Exhibition Texts

These texts were made to the CryptoArg’s IRL exhibition Riesgo País presented in Newton Gallery, New York, during the NFT.NYC week in July 2022.

To know more about the exhibition, click here.

To visit Fantástico Riesgo País, the digital edition on SuperRare Space, click here.

Riesgo País

In the land of risk, those who have nothing strive to get something. Everything is suffered greatly and enjoyed intensely because nothing is guaranteed. From a physical memory of scarcity, a monumental and fragmented image is built with pieces of what is available at the moment.

There can also be found many ghosts fed with fear, hate, and grief. There is a lot of romance too. However, behind all these narratives, fictions, and realities, an economic skeleton that sustains them and gives them shape is always present.

This exhibition ventures into a relationship with reality, between its fictionalized construction and the material conditions that bring it about. A circuit that imposes itself as reality is produced in the journalistic discourses on finance, in the repetition of words in economic narratives. Creating in an unstable context, with the privilege of living in other narratives, we have the possibility to reflect on this burden imposed by the media.

We start by exploring an economic index that is broadcasted in Argentinian news alongside the weather. It does not have an obvious meaning for most people but suggests that a crisis can be triggered at any minute. In the story that connects the artworks, we can find this message latently emerging from their symbolic fields.

The pieces presented tune into a profoundly poetic sense. The opportunity to continue to exist beyond the impossible is inscribed in the resulting lyric. A feeling hangs on a delicate balance, on the verge of the broken, with the aim of losing its form to inhabit the ruin of the ruin of the ruin.

Merlina Rañi, 2022.

Germinal Creatures

Astrosuka, Basseado, Candie, Joaquina Salgado, Kaswez, K0ch&NadArt, Luran, mardeformas, Sofja, VXN.

Somewhere, a world succumbs constantly. It collapses, ending in another that begins to emerge. We do not quite know what role destruction has in this cycle or whether violence is necessary at the end of things. Still, it is true that drama is often a way to produce meaning and that meaning is capable of generating value. While new economic narratives are being constructed, in the worlds that are both being born and dying, new forms of life emerge where they were not supposed to. 

Artificial and yet wild, totally unsuspected and deformed, these germinal creatures are the specimens of an abandoned laboratory. Diverse in origin, order, and logic, capable of thriving in the exoticism of time and space or of being in the fleetingness of an instant, they survive in the slightest possibility and exist beyond thought. 

What kind of organism will ignite the next spark? What can we become by surviving?

Merlina Rañi, 2022.

Curation: Merlina Rañi
Creative Direction: VXN (Victoria Campobello), The Internet Office, Facundo Suasnabar
Installation Design: Faktor, The Internet Office, VXN.
Management and Production: CryptoArg
Graphic design: Estudio Hummus
Sponsor: MOCA and Infinite Objects.