Miguel Rothschild – Río de la Plata, 2026

Río de la Plata, the estuary between Argentina and Uruguay, means “River of Silver”, recalling a colonial legend of hidden riches that drove Spanish conquest and gave Argentina its name. Centuries later, people were thrown into these waters from aircraft during the military dictatorship’s death flights. Today, the estuary is burdened by urban and industrial contamination. Miguel Rothschild treats the river as a political and material archive. More than a thousand nylon threads pierce a photograph of the river’s brown surface, printed on reflective fabric. They draw the image up into waves before descending beneath it, each ending in a lead weight. The river’s colour comes largely from suspended sediment. The silvery surface brings beauty into uneasy proximity with filth and violence – a coexistence Rothschild presents not as exceptional, but as a condition of the world.

Miguel Rothschild develops a practice spanning photography, video, installation and collage, drawing on iconographies from Western art history – from the Renaissance to modernism and German Romanticism. His work revolves around repetitive and meticulous interventions on produced or appropriated images: burning, perforating, cutting, or embedding. Through these operations, the image is approached as a material site in which light, colour and smoke acquire presence and enter into relation with space. References to the sublime or the sacred are often inflected with humour, while ordinary materials challenge the relationships between image, matter and symbolism.