argentinian artists
Candelaria Traverso at MACBA: Traces of Time and Memory
October 30, 2025 | nadiaevangelina
Walking through the galleries of MACBA in San Telmo, one encounters the delicate yet insistently resonant world of Argentine artist Candelaria Traverso in her first solo-museum presentation in Argentina. The exhibition gathers works created over the last eight years — textiles, drawings, artist-notebooks, soft sculptures — all of which serve as elegies to the time of things, the traces objects carry, and the quiet persistence of memory.
Within this context, the exhibition’s title “Aquello que persiste” (that which persists) seems less metaphorical and more vital. What persists is not only the object, but its sedimented social life, its embedded memory.
In one corner of the show, her soft-sculpture textiles hang or fold, resonating with human weight despite their gentle fabrication. The interplay of scale, fabric, and stitching invites one into a tactile reverie: you can almost imagine the fatigue of hands that once sewed, the repeated motions of buying, selling, and re-selling. The works ask: how many bodies did this garment pass through? Which hands folded it, which wrinkle marks speak of wear? As the curator Miguel A. López observes, Traverso “approaches the garments as living traces… she interrupts their movement, creates a pause in which we can feel them as carriers of affects, contradictions and conflicts”.
One of the strengths of the exhibition lies in this bridging of macro and micro: the global flows of used clothes, the second-hand trade, the uneven circuits of production and consumption, and the intimate impulse to collect, to draw, to trace a mark. Traverso’s drawings and notebooks accentuate this: small format, handwritten, dusty-ligatured, as though memory were being sketched in real time. These artefacts function as witnesses to circulation, but also gentler acts of bearing witness.
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| MACBA |
Traverso’s practice is rooted in the hum of daily life—fairs, markets, itinerant vendors. Her interest lies in clothing and textiles not simply as material, but as carriers of circulation, of economies, of intimate histories.
Within this context, the exhibition’s title “Aquello que persiste” (that which persists) seems less metaphorical and more vital. What persists is not only the object, but its sedimented social life, its embedded memory.
In one corner of the show, her soft-sculpture textiles hang or fold, resonating with human weight despite their gentle fabrication. The interplay of scale, fabric, and stitching invites one into a tactile reverie: you can almost imagine the fatigue of hands that once sewed, the repeated motions of buying, selling, and re-selling. The works ask: how many bodies did this garment pass through? Which hands folded it, which wrinkle marks speak of wear? As the curator Miguel A. López observes, Traverso “approaches the garments as living traces… she interrupts their movement, creates a pause in which we can feel them as carriers of affects, contradictions and conflicts”.
One of the strengths of the exhibition lies in this bridging of macro and micro: the global flows of used clothes, the second-hand trade, the uneven circuits of production and consumption, and the intimate impulse to collect, to draw, to trace a mark. Traverso’s drawings and notebooks accentuate this: small format, handwritten, dusty-ligatured, as though memory were being sketched in real time. These artefacts function as witnesses to circulation, but also gentler acts of bearing witness.
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| MACBA |
Yet the exhibition does not remain in melancholic stasis. There is an urgency to the work: to bring into visibility what is usually invisible — the discarded, the used, the passed-through. The textiles gain urgency precisely because they persist; they become acts of survival, of resistance to erasure. In the current museum moment, an institution like MACBA mounting this show signals a broader commitment to forms of labour, memory, and economy often overlooked.
However, one might ask whether the density of reference — to markets, global commodity flows, textiles, circular economies — sometimes overwhelms the visual quiet of the work. At moments, the conceptual scaffolding feels dense, and a viewer unfamiliar with the layering of contexts may struggle to let the textile works simply “be”. That said, the tactile invitation of fabric, of folded bodies, of accumulated scrap, offers its own reward: an embodied encounter with time.
In sum, "Aquello que persiste" is a quietly potent exhibition. Traverso invites us to slow down, to regard the worn, the used, the re-used, and in doing so to feel the traces of lives that linger in cloth and thread. Rather than a triumphalist retrospective, the show is a gesture of testimony. If objects persist, so too do the stories they carry — and within the hushed space of MACBA, we are called to listen.
However, one might ask whether the density of reference — to markets, global commodity flows, textiles, circular economies — sometimes overwhelms the visual quiet of the work. At moments, the conceptual scaffolding feels dense, and a viewer unfamiliar with the layering of contexts may struggle to let the textile works simply “be”. That said, the tactile invitation of fabric, of folded bodies, of accumulated scrap, offers its own reward: an embodied encounter with time.
In sum, "Aquello que persiste" is a quietly potent exhibition. Traverso invites us to slow down, to regard the worn, the used, the re-used, and in doing so to feel the traces of lives that linger in cloth and thread. Rather than a triumphalist retrospective, the show is a gesture of testimony. If objects persist, so too do the stories they carry — and within the hushed space of MACBA, we are called to listen.
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| MACBA |
"Aquello que persiste"
Location: Macba, Av. San Juan 328, C1141 CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Opening Date: 17th July 2025
End Date: 25th November 2025
Working hours: Wednesday- Monday 12am-7pm
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