Interview with visionary visual artist Claudia Casarino,
By Piero Bonadeo
Claudia Casarino is a Paraguayan visual artist whose work traces what passes between bodies across generations: inherited violence, unacknowledged labour, forced migration. She has exhibited internationally, from the Venice Biennale to the National Gallery in Amman, and talks about the future of Latin American art.
Latin America has historically oscillated between being seen as peripheral and being celebrated as a source of radical innovation. From your position, how do you experience that tension today — is the region defining its own terms, or still negotiating with external validation?
Being seen and being “celebrated” from the outside is usually out of step with where we actually stand, and it carries a real risk of exoticization. Celebration and dismissal are often the same gesture: both look at us from a distance and decide what we mean. My own trajectory holds the contradiction.
I’ve shown at the Venice Biennale, in the Latin American pavilion, a real platform, and also a reminder of how the region still tends to enter the system as a group, through a thematic door rather than the main one. But my work has also travelled another map: Beijing, Amman, Bahrain, Buenos Aires, Havana, rooms where artists from the global south were in conversation without a Northern authority certifying it.
That’s where I’d locate whatever autonomy we have. So: we set our own terms in the South-to-South conversation, and we’re still negotiating in the North-facing one. The risk is to mistake being celebrated for being understood.
The art market is often discussed as if it were one thing, but it operates very differently depending on geography and scale. What does “the market” actually mean for an artist based in Paraguay, and what structural changes would make the most difference?
“The market,” in the singular, is mostly a fiction. I work with galleries, in Buenos Aires, Asunción, Kansas City, and São Paulo, so I’m not speaking from outside the system. But I’ll say something that more or less defines my relationship with it: I don’t live off selling my work, and very few artists in a country like mine do. So the market isn’t the engine of a Paraguayan practice; it’s an occasional outcome. What sustains the work is closer to private conviction: collectors, family foundations, a great deal of sustained personal commitment.
That’s why, when I think about what would make the most difference, I don’t reach for “more market.” What’s missing isn’t demand, it’s foundation: acquisition budgets, a functioning national collection, the unglamorous machinery that lets work stay in the country and stay visible over time. The market sorts; infrastructure sustains. For a place like Paraguay, building that base matters far more than chasing a market.
Your work engages deeply with the body, memory, and cultural codes. Do you think Latin American artists carry an obligation to represent their context, or is that expectation itself a form of constraint?
I’d gently push back on the word “obligation,” because it’s almost always assigned from outside. No one asks an artist in Berlin to “represent Germany”; they’re expected to just make work. The expectation that a Latin American artist must act as a kind of cultural delegate is itself a residue of the periphery position: you’re granted entry on the condition that you explain where you come from. That said, I won’t pretend my context is incidental to me. I work from a family history of migration, of women who held households alone, of labour that was never named, and that history happens to be shared across much of the global south. But the distinction matters: I work from my context; I’m not obligated to represent it.
The first is a source; the second is an assignment. And refusing the assignment doesn’t make you rootless. Some of the most situated work is precisely the kind that won’t explain itself to the outside viewer.
The boundary between art and design is increasingly porous. Where do you position yourself in that conversation, and does the distinction still matter to you creatively?
I’m an admirer of design, so I won’t set it against art; that opposition doesn’t really occupy my head. What interests me is something else: design is never innocent. We all live surrounded by it, and behind every designed object there’s an intention, crossed by politics, by landscape, by memory. A garment, a tool, a room: none of them are neutral or merely decorative. So I don’t position myself on a border between art and design; I’d rather point at what they share, which is that both shape bodies and behaviour whether we notice or not. If anything, my work takes a designed object, clothing, and stops it from functioning, so that the intention hidden inside it becomes visible.
The distinction between art and design matters far less to me than what design hides in plain sight. Think of women’s clothing without pockets: it looks natural, it’s just “how those clothes are,” but it was a decision, and it quietly limited women’s autonomy for generations. That’s what I’m after, the intention buried inside things that look obvious.
