Lucía Reissig, *Hero*, 2025, Fiberglass, epoxy resin, 57x21x23 in.COURTESY OF MIMO, PH LUIS CORZO.

Lucía Reissig’s practice moves fluidly between sculpture and collaborative experimentation. Born in Buenos Aires and currently living in New York, Reissig recently completed her MFA in Sculpture at Bard College. Rooted in feminist and decolonial frameworks, her work transposes the politics of care, domestic labor, and food economies into material forms that are both intimate and structurally complex. Following her recent solo exhibition, Glossary at MIMO in New York, we sat down with Lucía to discuss her most recent work, the threads that weave her practice, and how sculpture becomes a site for both personal and collective memory.

Lucia Reissig, *Glossary*, 2025. Work in progress. Courtesy: Mimo, New York, photography by Luis Corzo.

Micaela Vindman: We first met during your exhibition, 287.5 Kilos (2023) at Móvil in Buenos Aires, where you presented different large-scale installations that interpreted images and scenes you had observed in markets in Guatemala and Argentina. In your current sculptures, I can still trace the evolution of those works. How has that research developed since then?

Lucía Reissig: The show at Móvil was a turning point for me. 287.5 Kilos grew from an archive of digital photos capturing fruit, vegetables, and regional-product mercados in Argentina and Guatemala. It revealed the rhythms of the informal economy, with piles of goods, ropes, nets, and hooks that shape how wares are displayed and sold. I spent two months working on that show on site, allowing each piece to assert its own agency while still relating to the others, much like the mercados that inspired them. The process became almost like a laboratory where mixing, measuring, and weighing connected recipes with numerical formulas, blending taste with technique, and honoring time, care, and feminist conversations about nurturing, marginalized wisdom, and the informal economy.

Almost two years later, I’m still in conversation with those works, drawing textures, colors, and rhythms into my current practice and making new iterations. I feel that my approach back then was more representational; now the mercado scenes have dissolved into a more abstract language.

MV: Food runs through your work as a visual language, a material, and a political symbol. How did this relationship between food, commerce, markets, and your artistic practice first begin?

LR: Growing up in Argentina with a Guatemalan mom meant chasing ingredients that were hard to find (in the 90s, the Central American diaspora was pretty low) like achiote, chile pasa, and miltomate. My mom would call her family to track down recipes, and we’d take long bus rides to mercados searching for flavors from home. Cooking together taught me that recipes, like sculpture, are about gathering materials, adapting, sharing, and passing on knowledge within a community.

On the collective side, I co-founded a queer art and food duo project that cooked from protest kitchens to punk shows and even a pop-up restaurant at my house. For three years, we cooked at rallies, like the abortion rights vigils in Argentina, feeding hundreds of people green vegan stews, green being the symbol of the movement.

I also worked at Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito, an art and community nonprofit in a shantytown founded in 2001 by artist Fernanda Laguna during Argentina’s major economic crisis. For five years, I taught art to kids and cooked in the “Comedor Gourmet” founded by Larisa Zmud. In 2023, I created the Transgenerational Food Experimentation Workshop, connecting my family with the mothers and grandmothers of my students.

Food has been my way of carrying places inside me: a Guatemalan kitchen in Argentina, soup kitchens, protest street food, classroom tables. It’s where the personal and the collective meet—recipes become stories, and eating together becomes both an archive of memory and a rehearsal for the world we want to build.

Lucia Reissig, *287,5 kilos*, 2023. Solo show at Móvil, CheLA, Buenos Aires. Installation view. Courtesy: Hache Gallery, Buenos Aires, photography by Ignacio Iasparra.

MV: You mention your artistic upbringing happened outside institutions, in DIY spaces and artist-run spaces. Your early involvement in feminist and community-based projects in Argentina appears to be foundational to your practice. How do you think that shaped the way you approach your work today?

LR: In Buenos Aires, I had the opportunity to learn directly from artists I admired, such as Miguel Harte and Ana Gallardo, among others. In Argentina, that’s very common; you enter the scene through artist-run and DIY spaces. Those spaces are messy, generous, and resourceful both technically and conceptually. They are socially engaged, fostering critical thinking and exchange. My professors were very present in the sessions, and I think that made me the artist I am today. They allowed me to blend art with life, politics, and labor, and to treat those boundaries as fluid. Pursuing my MFA at Bard later was important because it introduced me to a more traditional, studio-based approach to working, something I hadn’t quite identified with before.

I’ve been drawn to letting challenging circumstances feed the work, honoring “the personal is political.” For years, I created art while cleaning houses, which culminated in El trabajo invisible (2017–2021), a project where my labor became part of my practice, allowing me to make art at my job. I took photos during my workdays, collected used rags and dust while sweeping, and compressed them or made drawings with them. The series explores the memories embedded in domestic spaces, the gestures of care, the value of time, the economies of an artist, the working body, and the transformation of spaces through daily tasks. It also showed me how far an art practice can stretch, and that it doesn’t need to be separated from life.

MV: You work with materials as varied as resin, latex, paper, cement, and even onion skin. Can you walk us through your decision-making process when choosing materials?

LR: I approach materiality in different ways. Sometimes it’s very intentional, if I want a specific shape, scale, durability, or color. At other times, it has more to do with listening to found material.

