MARISA BERNOTTI

My work begins in the place where I try to keep everything in order: my paper planner. It’s meant for decisions, numbers, and logistics, but it never stays in its place. Color interrupts lists. Diagrams dissolve. A single note becomes a shape I can’t ignore. That moment—when the system slips—is where my practice stars.

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I work with emotional memory not as personal expression, but as an archive of lived experience—individual and collective—where affect becomes data, and memory becomes a structural force. 

I live and work in the countryside. I don’t divide those spaces; they overlap naturally. The field, the business, the studio, the everyday tasks: they all belong to the same continuum. That overlap is not a theory—it’s simply the way my life unfolds, and it shapes the way I think and build my practice.

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I use materials that come from that context: industrial spools, grids, metal pieces, fabrics, ropes, elements linked to motherhood and painted surfaces. Some are rigid, some are soft. Their coexistence matters. I allow the materials to contradict one another, and I let that contradiction guide the structure of the work.

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I inhabit the contradiction, at the intersection of production, archive, and affective memory, grounded in the rural territory of Uruguay—where the female body operates as a living infrastructure within the agricultural economic system. I’m drawn to the tension between what can be counted and what refuses to be counted—between productive logics and the more intangible dynamics that shape a life. I don’t resolve these tensions; I hold them.