Silvestre Borgatello
1977, Rosario. Argentina.
Artist Statement
The oeuvre of Silvestre Borgatello concentrates on the perception, grasping and remembrance of the landscape from the practices of photography, installation and landscape architecture. His images configure a visual syntax that represents the spatial, temporary, historic and natural qualities that are produced from the incessant process of development, dissolution and renovation of the landscape.
His photographs form an open-ended archive that allows us to recover the narrative time of the image through the composition of a non-linear, intermittent system of representation that simulates the ways organic memory is structured, as an answer to a present determined by the immediacy and saturation of images.
The work of the author represents the notions of landscape, memory, photography and archive as continuos, accidental and indeterminate forms of rewriting. His artistic style shifts from the abstract to the figurative; the intangible to the material; the fragmentary and the idea of totality.
In Borgatello’s research, the concept of the landscape always implies a stage and a spectator, a point of view, a representation and a poetic. The landscape is a historical account of what is seen, understood, experienced and remembered: a material and symbolic link between a self-interior and an external otherness. However, this separation between an inside and an outside does not result in a total rupture, but in an ambiguous form of relation where our way of seeing recognizes the radical strangeness of things: the landscape as a theater of distances.
Biografía
Silvestre Borgatello is an architect, landscape architect and visual artist. His works concentrate on the perception, grasping and remembrance of the landscape from the practice of photography, installation and landscape architecture.
He graduated in architecture at Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina in 2006. He specialized in Landscape Architecture at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2009. He obtained a Masters degree in Design, Planning and Conservation of Landscapes and Gardens at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City in 2023.
Among the awards and distinctions he has received are the scholarship in Visual Arts from the Secretary of Culture of the Province of Santa Fe, Argentina in 2006. In 2010 the UTDT and the USC American Academy in China awarded him a scholarship to develop a landscape architecture project for the Creative Nature 2011 exhibition in Xi’an, China in 2010. In 2014 he received the first prize of the architecture competition Concurso Nacional de Ideas: Parque de Las Ciencias and in 2022 he was invited to the residences program of Fundación Casa Wabi in Oaxaca, Mexico.
He has been the coordinator of the landscape association Nodo Rosario de la Red Argentina del Paisaje (RAP) since 2016 and the director of the landscape architecture studio Estudio Loess since 2006 and. He has participated in individual and collective exhibitions of art and architecture in Argentina, Mexico and China. Currently, he lives and works in Mexico City.