Guido Yannitto explores tapestry as a medium and a technology. Through collaborative work with individuals and communities, he considers the material, conceptual, and affective possibilities of weaving as he experiments with notions of tradition and history, genealogy and identity, and transmission and translation. By combining collaborations with weavers from Salta, Argentina and industrial techniques, he works through the entanglements between hard and soft technologies as well as between ancestral and contemporary histories and languages. As a result, collisions between human misunderstandings and digital glitches are central to his pieces, which serve as unique expressions of bodily and machine memories in a particular time and space. In his Water Grammar series, Yannitto traces water landscapes and hydric maps of Salta in collaboration with three local weavers. Between cartographic representations, individual imaginations, and digital distortions, these works become abstract signifiers of historical struggles for land and resources. The artist and the weavers tap into local myths such as that of Yuchán, the origin of all the rivers of the region and keeper of its waters and fishes, while also delving into communal conversations around territorial conflicts. In Yannitto’s works, colonial representations of the American territory are reimagined through a convergence of contemporary and ancestral abstractions, using a language that expresses claims for territorial justice and the poetic inheritance of the Argentine North.
