Marco Giordano: Slip Touch

Slip Touch is a solo exhibition by Marco Giordano (b. 1988, Italy) at Centro Cultural Recoleta and the artist’s first presentation in South America. It brings together two bodies of work: a group of monumental video installations that repurpose industrial pipelines as cinematographic apparatuses, and a series of drawings on rice paper. Both series expand the artist’s ongoing investigation into the interrelations between energy and communication flows, staging moments of spillage, rupture, and failure as conditions from which other relational grammars can emerge. 

Spanning sculpture, performance, and text-based art, Giordano’s work has examined systems and structures that impede meaningful encounters between individuals and collectivities, humans and more-than-human entities, bodies and their surroundings. Through immersive environments, arresting visual poetry, and animate objects, he has orchestrated estranging experiences that interrogate the boundaries of the self, its capacity to remain open to the Other, and its correlation with ostensibly inert matter.

In the artist’s new video installations, pipelines function as optical and aural amplifiers for footage filmed at and around infrastructure and energy facilities in South America and Northern Europe—nodes in the same network that distribute resources across the planet, binding distant territories into a single system of circulation.

Giordano interrupts this logic of seamless transmission through dazzling, often hallucinatory images that transform the pipelines into mediums for sparking a “slip touch”: a revelatory disconnection from, and reconnection with, the land. The artist lingers in the interstices of infrastructure—the roads that traverse the land, the extractive machines that pierce through it, or the mining complexes that reshape its surface—searching for modes of perception capable of challenging the disembodied, monocular, and machinic gaze that has historically rendered nature legible, mappable, and exploitable for human ends.

Giordano likens the disarticulation of distribution networks to poetry’s subversion of the normative protocols of language. If, in the drawings, words and images inflect and expand one another’s meanings, in the installations, the artist’s peripatetic explorations of the landscapes of the Anthropocene translate into acts of sensory augmentation. Filmed with a body camera and a fish-eye lens, the videos register his disorienting encounters with the technological sublime, awe before nature’s might and fragility, or vertiginous passages between micro- and macroscopic forms of life.

By questioning the imperative of fluidity that governs global infrastructure, Giordano reflects on the contradictions of energetic futures that remain dependent on extractivist practices—including the growing reliance on lithium-ion batteries for the storage of renewable energy—and on the enduring effects of these processes on territories and communities long subjected to material dispossession.

The exhibition’s soundscape has been developed by Emilia Álvarez.

The exhibition is curated by Michele D’Aurizio, independent curator, and Javier Villa, Chief Curator of Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. It is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), in partnership with Creative Scotland. Additional support is offered by Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires.

A volume accompanying the exhibition will be published in 2027 by KBB, Buenos Aires, and Temblores, Mexico City. It will feature contributions by D’Aurizio, Villa, and Liliana Gómez, Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel and the documenta Institute, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.