El Camino en los Campos

Urban space and landscape, natural materials and craft techniques have been themes that have drived artist Olaf Holzapfel for years. He explores the similarities between digital images, urban grids and historical artifacts. In 2009, while searching for an argentinian material that could also express the grid of Buenos Aires, he discovered Chaguars, woven from the fibers used by the Wichí people to create textiles.

At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, Holzapfel participated in the traveling exhibition Menos tiempo que lugar. El arte de la independencia in 2010, which opened at the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, and developed the sculpture Temporäres Haus (Temporary House). This encounter led to an ongoing collaboration with the Wichí Gutiérrez family from the Salta province. The resulting textile works combine the cultural heritage of northern Argentina with contemporary artistic approaches. Both sides have continued and deepened this process and are now preparing an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires, which will open on November 8, 2019, and will subsequently be shown in Salta in 2020.
 
Holzapfel traveled several times to the Gran Chaco in northern Argentina as well as to Patagonia to understand the boundaries and transitions within the landscape. The matrix of a city like Buenos Aires and traditional textiles are not opposites. Buenos Aires, as a grid-planned city, is like a web of threads that continues to expand and interweave. In the Chaguar images, one can see continuous grids of light and shadow and color; the fields of the city and the landscape; the paths between these fields.
 
The exhibition El camino en los campos showcases Chaguar images that Holzapfel created with the Gutiérrez family, along with photographs and a video projection. The film Teresa en caminos entre sombras de cuadras del infinito will be previewed at a joint event with the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires. The film depicts the visual exchange; it is also the story of three women who, like the images, tell a story between land and city, and who have taken their destiny into their own hands over time.
 
Connected to the exhibition project in Buenos Aires, the significance of this long-term exchange and cultural transfer will be discussed. Holzapfel engages with regional cultural techniques in Berlin and Brandenburg, with textile works being anchored in this context. In the exhibition And Berlin will always need you at the Gropius Bau Berlin, he presented a dialogue of Chaguar and straw images. Craftsmanship reveals artistic qualities and visions for the future. How can the exchange between urban and rural ways of life be shaped? Perhaps these textile images represent an attitude toward our environment that narrates the future.