From February to April 2025 Argentinean artists Nadia ’Pini’ Morales and Juan Salcedo worked with classes 4A and 5B at Pyynpää School on an art project about identity and portraits. Using a variety of art techniques, the artists and students have been exploring the right to identity and reflected on themselves and others. The workshops are part of a series of workshops with children from the Colonia Caroya school in Argentina.
Nadia Morales (AR): https://www.instagram.com/pini.peperina/
A video about the Pyynpää school project on the RaumArs YouTube channel
In the art workshops, the students got to know each other through art, shared their personal stories and considered identity through questions about individuality, personal history and memory. After this, they examined the history of portraiture in art and what portraits are like in contemporary art. Art was combined with the study of the special features of their own faces through photographs and light/shadow drawings made from them, as well as painted portraits. Mutual understanding was encahnced by discussing and making portraits of each other.
Nadia Morales and Juan Salcedo have organized similar workshops in Argentina, where bullying has been a common problem, using portraits as a tool to address respect for others, highlighting each person's own history, customs, and experiences, and the richness that comes from diversity.
During their residency, the artist-couple has also continued their series of performances, filmed on video and photographed in the urban environment and surrounding nature, as short chromatic interventions. The chromatic interventions were carried out using magenta-coloured transparent plastic, so that they could be carried out without damaging the environment.
Juan Salcedo says: “Throughout history, people have shaped different landscapes according to what they considered noteworthy. For a long time, art was dominated by the natural landscape, whose primary aesthetic ideal was the sublime. Later, with the construction of monumental, ritual or sacred buildings and the emergence of a bourgeoisie that viewed the environment in different ways, the urban landscape began to gain a foothold in artistic representation.
We explore the landscape from our own perspective, from the Global South, and question or highlight the history of spaces and the meanings they hold. We challenge established perspectives, the new when it is presented as foreign, and the familiar when it is taken for granted. Our aim is to deconstruct the obvious, create new ways and enrich seeing.
We understand landscapes, whether urban or natural, as inhabited spaces with valuable meanings and constantly changing. Our approach also requires the participation of the local community. Their exchange of perspectives, ideas and experiences broadens the meaning of the work and makes it a shared human value.”
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