AZOTEA.ARS
platform for cultural initiatives
AN ARTIST-RUN SPACE
NON-PROFIT
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
where artist studios, public programs and residencies coexist
ABOUT AZOTEA.ARS
AZOTEA.ARS is a non-profit, self-managed space that embraces the artistic heritage of downtown Buenos Aires to explore new forms of institutionalization based on openness, hospitality, and sustainability. The space brings together individual and collective practices through exhibitions, workshops, performances, lectures, and culinary experiences, proposing a dynamic of collaborative work and shared daily life.
Establishing a close relationship with the city's cultural and historical heritage, AZOTEA uses architecture to propose a dynamic of daily coexistence between individual and collective work. The central space is surrounded by other spaces for individual or collective creation. Studios of the residency program, a collaborative workshop equipped with tools and materials for collective use, enabling a scenario for the encounter of knowledge and skills.
The site will house AZOTEA's hybrid and multidimensional institutional practices (including interventions, residencies, workshops, performances, screenings, lectures, educational activities, and culinary experiences) and will offer a base for collective explorations of the art institution. AZOTEA develops and tests institutional models to accommodate and shape the dynamically evolving and discursively and socially engaged fields of the arts and their processes. This key element of AZOTEA's praxis—of instituting in a different way—is to synchronize the themes of its public programming with AZOTEA's everyday and multidimensional practices.
CALL FOR APPLICATION
RESEARCH PROGRAM:
LABORATORIO DE INVESTIGACIONES QUEBRADAS
The Laboratorio de Investigaciones Quebradas (AZOTEA.LIQ) es un espacio de formación y experimentación orientado a la producción artística contemporánea, que promueve el trabajo colectivo y el intercambio de saberes entre artistas y trabajadores del campo cultural. Abierto al cruce entre diversas disciplinas y prácticas (danza, música, artes visuales, pedagogía, performance, curaduría, entre otras).
Su eje central es la autogestión y el intercambio de saberes, lo que permite a cada participante cuestionar su propia praxis y situarse dentro del ecosistema del arte contemporáneo. Desde la charla de proyectos a futuro, visionado de portafolios artísticos, proceso teóricos que viajan a través de distintos lenguajes y soportes, laboratorio de investigaciones quebradas articula imaginarios, tecnologías de producción y reflexiones sobre múltiples dimensiones de sentido. Es un espacio de diálogo y circulación de ideas que da cuenta de la potencia colectiva del programa AZOTEA.ARS
APPLICATION DEADLINE:
May 2nd at 10pm
Participation in the laboratory is free and in person.
DATES:
Miércoles de 18 a 20:30h
El 13 y 27 de mayo, 10 y 17 de junio, 8 y 22 de julio.
With an open call for 20 artists and art workers, the Broken Research Laboratory proposes intensive workshops for reflection and critical thinking about the visual arts. Through collaborative methodologies, it seeks to create a space for horizontal exchange, political imagination, and collective creation in downtown Buenos Aires.
The program will be directed by Victor López Zumelzu together with Martín Touzón and will feature guests such as Jens Andermann (ARG), Ana Roman (BR), Andrea Soto Calderón (CL), Reset Plataforma (ARG), Ericka Flórez (CO), Helio Menezes (BR), Tania Pardo (ESP), Almudena Escobar López (ESP).
PUBLIC ACTIVITIES
RODEOS es una obra que explora el compromiso como estado relacional radical: una condición en la que ya estamos implicadxs, afectadxs y sostenidxs por otrxs.
Tras quince años de trabajo en colaboración, las coreógrafas Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang investigan el compromiso como punto de partida desde las experiencias de interdependencia y vulnerabilidad.
Life is a shared problem that inevitably transforms us. What happens when we stop denying this mutual exposure and accept that to exist is to depend? What structures, temporalities, and bodies do we need to reinvent to sustain ourselves in a shared life? Rodeos proposes inhabiting this implication and rehearsing a “we” that is always in process.
AZOTEA is pleased to announce INTERMEDIO, Asad Raza's first long-term intervention in Latin America. On August 20, 2025, we invite you to the opening of this new work, which directly engages with the architecture and subterranean ecology of the Thompson Building. The exhibition is inspired by the historical construction of Buenos Aires buildings, many of which were traditionally insulated with earth, a practical architectural strategy. In the building that currently houses AZOTEA, channels were previously excavated in the ground to install telecommunications infrastructure. In this new work, Raza activates this forgotten infrastructure. The artist will uncover the channels, reclaiming the earth between the soil layers and forming a new ecological network within the space.
