Tercer atómico espectral
Thursday, 16 April 2026
11:00
STIAS, Room 1
Abstract
Tercer atómico espectral (Third, Atomic, Spectral) is an exhibition grounded in long-term artistic research that explores the invisible infrastructures sustaining contemporary extractivism, taking lithium as both a cosmic residue and a strategic resource. Using footage from salt flats in the Argentine Puna, interviews, spectral audio recordings, and satellite prospecting data, the work links the stellar origin of minerals with the technical, political, and economic networks that mobilise them, proposing a material and sensory cartography of their itineraries. The central piece, the video Audience of Spectres, organises a narrative that interweaves cosmology, geology, and capital, and unfolds around it a system of works: a series of paintings made from satellite imagery that reveal extraction routes, and ceramic objects that replicate chips and cooling systems, returned to a condition of technological fossil. These operations insist on the paradox of a prospecting in which the mineral seems to think through the very devices that search for it, re-situating the operational abstraction of images in their material thickness and in their capacity to affect territories and bodies.
The video engages several of the conference lines; it develops Material Politics and Radical Futurity with particular precision.
Material Politics. The work examines the material governance of lithium as a chain of parameterised decisions. The montage correlates spectral indices, segmentations, and concession cartographies with the rhythms of pumping, cooling, and logistics, showing how these variables institute decision surfaces: geometries of exploitation, operational cadences, and classification thresholds. Attention centres on the performativity of the instruments of reading—what they classify, enable, and value—and on their consequences for water, energy, and territory. Within this architecture, paintings derived from satellite imagery and ceramic objects modelled on chips and cooling systems operate as methodological anchors: they return indices to matter and bring to the fore the thermo-electric histories of computation that sustain the extractive chain.
Radical Futurity. Futurity is framed as the design of verifiable conditions in the present. The narration adopts a techno-speculative voice that learns from the landscape and rehearses reconfigurations of memory when classifiers falter or hesitate; this misalignment operates as a method to open public criteria of reading for thresholds, perimeters, and intensities.
Biography
Florencia Levy (Buenos Aires, 1979). Artist, educator, and researcher. Since 2023 she has directed the Art and Science Center at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, where she has also co-directed the BA in Contemporary Artistic Practices since 2021. In 2024, Levy represented Argentina at the 15th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Her practice investigates historical processes of extraction, consumption, and power dynamics, exploring their impact on the subjective dimension of the materiality that constitutes our everyday life and social constructions. With mutating methodologies that cut across disciplines, her projects combine fieldwork, archival research, exchange, and dialogue with science. Her projects—unfolding across media from site-specific installations, video, and photography to painting and publications—are developed in specific contexts, addressing the dialectical tension between form and consistency, the virtual and the real, seeking to reveal an agency that arises from biological, economic, and sociopolitical processes. Her current work explores the relationships between geological time, the implications of the production of contemporary technology, and the geopolitical dynamics within extractive practices. She has received more than 40 awards and distinctions, including the Konex Award in Art and Technology; First Prize at Germany’s Lichter Art Award; the 2020 Trabucco Prize; and the Presidency of the Nation Prize at the 108th National Salon of Visual Arts, among others, as well as international grants for residencies in the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Cuba, Israel, Malaysia, Poland, Taiwan, China, and Switzerland. Since 2021 she has co-directed the BA in Contemporary Artistic Practices at UNSAM’s School of Art and Heritage, where since 2023 she has directed the Art and Science Center. Her work is held in institutional collections such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), the Museo Moderno, the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, Poland, the Guasch-Coranty Foundation in Barcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tamaulipas in Mexico, and the Fundación Klemm, among others.