“I didn’t want to be creative; I didn’t intend to create anything. I just wanted to follow the path of my own desire. So I started using my imagination.”
Argentine artist, writer, and activist Fernanda Laguna pronounced these words during the recent unveiling of an ambitious review of her work housed at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA).
The exhibition, titled “My Heart is a Magnet (1992-2025),” is the first comprehensive overview of Laguna’s undisciplined practice, which has rippled through the local cultural landscape for three decades. Her oeuvre seamlessly blends contemporary art with the aesthetics of everyday life, far from traditional art institutions.
“This exhibition is dedicated to the independent spaces and publishers that are key to building culture,” Laguna explained.
“I thought it would be nice to lend a hand from museums to these independent spaces.”
The exhibit
The exhibit features more than 200 pieces split up amongst seven thematic sections. The works range from vibrant abstract paintings and delicate embroideries to sculptures, installations, and personal notebooks.
Curated by Miguel A. López, the show seeks to frame Laguna not just as a creator of objects but as a barometer of the shifting social and political tides in Argentina since the early 1990s.
In the exhibit’s catalog, he stressed that the retrospective offers “an account of a body of work that is at once unclassifiable and captivating, popular and high-brow, which has become a touchstone of the Argentine art scene over the past three decades.”
López, who in the presentation described the exhibit as “explosive,” also said the title (“My Heart is a Magnet”) is a reference to how the artist’s work “calls out to other hearts, other bodies, to take action on society” in “a very complex” political time. In that context, he said, such active desire “becomes absolutely urgent.”
The exhibit is a joint production with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, where it is scheduled to travel in 2027.
The 1990s
Born in Hurlingham in 1972, Laguna first rose to prominence in the mid-1990s as a key figure in the generation associated with the Centro Cultural Rojas, a cultural and artistic hub run by the the University of Buenos Aires, which ushered an array of independent artists the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Her early solo exhibitions in 1994 and 1995, curated by Jorge Gumier Maier, introduced a visual language that many critics initially dismissed as naïve or superficial from the standpoint of traditional political discourse.
By embracing domesticity, craft traditions, and imagery from mass culture — such as cartoons, children’s stories, and decorative patterns — Laguna was actually mounting a radical challenge to the rigid, patriarchal structures of the contemporary art world.
Poderosa
Papas Fritas II. 2023.
“When I presented a portfolio at the Rojas, Gumier Maier told someone, ‘I don’t know if this was done by a girl who is totally insane or a senile elderly woman,’” Laguna remembered.
The current retrospective at MALBA allows visitors to trace her early motifs, such as hearts endowed with human traits and cartoon-like eyes, which Laguna used to express the intensity of life, love, and the immediacy of the present moment.
Beauty and happiness in a troubled country
A central focus of the exhibition is Laguna’s role as a community builder, specifically through the founding of Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) in 1999.
Co-created with Cecilia Pavón, the space functioned as a gallery, gift shop, and independent publishing house at a time when non-corporate spaces in the city were almost nonexistent.
In the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic meltdown, Belleza y Felicidad became a vital hub for affective and political organization. They hosted 226 exhibitions and hundreds of events that deliberately avoided the formality of traditional institutions.
Belleza y Felicidad gallery
Back then, Laguna and Pavon were responding to a need for places that could “connect with the present day.” Shows could be easily set up, contrary to the museum-dominated scene where the buildup and exhibition process could take years.
“You would submit a portfolio, and by the time they said yes, you were already doing something different. So this was a place created out of precariousness, and that later became an aesthetic,” she remembered.
The exhibition documents how this space fostered creative processes linked to social and popular mobilizations, including works by the Taller Popular de Serigrafía and work sessions for Serigrafistas Queer.
This spirit of collaboration extended to Villa Fiorito — the community where football legend Diego Maradona was born — where Laguna opened a branch of Belleza y Felicidad in 2003. The space for art-related community projects focused on culture, work and activism, and later included a gourmet soup kitchen.
Laguna’s literary output is equally represented, showcasing her work as a poet and novelist, often written under the pseudonym Dalia Rosetti. Her writing, much like her visual art, explores the tension of a search without consummation, bridging the gap between the professional and the personal.
Back in the Belleza y Felicidad days, Laguna used to reflect on the very notion of a book, which in her view could be as easy and cheap as a folded sheet of paper, “as long as it had a cover and an inside.”
“We wrote them in the morning, designed them at noon, and in the evenings we went out and sold them. That sprung a whole new aesthetic of writing. You would write what happened to you that day and then instantly publish that — a proto social network. if you will,” she remembered.
Visitors to MALBA can explore the portion of the exhibition on Level 1 until May 25, while the installation on Level -1 will remain open through June 22. The museum offers guided tours every Monday and Friday at 5:00 p.m., providing further insight into a career that has left a mark in local contemporary art through a vocabulary of desire and intuition.