This is not the first time Raza has used earth as a central medium. His project Absorption (originally commissioned in 2019 by Kaldor Public Art, Sydney) invited visitors to take home artificial "neo-soil" cultivated in galleries around the world. But this latest work turns inward, toward the existing earth already integrated and trapped within the city's built environment. It is an experiment in urban ecology, memory, and reclamation. Asad Raza's intervention at AZOTEA is also conceived as a device to be inhabited and from which a series of public programs will be presented in collaboration with local and international writers, botanists, ecologists, historians, and others. He will also consider other media such as performance, experimental music, light interventions, and other possible forms of dialogue. These events will invite visitors to reflect on the history of native plants in Buenos Aires and the interrelationship between technology, colonization, and ecological resilience.
Spanning winter, spring, summer, and autumn, the exhibition space will become a natural landscape where the building's functions—insulation, communication, and now, cultivation—intertwine in real time. The act of cultivating native plants within these architectural veins is a gesture both practical and poetic. As the plants take root in the narrow cuts once used for cables and wires, the work reverses the logic of extraction and disruption. Rather than channeling information through technology, the exhibition channels life, connecting botany, history, and urban memory in a form of slow, metabolic regeneration.
The ADMISSION IS FREE. VISITS ARE COORDINATED BY APPOINTMENT THROUGH THE FOLLOWING LINK
Coordinate your visit to INTERMEDIO by Asad Raza @ AZOTEA.ARS
Asad Raza's intervention will be open from August 20, 2025 to March 31, 2026 on the AZOTEA.
PREVIOUS ACTIVITIES
The call for applications was made for the Circulation Grants - Dance by Day Cycle 2025, a proposal from the new Blue Program for Research in Performing Arts of the Williams Foundation in collaboration with AZOTEA.ARS.
The scholarship is intended for artists or collectives residing in Argentina with performance proposals within the field of contemporary and experimental dance. The objective of these scholarships is to promote the circulation of experimental dance works and their exposure to new audiences. Promote the circulation of experimental dance works and their contact with new audiences.
We'd like to thank everyone who applied to the call. There were 89 projects, and they exceeded all our expectations. Congratulations to those selected!
The performances were free and in daylight, between June 25 and July 19, 2025, on Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m. and Saturdays at 3:00 p.m., in our space.
Thanks to the team of Fundación Williams for making this collaborative cycle possible and to KBB for the support.
MORE INFO ABOUT THE WORKS
“The Silence” by Cecilia Priotto and Cipriano Arguello Pitt
The rustle of a stone, the faun, that animal that mobilizes desire beyond reason. The skin is the deep surface that connects us to the unspeakable. At that threshold of events, where breathing happens in the small gesture, all the movement of the world exists. Can we stop? Cecilia Priotto dances on the dead, dances on stones. She loses her face and attempts to make the dance collective; there is no pretension of universality but of a ritual collective. If, as Nancy says, we go to the theater to see the animal perform, we are also going to see it dance.
Duration of the: 49 minutes
“Toque Zombi” by Luis Garay
The performance is based on two axes: on the one hand, on the idea of “tropicalizing the South” formulated by Néstor Perlongher: a poetic-political way of disorganizing inherited systems of language, identity, and territory. On the other hand, the idea of crossing this intuition with genealogies that consider the form of language from the Queer, the spiral, the unstable, and the incomplete: Franketienne (Haiti), the quantum literature of Wilson Harris (Guyana), and the archipelagic thought of Édouard Glissant, among others. The performance proposes a form of embodied listening and explores the way spoken language works in and with the body. The piece was originally created at the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) Berlin, 2024 and now reformulated in Buenos Aires with migrant performers (from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru), whose voices, accents, and bodily presences embody a situated rewriting.
Duración: 35 minutes
“Cardo Ruso” by Claudia Nanquín
A vagrant dance that explores emptiness, the rustic, the indispensable, embracing sound as a moving/performative force. The piece is presented as a minimalist practice, initiated from the center of the bodies and sustained by a physically grounded sound field driven by the insistence of moving air. This nomadic scene, replete with temporal gaps, then becomes a zone of sonic upheavals and physical denseness, giving rise to exhaustion, the avalanche, horror, the stampede, where the only hope is for the rolling body to stop, for something to cease, and for the tornado to sweep away the dust.
Duración: 35 to 40 minutes
“El último rito” by Quillay Méndez and Masi Mamani
The final rite is the transition from civilizing death. It is escaping those bonds and fleeing to other, erroneous destinies. Embraces, loves, friendships, and friendships are carried in its folds of clothing. The adventures are the perfect excuse to find each other, where both, punctuated by violence, merge into other worlds. Ritualizing escape is planning strategies to betray the colony and reunite with one's own people. Dancing on the shores is crossing the porous line between the indistinguishable from the picaresque and the brutal confrontation of bodies.
Duración: 25 to 30 minutes
WORKSHOPS
