Matías Duville: Monitor Yin Yang

The Argentine Pavilion at the 61st International Venice Biennale presents Monitor Yin Yang, a site-specific installation by artist Matías Duville (Buenos Aires, 1974) curated by Josefina Barcia. The project transforms the pavilion into a traversable landscape constructed from salt and charcoal, expanding drawing—one of the central languages in Duville’s practice—into a spatial, sonic, and performative environment.

Conceived as an immersive installation, Monitor Yin Yang proposes an open cartography that does not represent a specific place but unfolds as a territory activated by movement. Visitors traverse a fragile landscape where materials, sound, and time interact, producing a shifting field of perception.

Drawing on the philosophical notion of yin and yang, the project imagines a space where opposing forces coexist: light and shadow, residue and energy, ruin and promise. Rather than resolving these tensions, the installation sustains them, suggesting drawing as a shared ground of improvisation and instability.

Spread across a surface of white salt, lines traced with ground charcoal form an unstable topography. Mountains, paths, and horizons appear and dissolve without ever fully settling. In this environment drawing ceases to function as a fixed image and instead becomes a terrain to be walked through.

The materials themselves carry temporal depth. Salt—the crystallized residue of ancient oceans—evokes geological duration and accumulation. Charcoal—the product of plant combustion—condenses processes of transformation and energy. Together they stage a friction between temporal scales, an encounter between permanence and change.

The notion of the “monitor,” present in the title, introduces another dimension: a device that observes, measures, or translates environmental conditions. Within this framework, landscape becomes a field mediated by technologies of recording and perception, where matter, data, and human presence intersect.

A sound composition developed by Centolla Society—a collaboration between Matías Duville and Pablo Duville—in partnership with Alvise Vidolin and the Center for Computational Sonology (CSC) at the University of Padua unfolds throughout the pavilion through a multichannel system. Environmental data collected in real time from the city of Venice—including atmospheric conditions and air quality—are translated into sonic variations of density, intensity, and movement.Together with the sound of footsteps on the salt surface, the composition generates an evolving soundscape in which drawing, sound, environmental data, and human presence converge.

In dialogue with the curatorial framework of the 61st International Art Exhibition—Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, conceived by Koyo Kouoh, Monitor Yin Yang unfolds through elemental materials and subtle gestures. Small variations of light, sound, and movement produce shifts in perception, transforming the installation into a constantly evolving composition.

Organized by
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional y Culto, Dirección de Asuntos Culturales, Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, and PromArgentina.

In collaboration with
Estudio Duville, Galería BARRO, Casa Triângulo

Selection jury
Amalia Amoedo—President, Ama Amoedo Foundation
Sergio Baur—President, National Academy of Fine Arts
Andrés Duprat—Director, National Museum of Fine Arts
Tulio Andreussi Guzmán—President, National Arts Fund
Rodrigo Moura—Artistic Director (2025), Malba
Adriana Rosenberg—President, Fundación PROA
Eugenia Usellini—President, Castagnino Museum Foundation

Press
Cynthia Almansi, prensa@barro.cc, @MonitorYinYang