Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present “La familia elegida”, Chiachio & Giannone’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
The sewn and embroidered works of Chiachio & Giannone embody an intersectional perspective. In the wake of the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” the two artists make self-representation a militant act and domesticity a space of pride. Since 2003, they have created self-portraits, as a duo and, more rarely, individually. In doing so, they situate their existence: two queer, Argentine, artist men in love, passionate about gardening and about an intercultural and transtemporal history of art; they are also the happy members of an interspecies family. They have chosen to work with needles, a sewing machine, recycled fabrics, dyes, and thread. Every millimetre of their works bears witness to an unconditional commitment to sharing a space of representation that is singularly necessary.
The notion of chosen family nourishes their artistic practice. Chiachio & Giannone embroider their daily lives, enriched by their inspirations, encounters (botanical, artistic, and technical), dreams, fantasies, and desires. They often depict themselves with Piolin, Chicha, and La Dorado, three dachshunds who are beloved companion species. The self-portraits are also interspecies family portraits, in which human and more-than-human beings are connected through love, tenderness, and affection. They are also political family portraits, since they in no way correspond to the expectations of a patriarchal and heteronormative system. Two people of the same gender form a family with three dogs, conceived of as their children. Donna Haraway’s words resonate here: “Make kin, not babies.” Here, family is understood in a deconstructed, free, and emancipated way. Chiachio & Giannone have represented themselves for more than twenty years, just as they have represented the dogs who have lived and continue to live with them. They maintain a longterm relationship, within which both human and more-than-human bodies evolve and grow older: their coats turn white just as hair and beards do. The question of age is important. In a collective imagination built upon stereotypes, queer bodies are young, able-bodied, and festive. Chiachio & Giannone present themselves as they are, proud of their respective histories as well as of their individual and shared life experiences.
This connection to extended temporalities is also reflected in the artistic and cultural alliances that emerge from their thoughts, encounters, and research. During a residency at Transpalette in Bourges in 2022, they visited the city’s cathedral almost daily.1 They were fascinated by the stained-glass windows: the colours, the light, and the patterns formed by the lead cames connecting the fragments of glass. They made drawn surveys of them, as well as motifs inspired by the junctions between these lead bars.
This process of observation enabled them to establish a connection between these drawings and the Argentine Madi movement.2 More specifically, they became interested in the work of Yente (Eugenia Crenovich), born in 1905 and deceased in 1990. In a spirit of repetition and memory, they bring these two sources of inspiration into dialogue. The final drawing is then worked with coloured threads in order to create tonal gradations. Chiachio & Giannone also had in mind Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) paintings of Rouen Cathedral. The embroideries are superposed onto fragments of tapestries gathered during their residency in France and later upon their return to Buenos Aires. “It concerns machine-woven tapestries dating from the nineteenth century, from the period when Joseph Jacquard invented the warp-thread system by creating a machine adapted to the loom, operating through punched cards and automatically selecting the threads to be worked at each pass.”3 These fabrics are imbued with landscape and representations that echo their experience in Bourges. The tapestry fragments are themselves partially covered with coloured silkscreens referring to the luminous transformations observed in the cathedral. The works are thus conceived through layers of references and techniques.
These alliances of forms, intentions, and different periods can be found in several moments of their practice. The series entitled Comechiffones articulates the notion of chosen family (the artists and their three dogs), the history and practice of patchwork, the culture of the Hênîa-Kâmîare people (an Indigenous people, also known as the Comechingones, who live in the Pampas mountain ranges of the provinces of Córdoba and San Luis, and from whom Leo Chiachio is descended through his mother), as well as the trade of the ragpicker. The recycling of gathered fabrics gives rise to quilted works that bring together histories, claims, and cultures. In this sense, the works of Chiachio & Giannone overflow with love, tenderness, alliances, and freedom. Driven by constant curiosity, the two artists seek out common spaces, both visible and invisible. Threads connect cultures, eras, and ways of thinking in order to resist the limitations imposed by dominant models, to continue expanding the space of representation, and also to formulate surprising new hypotheses and visual languages that are as joyful as they are unexpected.
Julie Crenn, art historian and independent curator
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1 A research residency carried out as part of the exhibition HOPE WILL NEVER BE SILENT, presented at Transpalette, Bourges’ contemporary art centre, from 11 February to 24 April 2022. Further information here:
https://crennjulie.com/2022/01/11/exposition-hope-will-never-be-silent-chiachio-giannone-family-transpalette-bourges/
2 MADI is an avant-garde abstract art movement. It emerged in the 1940s in the Río de la Plata region of Argentina. MADI is an acronym that encapsulates the movement’s fundamental concepts: movement, abstraction, dimension and invention.
3 Quote from Chiachio & Giannone taken from discussions held with the artists during June 2026.