Arete Guazú — When Carnival Becomes Language

Group Exhibition Proposal

Curatorial Statement

The project brings together the practices of Gabriel Altamirano and Gerónimo Araquistain, curated by Gastón Fournier, within a dispositif where the imagery of the litoral—birds, feathers, and carnival—shifts from representation into a system of symbolic construction. Moving away from folkloric readings, carnival is approached as a language: a space of excess, transformation, and the possibility of becoming other.

Within this framework, Altamirano develops a poetic and oneiric universe, while Araquistain introduces a material and accumulative logic that activates a critical reading of contemporary consumption. The dialogue between both practices is not illustrative but structural, unfolding tensions between the natural and the artificial, the symbolic and the material, the intimate and the collective.

The project proposes an understanding of carnival not as celebration, but as a system of meaning production. Image, body, and matter operate as language, shaping unstable territories defined by economic, affective, and cultural forces. Territory is no longer conceived as landscape, but as a dynamic field of transformation and dispute.

Ultimately, the proposal constructs an ecosystem of relations where value is not fixed in the artwork alone, but in the network it generates. Carnival becomes a dispositif through which identities are continuously reshaped—no longer fixed, but unfolding within a space of ongoing transformation.