Futurism was a European avant-garde of the early 20th century whose main premise was to exalt modernity. Their admiration for machines and speed generated a series of optimistic discourses and aesthetics by situating themselves in that part of history. Ancestral futurism is also an exaltation, but it admires not the present rapidly becoming the future, but the past becoming present. Perhaps it’s an attempt to recall and practice techniques from further back to bring them into the present and thus create a new impulse of futurability. The past appears in different forms, igniting in the present and ceasing to be archaeological to shake the now, to become a retroactive time.

What if the world really burned? As narrated in a foundational myth of the Toba/Qom people, where people transformed into animals after a great fire from which they were saved by hiding in a cave. Beyond the complexities of the myth, thinking that the world is already burned, already devastated, is somehow a relief. Because then the constant dread of the impending end of the world is disarmed to face the fact that we are already living it.

How long have we been hearing the word ‘ancestral’ to refer to past knowledge? How many generations are enough to speak of ancestry? Five, seven, three? Is ancestral the knowledge, or the memory of knowledge? In certain techniques and practices, there is a key that unfolds an entire universe to urgent thought, dismantling limits and borders. Ancestry can be understood as a resource or as a tool for this end of the world, a material or a practice. Forms are a succession of genealogical lines of a cellular memory that makes us human. ‘Human’ is the name of a relationship, of a certain position in relation to other possible vital positions. The further back we go in history, the closer and more familiar we are, because we approach what unites us. The human being is an animal that walks the world.

Itamar and Bernardo are two artists who moved, studied, and lived in capital cities but chose years ago to move to small towns. In the tranquility and in those other times, they can live, raise their children, work, and contemplate the world.

A documentary is circulating about the future, with each chapter focusing on a different topic. There is a chapter dedicated to plants, ‘indoor’ plants, which have become very important in most Western populations over the past fifty years, in the advance of their ‘domestication’ or rather: their upbringing. Besides being a business, living with plants is very important for the psyche and for experiencing solitude (humanly). What is being investigated today is how these plants can be genetically altered to have other uses, to reach a mutual care with human beings. Plants that emit light, outdoor palms that not only serve as lamps but also open like umbrellas when it rains, plants that repel mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit, and countless other uses that could help us rethink the future and our relationship with other living beings, with everything that is nature, which as humanity ‘progresses’, seems to be increasingly separating from the human. That forward movement, progress, makes us wonder what happens if what is moving forward is the past, or rather: our pasts.

Taking up these techniques presented in this exhibition, these materials, is resuming a conversation with a part of human history that not only did not go away but coexists and is in dialogue with current practices and technologies. Ancestral technology for a new future.

We see that currently in Latin American art, aesthetics where clay, stone, organic materials are the protagonists prevail. Why do we use these materials? Why do we reproduce these aesthetics? Is it what we have at hand? Are we building an identity? What is that identity? Can we be just one thing? Who reproduces it and for whom? Who defines us by looking at us? How far can we trace the origin of our presence? Does it come from behind, like our shadow sometimes, or do we face it in backlight? Here in Salta, who is looking at us?