Many artists from your generation have moved fluidly between mediums — textile, performance, video. How has working with audiovisual formats changed the way you think about an artwork’s lifespan and audience?
Video and photography were there at the origin for me; my first works were photo-performances, my own body recorded and shown on a monitor. So the moving image is where I started. What it taught me, and what still shapes how I work, is that an image’s life leaves your hands the moment it circulates. The clearest example: the most reproduced photograph of my work online is an installation of black tulle pieces, and that single image has done more to fix my public identity than any exhibition. It’s why people call me “the artist who hangs dresses.” I didn’t decide that; the network did.
That’s the real lesson of audiovisual circulation: a work has two lifespans, the one in the room and the one as a reproduced image, and the second is faster, flatter, and mostly beyond your control. I’ve stopped fighting it. I make work whose meaning depends on being walked through, on shadow, on accumulation in space, things a thumbnail can’t carry.
Private collections have played an unusual role in preserving and circulating art in Paraguay. How do you think about the relationship between artists, collectors, and institutional memory in contexts where public infrastructure is limited?
The premise is true, and it’s not new. Our Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes itself began with the private collection of Juan Silvano Godoi in the 19th century: even what is “national” here started as someone’s private holdings. The contemporary version is the Museo del Barro, one of the most important collections in the region, also born of private initiative rather than the State. I know this terrain from both sides: my own work sits in collections like that, and I spent fifteen years directing one, the Fundación Migliorisi.
So I hold two things at once. First, realism and gratitude: without private conviction, much of Paraguayan art would have no archive, nowhere to be held, no memory at all. Second, a caution: when memory depends on private will, it inherits the fragility of that will. A collection reflects a taste, a class, and it can be sold or dispersed, with nothing obliging it to remember what’s inconvenient. That’s not an argument against collectors; they’ve been indispensable. It’s an argument for not mistaking their generosity for public memory. A country needs an archive it doesn’t have to thank anyone for.
What is the one thing you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career, and what do you think the current generation of Paraguayan artists needs most — mentorship, markets, platforms, or something else entirely?
What I wish someone had told me: you don’t get to decide whether you’re an artist, and the work is slow. The meaning of a piece often arrives years after you’ve made it, so stop demanding to understand it right away. I worked instinctively for a long time before I trusted that. As for the current generation, and I say this as someone who teaches and mentors, it’s not mainly markets or platforms; those are downstream. It’s mentorship, yes, but above all the horizontal kind: peers looking at each other’s work seriously, collaboration, the patient consolidation of networks.
Our scene tends to be spasmodic, a lot of work made in reaction to the next open call, a lot of people producing who never show. And one thing we lack almost entirely: a healthy art criticism. Without serious, generous, rigorous criticism, work floats; it gets celebrated or ignored, but rarely read. That’s the infrastructure we can actually build ourselves, without waiting for a ministry or a market: we can look at each other well, and we can write about each other honestly.
If you could redesign one thing about how art is supported, circulated, or taught in Latin America, what would it be — and what gives you optimism that it might actually change?
Let me start by resisting the question a little. Proposing one fix for all of Latin America is either naive or violent; I’d rather assume it’s the first. There isn’t one Latin America, and there isn’t even one Paraguay: the conditions in Asunción are not those of Ciudad del Este, let alone Cuenca or Caracas.
So the one thing I’d redesign is precisely that reflex, the search for a single model, a single centre, a single correct way of doing things. I’d support the plural instead: many small, situated infrastructures rather than one grand solution, and the lateral routes that let regions speak to each other directly instead of always routing through a capital or a Northern hub. What gives me optimism is that this isn’t a proposal. It’s already happening, just improvised and underfunded. The architecture exists. Optimism, for me, isn’t believing something new will be invented; it’s noticing that what we need is already alive, and choosing to feed it.
