An Open Cartography: Matías Duville and the Argentine Pavilion in Venice

A field of white salt stretches across the floor of the Argentine Pavilion, its surface marked by lines of charcoal that shift between drawing and terrain. Beneath visitors’ feet, the landscape crackles, disperses, and reforms. Shapes emerge only to dissolve again—mountains, paths, horizons, fragments of imagined worlds suspended between appearance and disappearance. Accompanied by a soundscape that responds to environmental conditions in Venice itself, “Monitor Yin Yang” unfolds less as an exhibition than as a living system, one in which matter, movement, and perception remain in constant negotiation.

For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Matías Duville transforms drawing into an experience that can be entered, traversed, and altered. Long recognized for works that inhabit the fertile space between memory, geology, dream, and ecological uncertainty, the Argentine artist expands one of the defining languages of his practice beyond the page and into the realm of architecture, sound, and duration. Curated by Josefina Barcia, the installation proposes an unstable cartography activated through the movements of its visitors, where salt and charcoal become material carriers of vastly different temporal scales—one shaped by ancient oceans, the other by transformation through fire.

Resonating with the late Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” Duville’s project embraces subtlety over spectacle and attention over certainty. Rather than offering a fixed image of landscape, Monitor Yin Yang presents territory as something perpetually in flux: a space where opposing forces coexist without resolution and where meaning emerges through encounter. Whitewall spoke with Duville about drawing as a form of inhabitation, the tensions between control and drift, and the evolving relationship between landscape, technology, and perception.

Drawing as a Living Territory

WHITEWALL: Your practice has consistently pushed drawing beyond the page and into space, installation, and moving image. With Monitor Yin Yang, the drawing becomes something viewers physically inhabit and transform. What interested you in treating drawing as a living environment rather than a fixed image?

MATÍAS DUVILLE: Drawing for me has always carried a spatial dimension. Even in earlier works on paper, there was already an idea of movement, of mentally entering and navigating a place. With “Monitor Yin Yang,” that possibility expanded into a physical experience. I became interested in what happens when drawing stops functioning only as an image and begins to operate as a territory, something that can be traversed and inhabited.

I wasn’t thinking of it as creating an environment in a theatrical sense, but rather as constructing a system where different elements—materials, sound, time, and the presence of people—could affect one another. The work remains open because it is continuously rewritten through movement, perception, and the traces that accumulate over time.

Material Memory: Salt and Charcoal

WW: Salt and charcoal carry powerful physical and symbolic associations within the pavilion, especially in Venice, where salt is tied so deeply to the city’s history and identity. How did these materials begin to shape the emotional and conceptual language of the work?

MD: The materials initially appeared through a more intuitive process rather than through a symbolic decision. I was looking for materials that could behave almost like a territory: unstable, transformable, and carrying their own temporal dimension.

Only later did other layers begin to emerge. Salt and charcoal already contain different histories and temporalities within themselves. There is also a very strong physical relationship between them: absorption and reflection, black and white, permanence and transformation. The drawing appears somewhere within that tension.

And in Venice, salt inevitably acquires additional resonances. It becomes connected to the city itself, to water, trade, geology, and memory. I like that those associations remain present without becoming fixed meanings.

WW: The title “Monitor Yin Yang” brings together ideas of balance, duality, observation, and control. What drew you to this tension between something spiritual and something technological or mediated?

MD: I was interested in the friction produced by those terms existing together. Monitor can refer to observation, measurement, or surveillance, but it can also suggest something more diffuse, a presence that follows or accompanies processes that are unfolding.

Yin Yang introduces another condition, one related to coexistence rather than opposition. It proposes a dynamic relationship where contrasting elements remain in movement and continuously affect one another.

The project itself operates through those tensions. There are very elemental materials alongside technological systems, physical presence alongside invisible information, stillness alongside transformation. Rather than resolving those oppositions, I was interested in keeping them active.

Landscape, Time, and Transformation

WW: Your landscapes often feel suspended between memory, geology, dream, and ecological aftermath. When developing the pavilion, were you thinking about a specific condition of the contemporary world, or do you prefer the work to remain more psychologically open?

MD: I wasn’t interested in illustrating a specific condition or producing a direct commentary on the present. I usually prefer to begin from something less defined and allow different readings to emerge.

At the same time, no work exists outside of its context. We live in a moment shaped by uncertainty, environmental transformations, and shifting relationships with territory and technology. Those conditions inevitably become part of how the work is experienced.

I think of landscape less as a depiction of a place and more as a field where different images, temporalities, and states can overlap. I’m interested in keeping that space open rather than closing it around a single meaning.

WW: The audience inevitably changes the installation simply by moving through it. How important was this gradual erosion and transformation to the meaning of the work?

MD: From the beginning, transformation was not something external happening to the work; it was part of its structure. The installation was conceived as something unstable and open.

“The installation was conceived as something unstable and open.”

Matías Duville

Each movement leaves small traces. Salt and charcoal shift, mix, and redistribute themselves. There is a gradual accumulation of gestures and presences that becomes inscribed into the surface.

I’m interested in the idea that the work remains alive, that it continues to register time rather than resisting it. The changes are subtle, but they slowly alter the landscape and become part of its memory.

Attention, Atmosphere, and an Open Landscape

WW: In the context of the Venice Biennale, where many projects compete through scale or spectacle, your pavilion operates through atmosphere, fragility, and slow perception. Did you consciously want to create a quieter or more meditative experience for the viewer?

MD: I wasn’t thinking in opposition to spectacle or scale. The pavilion itself is large, so there is already a certain physical presence.

What interested me more was creating conditions where perception could unfold gradually. The work reveals itself through duration rather than through a single immediate image. Certain elements only become visible through attention: changes in light, sound, textures, or small shifts in the materials.

I’m interested in experiences that unfold slowly, where attention itself becomes part of the work.

WW: Although the pavilion represents Argentina, the work seems to speak to something far broader than national identity alone. How do you think about the relationship between landscape, territory, and the shared anxieties surrounding instability and survival today?

MD: Today, many of our shared concerns—environmental instability, extraction, displacement, and uncertainty—are deeply connected to landscape. Rather than representing those issues directly, I’m interested in creating a space where different temporalities and ways of inhabiting a territory can encounter one another. In that sense, I feel there is a dialogue with some of the questions raised by Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial framework for this Biennale, particularly around attention, lived experience, and the ways we perceive and navigate the world. The work unfolds through movement and small shifts that become perceptible over time. It doesn’t propose a conclusion or a fixed statement; it leaves those tensions active and open to interpretation.

“I’m interested in experiences that unfold slowly…”

Matías Duville