LoRena ARticaRd - DiscouRse at 16 fps
august 02-31. 2025
Opening 02 August at 18:00
Lorena Articardi (b. 1992, Italian-Uruguayan), is an artist-researcher working with photography and film as her primary mediums. She describes her material-discursive practice as a study on light, approaching light as both her medium and subject. Light is inherently restless and under such a premise –as a light impression– thus is the photographic image. She holds a Licentiate Degree in Image and Sound Engineering from Universidad Católica del Uruguay, undertook Master of Fine Arts studies at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, NTNU, Norway; and her Master of Arts in Photography at Aalto University, Finland. Lorena has taught as an assistant professor at Universidad Católica del Uruguay –2017-2021–, and has –since 2019– worked co-curating and producing a range of cultural programmes –whether artist-run or more institutionally established– in Uruguay, Norway and Germany. Her work is held in private collections in Finland and Germany, and she has exhibited her work in institutions such as the Finnish Museum of Photography –FI–, and Tsinghua University Art Museum –CN–, among others.
In Discourse at 16 fps, Lorena Articardi examines the interplay of error, material agency and the constructed-ness of discourse. In an expanded approach to photography and film through photochemical processing and material experimentation, her practice positions light as both subject and medium –content and form.
The title, Discourse at 16 fps, evokes Articardi’s articulation of her own artistic agency, inherently discrete and situated. At this frame rate, experience is portrayed as discrete instances seamlessly sequenced, where ruptures and intervals are as perceptible as the apparent continuity of discourse. The exhibition gestures toward a broader critique of how images are produced, consumed, and contextualised; it interrogates the mechanisms through which meaning is inferred and controlled, foregrounding the ethical and political implications of representation.
In Softcore, Articardi moves beyond the photographic and explores a different means of recording light. Softcore renders light in the form of structural jacquard tapestries, processing radio frequency signals retrieved from the Metsähovi Radio Observatory’s solar activity archives. These signals, ostensibly filtered to exclude noise, are revisited with a deliberate amplification of their residual imperfections. The resulting artworks disclose a diffractive temporal record where interference, distortion, and de-phased events converge into a single reading. Softcore exposes the apparatus –both scientific and artistic– as an active participant, one that’s flawed and complicit in shaping what it purports to capture.
Similarly, by purposefully introducing error during processing and pushing the camera to malfunction, Eat Sand / Sand suggests an unstable narrative where the material and temporal layers of image-making are laid bare. Each screening of the experimental film in 16 mm embodies a performance of decay; the film loop erodes as it runs through the projector, accumulating scars that index the passage of time until only a seamless beam of light –an empty frame– remains. Here, error is resolute materiality and a site of surrender, dwelling on the fragility of both the image and the device.
Lorena Articardi’s work asserts that to acknowledge error is to engage in a dialogue with the material itself –to listen to its refusals, its assertions, its agency. In doing so, her practice embodies a form of resistance: attempting to make visible the hegemony of seamlessness, an apparent continuity that overwrites difference and that seeks to contain the unruly. The viewer is called to confront these instabilities –to witness the narrative reclaimed by the material and to find meaning, not in resolution, but in the shimmering discord of light.
