clarin.com/img/2025/08/15/6mb2wxzzh_720x0__1.jpg">
There is no carpet that can hide memory, 2018. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 30 x 45 cm.
Ups and Downs , a painting that depicts economic inequalities with dark humor, won the UN First Prize in the Economic Justice category in 2023 and was exhibited in Geneva. A drawing born in a personal notebook that ended up in Switzerland. That's how far an idea can go.
And there's more. "Life Sentence in Memory" depicts the dictatorship as a brain-labyrinth from which Videla cannot escape. "There Is No Carpet That Can Hide Memory ," in memory of the AMIA bombing, places Justice on a carpet that doesn't sweep, but hides. "Retrate" is a toilet converted into an altar (or tomb) for repressors, where Videla, Hitler, Stalin, and Putin float trapped in tempera paints on a pedestal toilet.
Delivering Justice (or Parting Justice), 2019. Gouache, watercolor, and chalk pastel on paper. 30 x 40 cm.
Soria plays with the off-screen, associations, and the active participation of the viewer. “I like to leave messages open, like invitations. Let the audience fill them in. I learned this in advertising, but in art I found the depth that that world no longer offered me,” he analyzes.
This perspective is evident in pieces like Box Sweet Box —where a cardboard box commemorates the homeless—or in 16 Reams , an installation that shows a printer "planted" with a tree inside: the number of leaves obtained from a single tree. Throw Tomato Soup Here is a work conceived as a symbolic shield against attacks by conservation activists in museums . Instead of protecting itself, it offers itself as a sacrifice.
Textile installation "The Weaver," with watercolors inspired by legends from northern Argentina.
Anniversaries raise questions from the intersection of poetry and documentary, the artisanal and the urban. In times when forgetting is almost a public policy, Otto Soria proposes an inverse exercise: remembering as an act of resistance , pointing out what hurts and, at the same time, imagining futures. " We can do it ," says one of his works, where small human figures lift a huge beam. It may seem utopian, but it is also profoundly necessary.
Because, as curator Laura Casanovas recalls: “Anniversaries, originally, served to help sailors know where they were. The ones Otto proposes challenge us: where are we today? And what are we not willing to give up?”
Ephemerides can be visited at the Liliana Rodríguez gallery (Billinghurst 750, Almagro), from Wednesday to Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m., until August 23, 2025.
On Friday, August 15th at 6 p.m., the exhibition opens with the performance Efemérides audioluminicas , performed by the group Salón de los rejectados, and on Friday, August 22nd, at the same time, a guided tour with the curator will take place.
Clarin