In the first half of the 19th century, a couple of young German painters set out on a journey on horseback across the Andes Mountains. All we know of the vicissitudes of this adventure are fragments of letters, misplaced research and fictionalised writings. More than a century later, the Argentinean writer César Aira published his version of the events for the first time. In the middle of the story, the author mentions that, at a certain point, this pair of travelling painters were suddenly enveloped in an air of an impossible distance. Perhaps this air of distance had been moved by the kilometres that separated them from their place of origin. Or perhaps this air, an invisible but quantifiable element, refers to the distance between the two painters and their environment, between their illustrations and their objects, or between the experience of the journey and the narration of it.

An air of distance brings together in Il Posto the work of seven artists who share the air of displacement, uprooting and impermanence. Each of the works exhibited here is enveloped in its own narrative singularity rooted in the drive to wander. They strain, each in their own way, the modern conventions of the discovery of lands and civilisations as forms of domination and purification. The exhibition is therefore articulated as a brief spatial essay that raises questions about the construction of the identity and imaginary of our region through the work of artists who not only illustrate and narrate, but at the same time conflict with, the experience of human transhumance.

This exhibition essay is divided into three sections: the first one brings together the works of Chilean artists Juan Dávila (1846), Eugenio Dittborn (1943) and Nury González (1960); the second one presents the works of the German Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802 – 1858) and the Venezuelan artist Christian Vinck (1978); and the third one exhibits the work of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (1963) and the Ecuadorian artist Adrián Balseca (1989). Each of these sections takes the form of a fold in which a hypothesis that is unveiled as a memory is addressed with singularity. The figure of the fold, which in this particular case comes from the practice and thought of the artist Eugenio Dittborn, allows us to imagine a scenario in which the places and times inscribed in these sections collide, juxtapose and invert each other.