Graciela Sacco addresses some of contemporary society’s biggest problems— famine, displacement, homelessness, violence and corruption — in her photographic, video and installation works. Having developed her own photographic technique, which she called ‘heliography’, she experimented with various supports from paper and canvas to wood and rubber. Sacco represented Argentina at the 1996 Bienal de São Paulo and the 2001 Venice Biennale. She has exhibited internationally and her work is held in many institutions, including Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Rosario, Argentina.
In Graciela Sacco’s monumental work Adelante [Ahead], shouting protestors advance towards us across 19 wooden planks. Created in 2015, this is the final work from her long-term Cuerpo a cuerpo [Body to Body] series, which she began in 1996. Newspaper imagery from the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris is appropriated in her installations to address universal themes surrounding resistance. Sacco explains these works in her own words:
The image of one demonstration is printed on a series of splintered wooden planks, similar to those that are used to carry banners in a demonstration. In an incessant doubling up of parallels the image is splintered, it is fragmented in vertical rhythms that intercept the viewer forcing her/him to restore the complex articulation of various and overlapping meanings. A multitude advances through the streets raising violent gestures. Their faces, the determined fast-paced march, the crowded gathering, everything is condensed, unfolding the record of an action orchestrated to intervene, to shock.
Using ‘heliography’, a self-developed photographic process involving light-sensitive chemicals, a handmade apparatus and sunlight, Sacco imprints the wooden planks with images from the media in muted tones. ‘I try to imprint images in a way that makes it seem as though they arise from within the object,’ describes the artist. Through her process, the wooden planks—previously ordinary objects—take on their own resonance. Sacco’s emotionally charged installation works push the boundaries between photography and sculpture.
Following her unexpected death in 2017, a major tribute exhibition was presented at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.