The exhibition presents three of Straschnoy’s projects from the period 2003-2006, its beginning given by the invitation to participate in the Ex-Argentina exhibition and its end marked by his eventual move to Helsinki and consequential closure of his workshop. What is remarkable about El constructor (2003), Estudio (2005), and Los Proyectos Medley Taller Boceto (2006) is that while they take the shape of individual projects, the central theme that unites all of them is the concept of the artist’s workshop. The first two were never made, and, while parts of El constructor appeared in previous exhibitions, this is the first full presentation of both. The three projects were conceived in a peculiar socio-political and cultural moment. At the beginning of the 2000s in Buenos Aires -right after the 2001 crisis-, there was a juxtaposition between two very different ways of understanding artistic production. On the one hand, artists who worked on projects with political themes, mainly in urban space. On the other, the artists linked to the Rojas Cultural Center during the 90s, whose production focused on ornamental objects to be realized within the workshop, all thought as exhibition pieces. Straschnoy appeared in the context of a new generation that held the premise that the categories of “political project” and “formal workshop object” should be either ignored or merged with one another.

The antagonism present in argentina’s art sphere that spun from the confrontation between the Florida and Boedo groups during the first avant-garde movements of the 20th century, became inoperative with the beginning of a new millennium. At a time when curators and art historians are beginning to write the history of the early 2000s in Buenos Aires, “Today, / great tomorrow !, / the pines are blowing winds / of the past” places Straschnoy’s work in context.

The exhibition presents Straschnoy’s proposal about how to find a new way for the contemporary crises in art and the political sphere to communicate. The exhibition combines two ways of treating objects from the past, many of which were not created to be exhibited but are the last remnants of the projects they once belonged to: it is both a retrospective view from the curatorial point of view and artistic project in itself about how to present works that never came to life. They are pieces that belong both to the past and the present simultaneously. It rethinks ideas of revisionism, rewriting, reconstruction, and conservation: this is an exhibition about time and its dialogues.