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Curating

Maitena. Las mujeres de mi vida


Female genius of humor, sociologist of everyday life, leading figure in Latin American comics, pioneer and mentor of female cartoonists — these are just some of the titles bestowed upon her by millions of readers.

For the first time, Maitena opens her archive spanning more than three decades of work, exploring the funniest aspects of the most intense situations. The result is an exhibition as vast as it is hilarious, covering her greatest successes —Mujeres Alteradas, Superadas, and Curvas peligrosas— while also revealing secret and intimate material: early sketches, original pieces, drafts, erotic drawings, and her advocacy for various causes and rights.

The chosen title, Las mujeres de mi vida, celebrates polygamy —or is it polyamory?— of an artist who, without marrying a single "battle character," multiplied, across hundreds of faces, bodies, and situations, the experiences of all women. "We women aren't all the same, but the same things happen to us," she has said more than once, explaining her deep connection with her audience. Those "same things" form a compendium of patriarchal order expressed in panels.

It's impossible to ignore: a feminist reference, and at the same time, humorous. In this way, we can say that the Kirchner Cultural Center, taking up the call for "a room of one's own" that Virginia Woolf made in the last century, now dedicates all the galleries on this floor so that Maitena has what she deserves: her very own fourth floor.

Urdapilleta y sus glorias


"At 60, which is when I'm going to die or someone's going to kill me, I'll be 11," Alejandro Urdapilleta predicted. And so it was: after imagining his infinite deaths —"with eyes wide open, high on powerful morphine, or a victim of summer diarrhea"— he died on December 1, 2013, just days after turning 63, still a foul-mouthed child; solitary, yet full of friends; arriving at the theater half-asleep and desperately looking for his mother.

Ten years after that wretched day, this exhibition is not a tribute, but the beginning of a triumphant revenge. Uru wrote nearly everything that crossed his mind and his guts in his notebooks Gloria and Rivadavia, as well as in agendas and little notebooks. Here, for the first time, a small portion of his ever-growing archive is on display: poems, drawings, lists of drunks and enemies, of books and lovers, song projects, aphorisms struck through and rescued. In love letters, scripts, brilliant ideas, failed ideas, deletions.

He was Hitler and he was La Cañancha. He was killed by Hamlet and lived until he became senile like Lear. He shone like a sliver of fake gold alongside Batato Barea and Humberto Tortonese, battling them again and again in the post-dictatorship era. The theater is the only place where what Uru truly was can be found, and it lives in these intimate papers, written between misery and ecstasy.

He hated being labeled as an actor, writer, or playwright. Let's give him his due. Let's call him by his own magic: crazy captain of chaos, reviver of dying theatrical art, warrior of the paracultural battle, serial hater of clichés. Let's tell the truth: a genius.