Paz Pereyra is an artist born in the city of Buenos Aires who settled in Tandil 15 years ago. She exhibited her work on several occasions in Buenos Aires and Tandil, including solo shows and participation in the Mumbat.

About to complete her training as a constellator and after exposing her work in the maritime city of Necochea, she gives to PAN the first interview of the year.

You are about to graduate as a family constellator. What notions of this very novel practice are related to your creative vocation?

During the constellations -specifically what I felt- was similar to what I feel in the creative process. Like a heaven/earth connection and a place of truth. It gave me the possibility of expanding what interests me about art, which is the Spirit in connection with matter. Perceive through practice that there is something bigger than ourselves. The constellations are a practical philosophy, and that also interests me in art, the two things together.

What did the experience of the covid pandemic leave you with?

Many ways or rigid objectives fell, I realized that they were losing strength. The “here and now” appeared with more determination, transforming everything. Or maybe it’s that I’m already 45 years old, I don’t know.

You mentioned that the possibilities of exhibiting are being presented to you in a more organic and collaborative way lately. How does this work?

Surprising proposals appear and I let myself go, I trust without having read the fine print, because I sense that I have to move there. I go on vacation and I meet a person who is a manager and invites me to a project with other artists in the area. The samples that appear come from a network that is being assembled in this way. I am interested in art as a promoter of Life, and in this sense I am deciding on collective experiences that fill me with vitality. It has happened to me from entering contests “because it is what I have to do”, from opening myself to paths that did not fill my soul, those routes no longer make sense.

Have you ever said that Art is not always in institutions.

In my practice I am interested in opening up the game and that is why I work with artists who are nourished by other things: I have a tarot reader, librarian and artist friend. Another who has a hostel, who is a cook and an artist. Art reminds me that life is ritual, play and sacredness. This is something that I also perceive in the constellations. I am interested in those places where alchemy is produced. I don’t like to lock myself in institutional circuits, I’m an art historian, that’s why I need to breathe other airs so I don’t suffocate.

Are there any objects or images, elements now in your atelier that have a special value?

Textiles have always interested me. So I have old curtains from my aunt, ropes that I found lying on the beach, ribbons with which my girl’s dresses were tied. I have an attraction for textiles. I have old sweaters from my adolescence that I cut up, and sometimes I feel like there are still unresolved issues from those times and that’s why I can’t let go. As if it needed to transform that matter to heal; find a way to flow for me the healing power of Art is very great, and the resource of the image is very important to transform me.

Art was always stigmatized as therapy, at one time by the artists themselves. But you insist a lot on Art as a service too…

Yes, for me Art is a service. In the sense that the artist “is at the service of” within a community, to bring something that is missing or for that alchemical power to transform a trauma into something healing, as the German historian Aby Warburg said at the time. Art appears in the face of fear, and I associate Art with the party, with something alive in its ability to transform the greatest tragedies into something that one can approach and process.

Performance colectiva, vestuario a partir de bolsas de descarte de verdulerias, Noche de las Librerias, Tandil, enero 2022. Ph @martisouthw

We were talking a few days ago about Adriana Lestido and how she hopes to give her photos enough life to make them live. How does this provide energy to production work? Especially since in your practice you animate or bring to life a variety of very curious beings.

I do not feel that I endow the production of energy, but that I am like the channel of an energy that is there, and one passes it through the body and shapes it into something. I make some drawing representations that I don’t even know what they are: all these little animals and people appear that I don’t know what they mean but it’s good for me to bring them, even if I don’t quite understand them. I watch what comes out to see if it has enough energy to be shown or do I still have to have them indoors.

I am interested in Art as a promoter of life. There are things that have to find a sufficient density to have the power to be. They seem to be brewing inside of me, in my system, in the place where I live. Senses are appearing that there comes a time when they have to be embodied in some matter. It is in dialogue with a spiritual need. I don’t want to make art for art’s sake. For me the ritual is sacred, it has a very important meaning.

We mentioned in talks that during the pandemic we get a lot of interviews with artists on YouTube. Would you say that new links are created with narratives related to the work itself, in a way that distance did not allow before?

What interests me when listening to other artists is to see how they have expanded in their own practice, because that encourages me to go a little beyond my own limits. It’s like when I see another cross borders and encourage more, the mental barriers begin to fall. I am interested in going from Art to unexplored places of mine, almost like a mission. I feel an unconscious curiosity to move into unfamiliar areas. Like “I never did craft, well I’ll go that way.” At one point I stopped drawing when I was a girl, and then I say “I’m going to do that and see what happens to me.” Because I don’t have a degree in Fine Arts, but rather a theoretical one, experimentation is a fundamental resource for me. And I am encouraged by the narratives of others to encourage me to more. Maybe I don’t connect so much with the artist’s work, because I only see it on the phone or the computer, but what they have to say about their work does reach me. Even in quarantine, the number of artists that aroused my interest ran out, and I switched to writers, who have more resources to explain their process through words. And I marvel at that because they’re talking about something intangible and how they can surround and recreate that impossible to catch. Listening to them makes me feel accompanied, understood in my search.