AZOTEA
Program
General
Artists
Federico Colletta
AZOTEA (Buenos Aires)
AZOTEA is a self-managed, self-funded, non-profit art space and platform designed to foster artistic experimentation and theoretical research. Committed to the notion of art as a fundamental part of the public sphere and political space, it provides a critical platform for aesthetic-political experiments with and through art. It brings together artists, thinkers, and other agents of our society to put transformative forms of coexistence into practice through a range of experiences.
Proposal
AZOTEA.BIS proposes the art fair booth as a site of research rather than a conventional commercial display. Emerging from AZOTEA’s ongoing exploration of “new institutionalities,” the project translates its collaborative and process-based methodology into a critical visual and spatial form.
Curated by Víctor López Zumelzu, AZOTEA.BIS brings together the practices of Federico Colletta, Jessica Mein, Martín Touzón, Asad Raza, and Sigismond de Vajay through an “ecology of practices” grounded in the notion of material thinking. Rather than organising the works around a single thematic framework, the proposal foregrounds the relationships between different ways of working with matter, space, language, ecology, and social experience.
The works become interconnected propositions within a shared environment, where material processes operate as forms of knowledge and where making becomes a way of thinking through the economic, political, and ecological conditions of the present. The booth thus functions as a situated device for encounter and reflection, making visible not only the artworks but also the forms of collaboration, research, and institutional experimentation that sustain them.
AZOTEA.BIS ultimately asks how an art space can operate beyond the conventional structures of exhibition and commerce, proposing the fair as a temporary space in which artistic practices can generate new forms of relation, knowledge, and collective experience.
Asad Raza (b. 1974, Buffalo, NY) creates artworks that transform exhibitions into living systems. Combining installation, ecology, architecture, and social practice, Raza develops site-responsive environments that prioritize participation, interdependence, and transformation. His installations resist the production of autonomous objects, focusing instead on ongoing processes that evolve collaboratively with human and non-human agents.
Raza’s practice engages with elements such as soil, plants, water, and air, situating them within institutional and architectural frameworks to reorient how we inhabit built environments. Diversión, first presented at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverted a river through a museum. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil that is offered to visitors, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), and was subsequently presented at Gropius Bau in Berlin (2020) and the Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (a weave for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis inside a sixteenth-century church in Milan. These works invite viewers into temporary and metabolic encounters, making care and coexistence central to the exhibition experience.
Born to Pakistani parents and based in New York, Raza’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in dialogue, sensory experience, and the material complexities of contemporary life. His projects have been presented by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Manifesta 15 in Barcelona; Gropius Bau in Berlin; Serpentine Galleries in London; Kunsthalle Portikus in Frankfurt; Ruhrtriennale in Essen; Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney; the Lahore Biennale; Museion in Bolzano; and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Raza has also worked as a dramaturg on group exhibitions including A Walk in the Fun Palace at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and Chronicles of Solaris for LUMA Arles.
Together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Raza co-organized four exhibitions inspired by the poet and relational theorist Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels) and This language that is every stone (IMA, Brisbane). His writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, n+1, Mousse, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and TENNIS magazine. He studied literature and film at Johns Hopkins University and New York University.
Federico Colletta
He is an Argentine visual artist whose practice develops a visual investigation into the essence of existence through material traces and the marks of time. His practice occupies a critical intersection between documentary record and abstraction, where the aim is not to represent an object, but to capture a presence or an event that has occurred.
His work is intrinsically linked to natural processes and an aesthetic of depletion, seeking to arrest concrete actions—whether weather, erosion, or everyday residue—in an act of poetic testimony. In his methodology, Colletta relinquishes part of his control over the work, allowing discarded elements and the environment itself to act as co-authors. By exposing materials to the elements or collecting traces from his own everyday life, the artist transforms personal biography and minimal traces into a universal abstraction that reflects on permanence, emptiness, and the fragility of being.
Jessica Mein is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in São Paulo who currently lives and works in Buenos Aires. With a strong international academic background, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Her practice explores the intersection of drawing, printmaking, textiles, and video animation, often using discarded materials or industrial supports—such as jute sacks, printing plates, and discontinued advertising posters—to dismantle their structures and reconstruct works that question obsolescence, memory, and the imprint of manual labour.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at prestigious institutions and galleries around the world, including Simon Preston Gallery and The Drawing Center in New York, Galeria Leme in São Paulo, The Pavilion Downtown and Carbon 12 in Dubai, the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, and Harvard University and NYU Abu Dhabi, as well as in the Museo del Barrio Biennial. Her works are also held in major public and private collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Julia Stoschek Collection, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP).
Martín Touzón is an Argentine visual artist whose practice lies at the intersection of economic theory and aesthetic production. With a degree in Economics, his work draws on the specificities of systems of exchange, value, and circulation to dismantle the logics of capital and transform them into visual devices.
His research unfolds across a range of media—including installation, sculpture, painting, and performance—to address concepts such as accumulation, surplus, and speculation. In his projects, Touzón often transforms financial abstractions, such as market graphs and flow diagrams, into physical and tangible structures, revealing how economic fluctuations shape lived experience and the spaces we inhabit. His methodology incorporates found materials and processes of transforming institutional waste, operating as a critique of systems of visibility both within and beyond the art market.
