Limited LP, Art Edition. By 1966, following her studies in fine art, Carnevale, born in 1942 and living in Rosario, Argentina, had begun to ask herself who she was, what she was doing, and why. She questioned what her education in the school of art had to do with reality, and with art. After her early involvement with Primary Structures, Carnevale began to reflect more deeply on the political and societal conditions in Argentina. Pieza Blanca was originally created for Graciela Carnevale's first show in Buenos Aires in 1968, presenting an empty room, entirely painted white, brightly illuminated, and filled only with the sound of an amplified heartbeat. For her monograph exhibition at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein in 2025, the artist performed one subtle yet significant alteration. Whereas the 1968 iteration featured the sound of a prerecorded heartbeat on vinyl, looped on tape, a medical recording provided by a doctor friend, Carnevale replaced this found, archival sound with a recording of her own heartbeat. Reflecting on her own mortality, and on the time as it was then and as it has passed since, the use of her own heartbeat asserted with renewed clarity that the piece is about time, about the present moment, and fundamentally about life.
The other work in the record is based on a project titled La Huerta, a workshop offering gardening and horticultural training to young people and adults from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, a space of mutual learning, exchange, and profoundly political work. The audio file records the sounds of the Southern Hemisphere as they were played inside the library at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Canada, where the work was first presented. (From Mathieu Copeland's text To Listen and to Sow.)
Recording and editing by Renata Defelice and Fermín Sagarduy, heartbeat recording by Dr. José Luis Ameriso, Dr. Laura Vozzi and Andrés Fernández, in cooperation with Leeds Beckett University, Leeds School of Arts, and with thanks to the participants of the Huerta Doña Irma project, a training workshop on agro-ecological and biodynamic gardens for young people in a low-income neighbourhood of Rosario (2023). Design by Koby Barhad. Record #07 in the Ediciones Inauditas series of vinyl records by conceptual artists, co-published with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), published by Marius Babias and Sergio Edelsztein and curated by Mathieu Copeland. 33 1/3 rpm, 43:36.
Graciela Carnevale, born in Marcos Juárez in 1942 and based in Rosario, is one of the key figures of the Argentine avant-garde of the 1960s.
