NICOLÁS GUAGNINI
            Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
            










270 is a series of short films commissioned by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) to preserve and amplify the legacies of artists from Latin America. Each installment of 270 centers a single living artist in a short film lasting four minutes and thirty seconds—a duration that lends the series its title. Nicolás Guagnini: Self-Portrait with Cucumber / Autorretrato con pepino is the second installment in the 270 series.

270.02 documents the artist's engagement with self-portraiture and autobiography, two forms defined by the imbrication of intimacy and publicness, the subject and the social. Director Julio Grinblatt interviewed the artist, posing the same questions in two languages and eliciting two different sets of answers. Guagnini’s words are overlaid in a vertical montage, with the Spanish text subtitling the English conversation and vice versa. The result is a formal and conceptual exploration of the tension between reflecting on our own subjectivity and confronting the strange reflections of our subjectivity returned to us in the symbolic world of language and images.

Installments of 270 are presented in an edition of custom boxes with artifacts and documentation selected by the film’s subject. 270.02 boxes contain paperweights, an object of enduring fascination to the artist.