If there is one thing about tradition, it is that it sparks fertile debate about its dialogue with the present. For some, this conversation is inescapable, while others see the past as an anchor that does not allow new generations to propel themselves into the future. For Vicente Prieto Gaggero, tradition is a political tool, a strategy that allows him to reflect on the control that exists in our societies; a biopolitical exercise that is not far from the colonial processes that, since the 16th century, have taken away the ancestral territories of Latin American peoples.

In his case, tradition emerges from the past in the form of a sculptural technique: burnishing. His works defend sustainable practices and a raw material with zero environmental impact, such as clay. The result is a series of works that refer to this ancestral essence, to an organicism that turns to the present of art to question the control mechanisms that characterize our postmodern cities. Thus, in the works that make up Blindaje por resonancia, we find panoptic structures made of clay that delve into this need on the part of the authorities (governmental, corporate, cultural…): the interest in controlling at all times what happens within its borders, in order to deploy new control strategies that keep this wheel in motion. In this scenario, the only thing left for the user to do is to defend himself, to erect walls of control and thus, as Foucault advocated, to prevent power from crossing him and taking up residence in his being.

The works that make up Blindaje por resonancia are this defense of the subject, a kind of layers that, detached from their being, serve as evidence of political resistance. For some, they could be scraps, unglazed clay of potential archaeological value; for Vicente, they are the echoes of old resistances, like the wall that survived the battle.

The fact that we live in an era of interactivity also favors the personalization of this struggle, our struggle, since Vicente opens the possibility of appropriating the struggle from the single pictorial work that vertebrates the exhibition. The individual stretched out on the grass could be the spectator, deposited in a possible geography (the Patagonian plateaus of Tierra del Fuego, as we know them or as we are told they are); the people who still look for solutions in art, who yearn for that positive resonance that challenges them and allows them to narrate their real experience in these times of virtualities. The shield of Vicente Prieto Gaggero’s sculptures passes through life and death. The subject, who is the protagonist of this series, is open to numerous interpretations: Is he resting? Meditating? Dreaming? Leaving this world? His is a struggle, more than biopolitics, necropolitics, confronted as he is with the powers that decide who lives and who dies, which cultures will survive the centuries and which will be gradually condemned to extinction. That is why Vicente relies on burnishing and clay, on traditional techniques, to show these forces that the individual can also confront this economy of death, the technologies that are subtly implanted in our daily lives and that, through dark but subtle channels, save or condemn lives in the pursuit of production.

In any case, Blindaje por resonancia sends a hopeful message: tradition cannot be killed, and although many discourses try to politicize it to their advantage, its essence emerges as a balm that purifies ideologization.