The Marshals Arrive. The Flowers Bloom. A waterfall of blue. A herd of colors swallows the gray. The world expands. Everything seems to grow more intense inside PROA’s building, as five artists stormed in to turn it into a volcano. Technically, they’ve done something that still has no name in Spanish—what we call site-specific, meaning a work conceived for one particular place and no other. This means choosing a location to transmute into art and embedding each artist’s poetics into its walls, ceilings, and floors. They don’t work on a blank canvas but rather the opposite: the material—whether concrete, glass, or wood—is laid bare, just like the building’s design, the space’s functionality, and the flow of people. Here, the artist cannot charge in like a battering ram but must seep in like water. In fact, they must be as fluid as water to adapt to what already exists; they must bend like the reed in Tao.

Who brings this quality? From the province of Misiones comes Andrés Paredes, with giant marshals heralding the storm, their wings hiding secret images. Daniel Joglar crafts a subtle poetics of space (quoting French thinker Gaston Bachelard) with blue stripes evoking waterfalls or the vibrations of a summer day. Gabriel Baggio is an expert at detecting floral motifs in everyday objects, which he then alters, elevates, and places within the space. The elevator’s gray concrete box is embraced by colorful sheets of redesigned plastic by Irina Kirchuk. Finally, Augusto Zanela draws thick stripes that, only from a precise angle, resolve into the logo of planet Earth—employing a renewed mathematical technique: anamorphosis.

This volcano isn’t geological but musical. Among the five artists, a true fugue emerges—a counterpoint of voices merging into the space to create a vibrant combustion of form and color.