Carolina Magnin: Descent to the Bottom of the Image

In the basement of the Sudamericana building, facing the Plaza de Mayo, Carolina Magnin deploys Salvático , a site-specific installation. It doesn't simply occupy a space: it inhabits it as if awakening its dormant layers. There, where the Superintendency of Health's archive once operated, in a space now closed and without active offices, the artist proposes an immersive experience where photography, abstraction, sound, and dreams merge into a poetics of the invisible.

The exhibition, produced by Gustavo Doliner and curated by Renata Zas, is the result of a process that began in Paris during a residency at the Cité des Arts. There, Magnin delved deeper into the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard 's The Water and Dreams , that unclassifiable book that explores liquid matter as a symbol of the unconscious, of that which flows and transforms, of that which remains in the shadows. From this poetic immersion, Salvático takes shape as a geology of the dreamlike : layers of time, matter, and memory that slip, filter, and drain into multiple languages.

“Everything took on a different meaning when the possibility of exhibiting underground arose,” Magnin tells Ñ . And it makes sense: the underground is not only an architectural condition, but a symbolic key to the entire work. As in Plato's allegory of the cavern or in the cosmic caves of mythologies, the dark background of the building becomes a fertile matrix. This is where Laguna Negra , the performance piece that kicks off the exhibition, is conceived: wearing black gloves, the artist pours stamp ink onto water contained in a pan, while audio recordings of dreams in different languages ​​play. The voices overlap in a disturbing, almost spectral murmur. They are incomprehensible, but they strike. More than narratives, they are presences . The sound of an untranslated beyond.

“Stamp ink runs throughout my work,” he explains. “It's a material of recording, but also of concealment. Like black water, it's immemorial.” The lagoon is also a metaphor: a liquid mirror where nothing is reflected, except an elusive shadow, a fleeting flash. This “black cave”—inspired by Bachelard's Poetics of Space— is a place before human eyes, prior to all forms, where images barely emerge.

Salvático works with what is not there. With the remainder, the void. There is no linear narrative or traditional archive here. The empty shelves of the old healthcare archive become minimal sculptures , barely intervened by dismembered images and fragments that suggest more than they reveal. It is the reverse of institutional memory: where once there was medical knowledge—regulated, classified, instrumentalized—now there is a poetics of not knowing. A place of intuitions.

Working with archives has been a constant in Magnin's career, but here it becomes radical. In Paris, she searched for negatives, forgotten books, and documents at flea markets. Upon her return, she cross-referenced this material with her own library, with images collected at the Faculty of Agronomy, and with traces of dreams that have haunted her for years. Digital technology reveals what light cannot reveal : shadows, textures, cracks. The final process erases the areas of clarity to leave only the spectral.

“I work with black mirrors, like obsidian stones,” he explains. “They are divinatory surfaces. They don't reflect, but rather a shadow.” This is no coincidence: the obsidian mirror has been, from Aztec culture to European alchemical rituals, an instrument of inner vision . Nostradamus is said to have used it. Here, Magnin incorporates it as a printing surface. The image decomposes, abstracts, becomes a trace. What remains is barely a vibration.

The abstraction Magnin proposes is not formalist. It has a spiritual dimension, close to Malevich 's Suprematism and Kandinsky 's transcendental quest. "Abstraction brings me closer to the invisible," he says. "It allows me to work with what lies behind." And that behind is none other than the unconscious, the bodily memory, the zone where the image no longer represents but evokes. As in El Lissitzky 's works, planes overlap, forms transcend their frame, images occupy the space as if they wanted to break out of the support.

In an adjacent room, a rectangular, illuminated glass display case houses three photographic pieces. Beyond, a video room projects a silent piece filmed in Paris. The artist combined footage of the Seine River with other images, creating a liquid, abstract surface projected onto mirrors arranged on the floor.

The choice of space wasn't random. Tomás Redrado, director of the gallery that represents the artist, sums it up. “Highlighting this uninhabited building from the beginning of the last century is part of the project's purpose. Carolina has a family history linked to health, and she was working with medical archives when I met her. It's quite magical that the archive of the Superintendency of Health used to be located right in this basement.”

The exhibition—Magnin's 13th and his first solo exhibition with the Tomás Redrado Art gallery—is also a manifesto on how spaces can be transformed, mutated, and redefined . What was once a dead archive is now a living organism. A shadowy body that dreams of water. And into that dream, we enter as intruders. Or guests.

Salvático can be visited Tuesday through Friday, from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM, at the Sudamericana Building - Basement. Roque Saenz Peña 530, Buenos Aires City. Until September 15th. Free admission.