Carla Zaccagnini’s practice merges literature and the visual arts. She uses the fragment as a concept to illustrate processes of discontinuity and displacement in Latin American cultural, social, and political contexts. Similar to annotations in the margins of a book, her installations, sculptures, and performed writings stray from mainstream versions of history, diversifying both subjects and ways of narrating. The exhibition features several newly commissioned installations and films.

In Cuentos de cuentas/Accounts of Accounting, she uses personal memories and appropriated stories to narrate tales of everyday life in which the domestic, the historical, and the epic overlap.

Throughout the exhibition, intimate moments from her family’s archive allude to the economic asymmetries and co-dependent relationship between Latin America, the U.S., and Western Europe. Her works explore migrations, trade, and resource extraction caused by outside intervention and which contribute to the fragile economic environment and a recurring sense of disappointment that lingers throughout the region.

This exhibition is Carla Zaccagnini’s first solo presentation in the United States and started with episodic online publications between January 2021 and April 2022 also titled Cuentos de Cuentas. In these stories, Carla casts herself in the role of the doubtful narrator, presenting fiction as fact and challenging conventional notions of truth. Her narratives question the truthfulness and equally reflect on notions of value. Throughout, she reflects upon the strategies and tactics necessary to keep and transport money when it was still an object to be kept safe, secret, and under wraps.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication co-published with K. Verlag.