I mostly work with what’s available. I like to pick materials intuitively and experiment, often using them “wrong” with a bit of disobedience. If I’m making a sculpture from scratch, at the beginning, I need things to move fast, so I usually start with paper, glue, and chicken wire. Later, I let the process slow down and see what the sculpture needs, sometimes making molds and casting, and other times casting something directly and reproducing it multiple times. My approach changes depending on the project.

When I work with found objects, they become the material itself. Each carries its own history, and whatever I add becomes part of a conversation with its past, whether it’s dust I’ve collected, rags worn through domestic work, used egg crates, or produce bags picked up in the street or markets. Once those are in my studio, I create a reaction to them by adding components that usually involve some kind of tension, in terms of scale, industrial or organic qualities, or weight.

Lucía Reissig, *Maples*, 2023, 2024. Epoxy Resin, Papercrete, and Egg Crates, variable measures. Courtesy: Hache Gallery, Buenos Aires, photography by Ignacio Iasparra.

MV: Scale is a significant factor in your work. How do you approach it? Does it emerge first from a conceptual or practical need, or is it more often a response to the specific space for which the work is initially conceived?

LR: When I moved to the US, the scale of my work suddenly came into question in ways it hadn’t before, prompting me to rethink scale not just as a formal concern but as a cultural idea. I’ve always tried to balance what’s practical with what feels right.

Instead, I looked for ways to fill space without going “big” or spending money, while staying aligned with my subject matter. I’ve since focused on repetition, collapsibility, and piling, engaging in a kind of active meditation, making and making so that the work grows through accumulation, not just in size.

As a fellow sculptor recently told me at a studio visit, “Making sculptures in New York is heroic,” and I’ve seen the truth of that while navigating the limits of space here. It has made me think about privilege and its relationship to scale, storage, the body, and how artworks inhabit their surroundings.

MV: Collaboration has been a constant thread in your practice, sometimes as a conceptual framework, sometimes as a source of inspiration. You’ve previously worked with both your father and your mother. How do these collaborative dynamics, along with theory and research, shape your work in the studio?

LR: Theory, research, and collaboration are all tangled in my work. I might be deep in making, then suddenly a book or a conversation clicks, and everything makes sense. Collaboration comes from affection and admiration; this feels central to my practice. Whether with family, artists, or experts in cooking, economics, history, and activism, these exchanges shape my process. I love working with family members because it brings us closer together and allows our relationships to unfold outside of traditional family roles and dynamics.

During El trabajo invisible, I met many academics and activists. I loved that, because I’m always curious about art’s limits, and the art world can sometimes feel closed off to these conversations. Through these exchanges, I’ve met very inspiring people, including Luci Cavallero, who researches debt and violence; Martín Wasserman, a historian of finance; and Pato Laterra, a professor of economics and gender. Their input has been invaluable. Luci wrote for my 2018 show El trabajo invisible; Pato contributed texts for my 2022 exhibition Todo estaba sucio (Everything Was Dirty), which explored feminist economic stages of labor; Martín wrote an article contextualizing 287.5 Kilos, tracing domestic traces in market history.

During 287.5 Kilos in Buenos Aires, I collaborated with political scientist, cook, and butcher Victoria Vago on a participatory sausage-making workshop that became a space to share food while reflecting on how meat (so central in Argentina), politics, gender, and community are intertwined. That spirit of collaboration continues after my show at MIMO, when the Chilean lesbian publisher duo Hambrehambrehambre, who published my poetry zine on labor, Sticky Floors Vol. I (2021), came to New York City for the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. Together, we launched a new edition and hosted an Acción Gráfica in my Long Island City studio, a collaborative hangout where we drew, scanned, and printed pamphlets to paste on the streets.

Lucía Reissig, *287,5 kilos*, 2023. Solo show at Móvil, CheLA, Buenos Aires. Installation view. Courtesy: Hache Gallery, Buenos Aires, photography by Ignacio Iasparra.

MV: Your recent solo show at MIMO, Glossary, was a powerful exploration of language, abstraction, and the politics of containment. Can you share more about that project and what you were experimenting with?

LR: Showing at MIMO was such a meaningful experience. The space, a basement run by Venezuelan artists Carlos Nuñez and Luis Corzo, felt close and human—it reminded me of home and the way I grew up, surrounded by friends, making things together. Over time, MIMO has become an important space for the contemporary diasporic art community.

For Glossary, I developed a series of abstract container sculptures that responded directly to the architecture of the space. The works adapted to the basement’s compressed, almost awkward proportions, negotiating with its low ceiling and tiled floor to heighten a sense of intimacy and constraint.

In a notebook, Virginia Woolf wrote a list of words under the title “Glossary.” In it, hero is redefined as bottle. Ursula K. Le Guin took that linguistic turn to tell a different story in her book The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. That text expands the concept of the bottle to encompass any receptacle, container, or sack—perhaps the first cultural artifact ever. This means that long before weapons, humans created containers to store and transport things.

Le Guin conceives this powerful theory based on a formal appreciation and need for containers, giving us a sense of belonging to human culture and creating an inherent relation between sculpture and carrier shapes that we continue to relate to daily. I also think about Woolf’s twist in language as a form of translation, how shifting the meaning of a single word can open a new world, and how, speaking English as a second language, I’m constantly navigating the spaces between translation, mistranslation, and abstraction. This reinforces the idea that language, like sculpture, can be reshaped. The works in that exhibition evoke the image of a table after a big feast, a surface that holds the traces of gathering. I think about what we carry, physically, geopolitically, and emotionally, and how sculpture can hold those experiences. I’ve realized that many of my works function as carriers in their own way.