Nicolás Rodríguez’s installation (Argentine Pavilion) is situated in the material and political fissure between the ancestral and the contemporary. The work is an area of tension that exposes the dialectical struggle between hegemonic progress and the persistence of cultural memory. Far from being a simple architectural dismantling, it is an essential symbolic and decolonial operation: allowing the repressed to regain substance through the base material.

Rodríguez approaches adobe as the sensitive core of colonial memory, a ‘mixed and impure material’ that is the sediment of a land punished by historical violence and extractive exploitation. Its revaluation is a political statement that reverses the aesthetic hierarchies imposed by modernity.

This confrontation manifests itself in the aesthetics of contrast: the ‘smooth shine’ of official history, which seeks sterility to close off the past, is overwhelmed by the ‘lively and porous roughness’ of adobe. This porosity symbolises resistance, permeability and the impossibility of walling up the sensitive archive. The work is a materialised manifesto that demands we confront the reality of our historical foundations in order to negotiate the potentiality of a truly decolonised future, where the impure and the mestizo reclaim their place. It is a cultural battle fought in the texture of the wall.

Victor Lopez Zumelzu