Florencia Sadir
W-Galería (AR)
ArtNexus, #126 (June-November 2026)

In W-Galería’s vast exhibition space, Florencia Sadir delineates a landscape based on minimal elements. With small accents and rhythms, she reconstructs the sensation and the memory of the Animaná carob tree forest. Located in Sadir’s native province of Salta, the forest suffered a massive fire in 2024. Lo que sucede río arriba, sucede río abajo (What Happens Upriver, Happens Downriver), curated by Laura Hakel, presents visitors with a series of installations characterized by three forceful materialities: clay, wood, and silver.

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Our first encounter is with the reddish, cracked dust covering the floor: Después de la fuerza (After the Force) (2025). In this artwork, clay is used in its purest, most virginal state. In this arid, dry landscape, materiality is omnipresent: it is felt in one’s body, in the thickness of that dust on one’s tongue and throat.

 

​Lo que sucede río arriba, sucede río abajo (2025), the installation that gives the show its title, seems to have been arranged in anticipation of a gathering or a ritual action around the figure of a tree. Inverted atop a large white platform, this black (charred) tree dominates the space. Many branches and limbs, collected and joined by ceramic rings with silver luster applications, form an imposing and captivating tree trunk. Rather than rising upwards, however, this tree bows to the ground that gave it life and nourishment. Next to it, we find some smoke-cooked bowls containing sheets of silver, filled with water. These appear to be the only water reserves in this whole desert; it is as if the liquid has been squeezed out of every one of the elements, to be kept there for reverence and consecration.

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Two of the exhibition space’s walls are shored up by more of the burned forest’s charred branches: Diagonal monte (Diagonal Mountain) (2025). The inclined branches provide structure and support; still standing, albeit not unscarred, they resist the inclemency of the weather and of human action. These items bring to mind Sadir’s Refugio (Refuge) (2025), her monumental installation for Yendo por dentro del agua, he llegado muerta de sed (Traveling Inside Water, I’ve Arrived Dying of Thirst), an exhibition at Malba-Puertos between March 2005 and February 2026. There, three leaning walls hold themselves up with the help of a small, burned carob tree branch set centrally between them. Now, next to each branch, we find a black ceramic tile on which Sadir draws rivers and water courses in organic, irregular lines. Occasionally, glints of silver seep through some of these grooves, like interstices: synonyms with water or life.

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Graphic tracings reappear in 7, 8, 2, 5… (2025), a clock made of rocks with markings of numbers and symbols. These writings suggest an unknown ancestral or imaginary language, out of reach of our era’s imperious demand for all-encompassing knowledge. In the curator’s words, this clock “invites us to consider another time, outside the utilitarian nature of our measurements.” More than keeping time, it prompts us to pause for a moment of observation and reflection.

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The concept of measurement is also present in eE (2025), a set of wooden rulers resembling limnimeters, the instruments used to measure the water level of freshwater bodies. Accompanying them is a group of silver-coated ceramic bricks representing the motion and forces of water, like traces left behind by the passage of a river. This echoes the red clay encountered on the floor and up the wall’s baseboards, which creates a mud guard of the kind found on riverbeds after the waters rise and fall.

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In the series Rayo (Ray) (2025), small branch fragments gathered from the Calchaquí river are joined together by ceramic and silver-luster rings to form larger sticks. Here, as in the works mentioned above, ceramic material and silver –a water symbol in Sadir’s oeuvre– are the binding element through which nature, although changing, remains alive and able to resist.

These works express two opposing concepts: the fragility and the resilience of nature. Nature may take different forms, states, and materialities; it may crack and even break, burn, and change. Yet, an intrinsic resilience keeps it alive against all adversity.

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For Sadir, matter is everything and cannot be separated from the land. It breathes the language of nature. Her investigations reveal a profound respect for nature’s resources along with a political and ethical commitment to confronting the climate crisis in her art. What Sadir’s large-scale installations demand above all is an attentive, empathetic gaze that can capture the delicate whispers of forests and rivers.