Tatiana Castillo: Who Has the Right to Tell a Story? Body, Territory, and Resistance
Writing and Research: Área Temporal Editorial Team Archive: Mapeo Artístico 2026 Open Call
An artistic practice that investigates the historical and political tensions of northern Argentina, bringing into visibility those presences that dominant narratives have relegated to the margins.
In Tatiana Castillo’s work, territory is neither a passive backdrop nor a mere geographical reference. It is a web of historical, cultural, and political relations that shapes the construction of identity. Born and raised in Jujuy, the artist develops a multidisciplinary practice rooted in the complexities of northern Argentina, where borders, memories, and embodied experiences become means of questioning how collective narratives are constructed and how the possibilities of representation are distributed.
Her research begins from a situated position. Salta and Jujuy, territories shaped by border relations with Bolivia and Paraguay, constitute a field of inquiry in which identities cannot be understood apart from their historical, geographical, and political conditions. From this perspective, Castillo explores the experiences of women and racialized people whose histories have been silenced, displaced, or subordinated by dominant narratives. Her work does not simply seek to recover what has been excluded from official records; it examines the structures that determine which experiences deserve to be narrated, which bodies become visible, and which forms of knowledge remain marginalized.
This concern situates her practice at the intersection of autobiography and collective research. The personal becomes a point of departure for approaching issues that extend beyond individual experience. Identity thus emerges as a construction shaped by memory, territory, and power relations. Rather than separating intimate experience from social processes, Castillo explores their interdependence: what unfolds at the individual level is also inscribed within broader historical structures.
The Body as an Instrument of Research
One of the central aspects of Castillo’s practice is the role of the body within the artistic process. In her performance and video works, the body operates as a recording instrument, an expressive medium, and a site upon which experiences are inscribed. Through the body, research moves beyond the distance of exclusively external observation and becomes an embodied practice in which presence, action, and physical exposure acquire the capacity to generate meaning.
This bodily dimension makes it possible to consider memory beyond its documentary function. Remembering does not merely involve reconstructing past events; it also means questioning how they persist in the present, how they affect self-perception, and how they shape one's relationship with the surrounding environment. The body thus becomes a meeting point between different temporalities: it retains traces, renders tensions visible, and opens up possibilities for narrating what does not always find representation within established discourses.
Castillo’s research unfolds through a methodology in which the choice of medium responds to the conceptual needs of each project. Performance, video art, photography, and installation are neither independent languages nor interchangeable resources, but distinct possibilities for giving material form to a question. This relationship between thought and materiality reveals a practice that understands artistic production as a process of exploration: form does not illustrate an idea that has already been resolved; rather, it participates in its construction.
In this sense, the audiovisual dimension makes it possible to record and transform actions; photography introduces alternative relationships between presence, image, and absence; while installation allows the viewer’s experience to be spatially organized. The convergence of these languages expands the scope of the work and questions the boundaries between document, performative gesture, and spatial experience.
Memory as a Political Presence
Within Castillo’s conceptual framework, memory acquires a political dimension because it intervenes in struggles over the visibility and legitimacy of experience. Marginalized histories do not appear merely as objects of representation, but as presences capable of challenging the frameworks through which reality is interpreted. Making these histories visible therefore entails more than incorporating them into an existing narrative: it requires examining the conditions that produced their exclusion.
This perspective avoids reducing her work to a nostalgic gesture or a reconstruction of the past. Memory is activated as a force that challenges the present, reveals historical continuities, and makes it possible to imagine other ways of relating to identity and territory. Through this process, artistic practice acquires a critical dimension: rather than offering a definitive account of the experiences it addresses, it opens a space in which their complexities can emerge without being subordinated to a single interpretation.
The resistance that emerges from her work is articulated precisely through this possibility of sustaining what has been displaced from dominant discourses. The aim is not merely to denounce invisibility, but to explore the aesthetic and material conditions through which a presence can endure, assert itself, and generate other forms of knowledge.
A Practice Between Experience and Thought
Castillo’s trajectory reveals a sustained search for tools through which to deepen these inquiries. Her education in Fine Arts at the National University of Tucumán, her current studies in the Master’s Program in Studies in Contemporary Cultures and Arts at the National University of Salta, and her participation in educational initiatives such as the Artists’ Program at Torcuato Di Tella University (2022–2023), supported by the Brun Cattaneo Scholarship, form part of a trajectory in which artistic production engages in dialogue with critical reflection.
Her participation in exhibitions such as BOOM (Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta, 2023), Una historia (Museum of Anthropology of Salta, 2023), and Polvareda (Museum of Fine Arts of Salta and MUBA René Brusau, 2024–2025), as well as in the National Visual Arts Salon, situates her work within diverse spaces of circulation and debate in the Argentine art scene. Her participation in Convergencia, a regional performance gathering in Argentina’s Northwest (NOA) in 2024, and the recognition she received at the CINE+PERFO International Festival further reflect her exploration of artistic languages that bring together corporeality, image, and action.
Yet the significance of her practice lies not merely in the diversity of the media she employs or the spaces in which her work has been presented. It resides, above all, in the way she brings experience, research, and form together to interrogate the relationships between identity, history, and power. Her work suggests that territory is not simply inhabited: it is also remembered, interpreted, and contested; that the body is not merely a physical presence, but a site from which knowledge can be produced; and that memory can become an active form of intervention in the present.
In Tatiana Castillo’s practice, to create is to open a space for what persists beyond hegemonic narratives. Her works do not resolve the questions of who has the right to narrate a history or of the conditions that make its recognition possible. On the contrary, they keep these questions open, placing viewers before the tensions that shape representation, belonging, and visibility. This is where the force of her practice resides: in transforming situated experience into a critical tool through which to reconsider not only the histories we tell, but also the structures that determine which of them are ultimately heard.
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