Deformaciones, tensiones, hundimientos (Deformations, Tensions, Collapses)

From its very beginnings, the work of Horacio Zabala has looked at the role of the artist in society. His work stems from the social and political context associated with the media and new technologies, using conceptual art tools to explore the information they provide. In 1973, Zabala became part of the Trece group, whose concept (known as Mail Art) questioned all conventional plastic formats. His output included objects, texts, images, installations and interactive works for the Internet, as well as a number of essays. A theme that Zabala often returns to is cartography, which he approaches through its relation to power and politics, where territory can be marked out as something controllable, exploitable and commercialised. Through his interventions on maps, whether cutting, censoring, diluting colours or scoring, Zabala denounces the power games that lie behind the establishment of a particular order, questioning the imposition of a shared code. In this piece, the object of distortive intervention is a map of Latin America, criticising the power dynamics behind a particular territorial order. The work associates the colonial dynamics of territorial control with the context of repression by dictatorial military regimes in various Latin American countries in the 1970s.