Ala Plástica (1991-2017) was an art and environmental organization based in La Plata, Argentina. It focused on the rhizomatic connection between ecological, social, and artistic methodologies, combining direct interventions and defined concepts to explore parallel universes while preserving the symbolic potential of art.

Initially, Ala Plástica was formed by Alejandro Meitin, Silvina Babich, and Rafael Santos. Meitin’s background was in law, Santos’s in horticulture and science, and Babich’s in art education. They were dedicated to bridging the artist's way of thinking and working with the development of initiatives in the social and environmental spheres. Since 1991, Ala Plástica created a variety of unconventional artworks addressing local and regional issues and collaborated closely with other artists, scientists, and environmental groups. Their work spanned bio-regional efforts within Argentina and extended internationally, engaging with other transformative arts practitioners.

For twenty-five years, they collaborated with countless individuals. Their work served as a concrete example of methods, organizational structures, aesthetic forms, and social outcomes of artistic processes closely tied to a specific territory: the estuary of Río de la Plata and the watershed of the Paraguay-Paraná River.

Ala Plástica employed an intuitive, emotional, and phenomenological approach to a range of artistic initiatives that impacted communities and the environment, while highlighting the transformative potential of art. By prioritizing dialogue and communication, they created unconventional artworks that revitalized economic networks through retraining individuals in artistic roles, stimulated collective experiences, and empowered individuals to influence their political and biological environments more broadly. They collaborated with a diverse range of participants and stakeholders from various backgrounds. Through these processes, their work often evolved into self-organizing strategies that used art to re-imagine territories as vital aspects of community.

Their work was also featured in numerous national and international exhibitions, evolving alongside a long tradition of activist and social practice art. This tradition began in the UK in 1994 with the Littoral Art movement, an independent network of artists, critics, curators, and scholars interested in innovative approaches to contemporary artistic practice and critical theory, founded by Ian Hunter and Celia Lerner and documented in the book Littoral Art and Communicative Action by participant Bruce Barber. Later, they collaborated with prominent and extensively published artists and critics such as Suzanne Lacy, Teddy Cruz, Helen and Newton Harrison, Grant Kester, Critical Art Ensemble, Eduardo Molinari, M7Red, Fabiano Kueva, Sitezise, Transductores, members of Platform, WochenKlausur, Park Fiction, and more recently, Myanmar artist and author Jay Koh. These collaborations were part of group exhibitions and ongoing public dialogues about socially engaged art. Furthermore, they explored how artists could collaborate with scientists and advanced practitioners in fields such as geography, hydrology, biology, environmental law, and ecology. Such transdisciplinary collaborations were reflected in the curatorial work of Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in the exhibition Making Things Public and in the text Extradisciplinary Investigations by art critic Brian Holmes. These references helped them understand how artists could critically engage with economic production realms (e.g., GMO agriculture, hydroelectric dams, infrastructure projects) and constructively engage with community-based economies involving craft work, subsistence farming, forestry, and other activities that could benefit from specialized knowledge and innovative techniques.

 

CONCEPTUALIZING

 

-Emergent species, guides us as creative model. It gives sense to participation in processes of formation and transformation.

 

-The aproach to complexity representes a dynamic property in democratic or participative processes, where action tends to transformation.

 

-Creative practices are organic models which give light on decaying states of relationship nets, and they stand as a natural process positioning in front of survival.

 

-The question of what human being is capable to build or destroy, and what for.

 

-The right for communities to reach more sensitive visions of their situations.

 

-To look at how does human being function on nature.

 

-The development of an inclusive objectivity; another way for human being to focus itself into nature.

 

-Art in terms of adventure, exploration.

 

-To experience subtleness in human/nature relationship.

 

-Sensitive research, publicness, transformativeness, connectedness and confidence in emergence.

 

THE TONE

 

From a local social / political realm, through a critical points model, to a biosphere / political vision on the relationship between mankind and nature.

 

MECANISMS?

 

No, but inherent values and practices, bioregional models of action and interaction, connectedness, and selfreferenceless.

 

Organic processes models, and reflection on them (organic formation and transformation).

 

ART

 

Where is “Art”? A better question: Which are the results of art practice? A change on the way to aproach human facts and nature (an organic objectivity shift)

 

The discrete exercise as a didactic / cathalitic experiment.

 

Cathalisis, Attitude - Synapsis, Communication.

 

So called Intervention art, mostly a socially diving action than an experiment. Aproaching things cathalizes the experiment/exercise, then art interventionism emerges.

 

Art practice out of the art establishment‘s corral (market value, facility oriented practice).

 

WHY THE LONG TERM?

 

For allowing sensitive aproach, extended participation, publicness, transformativeness, and confidence in emergence.

 

 

ALA PLASTICA CV here

 

ALA PLASTICA Time Line 1991 - 2016 here