This artist likes to see her work as the result of her will to bring into real life what she has learned in books. She compares herself, in this sense, to Don Quixote. The art that results from such an impossible project is a sort of imaginative re-accommodation of truth, ‘a translation of reality into what has been read, or a superposition of both’ (Pica). As a result, her pieces are always contextual interventions on buildings, monuments or objects, which can include performative components, or performances closely linked to specific contexts or situations. Perception, time, memory and a certain sense of spectacle are chief instruments for her work.

An early piece epitomises her poetics. Thanks to the same old schoolbook illustration, all Argentinians recognise the historic bright yellow house where the country’s independence was claimed. However, this house, located in a small northern city, is actually white. As a way of negotiating the contradiction between reality and its iconic image, Pica cast a yellow light over the real house during 40 minutes (the equivalent of a class period). By an artistic sleight of hand, she made true what was falsely learned and believed by the people. Always spiced with irony, Pica’s work is a critique of icons that is carried out on the icons themselves.

Gerardo Mosquera