In his exhibition at Proyecto AMIL, the artist focuses on affects as categories for critical analysis,
challenging the superiority of detached scientific reason over the emotional and the subjective. The
six pieces presented throughout the show, scaling from the epically proportioned to the minutely
detailed, are in dialogue as they explore the interplay between presence and absence that
reverberates in each one of the works. The authority of the body and the emotional response herald
in this intriguing new group of artworks, reclaiming a legitimate knowledge about the world.
Suspended in the room are Among us, large concrete but hollow pieces that create an uncanny
architecture of presence and absence in the exhibition space. The sculptures seem to be fragments,
or even archaeological vestiges, of a major architectural structure. The surface reveals excerpts of
statements related to Argote’s long term research on the history of ideologies and propaganda and
its influence on the production of subjectivity.
Produced between Paris and Lima, Sírvete de mi, sírveme de ti is 4 meter-long sculpture made of
approximately 100 hands in polyurethane which have been cast from diverse groups of people,
from the artist’s friends to members of the Proyecto AMIL audience. Since each hand has to be cast
holding the previous one, every addition becomes a conversation, a moment of exchange with the
people who have previously participated in the making of the sculpture. This piece works as both
an emblem of the self as individual and a symbol of a larger social body ; drawing attention to ideas
such as intimacy and solidarity, but also to the distances embedded in social and cultural structures.
