ARTWORK

Fernando Hierro artworks selections from 2008-2025

Every progress need enemies or Does anyone remember who Simon Radowitzky was? (2018-2025)

In this piece, I explore the biography of Simon Radowitszky (10 September 1891, Štěpanice, Ukraine – 26 February 1956 Mexico City, Mexico) and his legacy in collective memory.   

On the morning of 29 November 2018, I was walking in the centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina. That day, the city was ringed by police and army because the G20 meeting would take place that week. In short, it was a huge security operation as Argentina was expecting visits from Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and other world leaders.

Simón Radowitzsky is an unavoidable reference for understanding the construction of the doctrine of the inner enemy in Argentine military literature. He was a worker and anarchist who was imprisoned for the murder of General Ramón Falcon and his Secretary Juan Lartigau after the repressive events that started during the celebration of International Workers’ Day in Lorea Square in Buenos Aires in 1909, where more than a hundred people were injured and dozens killed by the police who shot randomly at the dispersed crowd. The most successful general strike to date, which occurred as a result of this massacre, is known as the Red Week.

It should be noted that workers struggled to improve their working conditions for over three decades in the early 20th century. In those days there were no labour laws, i.e. working hours were very long and there were no rest breaks on Sunday.

Today, this story is the first one taught in police schools in Argentina, where Ramón Falcón and Juan Lartigau head the pantheon of heroes.

The following work is composed of construction waste, photographs from my digital archive (some of them from 28 November 2018 in Buenos Aires),  photographs from the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires (where the remains of General Ramon Falcon and Juan Lartigau lie).

Sculptural models for a necropolis (2022-2025)

The following artistic research is based on several exercises that aim to discern the connections between different systems and understand their relevance, based on the idea of the border as a possible site/space of managed death, according to the concept of Necropolitics developed by the Congolese philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Mbembé argues that the economic and political management of human populations by subjecting them to death has become a global phenomenon. War, genocide, the refugee crisis, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperisation and precarisation show how ever-increasing numbers of individuals are now governed through the direct and indirect exposure to death.

Examining the material and symbolic practices that constitute the development of borders, whether territories or regions, opens up specific questions about the relationship and interaction between ecological, social and economic systems, whose mutual impact defines what the Global North eventually designates as sustainability.

From sculptural processes that collect plant, electronic and construction waste, I am interested in the idea of recreating a kind of small necropolis. In other words, a space that demarcates and bears witness to death in relation to life. I should mention that the work will try to initiate a dialogue with the exhibition space, which is a disused church (disused medieval church) in medieval Gothic style.

SILENT MATTERS (2022-2025), focuses on exploring the idea of encryption and its sometimes accidental scope, through color and the geometry of images in their sensitive fusion in architecture and visual poetry.

Between two glasses (2020) is a video piece made after a frustrated research, about the inbalance of information flow on latin american issues. Explore the global tensions in different contexts lead me to reflect on subjects like epistemic injustice, history and the notion of border.

Time based media (2´22″)
Author: Fernando Hierro
Music: Luis Alberto Mariño
Editor: Juan Manuel Ledesma -Estudio Buenos Aires-

Frío por los ojos (2018-2022), perhaps it is the title of this exhibition, perhaps a state of perception, or even a hidden chorus in the famous song Should I Stay or Should I Go by British band The Clash. According to the artist, the focus of this exhibition, which brings together three years of production, consists of “the image and its evolution, the migration of ideas and their unexpected locations… Walking down an avenue of growing information traffic makes us indifferent, nothing new under the sun.” It is the act, almost a reflex, in which observation becomes a simple, disinterested, ascetic, and inaccessible gaze. Fernando Hierro is an artist who appears subtle and even naive at first glance, with fine, delicate strokes, a quasi-perfect handling of watercolor with pastel and soft tones, and (seemingly) childlike themes. However, behind this sweet and gentle first impression lies the hard and bitter core, the essence and raison d’être of his work. He places us at ground zero, where the harmless and insignificant aspects of everyday life take on a new dimension, now charged with hostility. Such is the case with his series Democracy (2017-2019), through which the artist denounces how a homemade Christmas cookie recipe—industrialized by a designer brand—can function as a cheap and easy-to-assemble home for refugees, simply by changing the scale of its patterns, in a paradoxically xenophobic context. Materiality and its precariousness is also a concern in his work. His exhaustive archival work and his experience as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital led him to draw on disposable polyethylene gloves used for body searches. This work, echoing Compulsive Beauty, in which Hal Foster recounts André Breton’s experience as a medical student during World War I, presents a series of images that, like the memory of anything, will be lost with the passage of time. The corpus of this exhibition consists of paintings, documentary photographs, and objects that, in their intertwining and poetic display, bear witness to the artist’s critical background. These images require much more than a glance. They require emotion, critical thinking, and, consequently, warmth. The same warmth that makes our blood boil when things are not right. Text by Mara Sofía López, Curator and Art Historian

Possible anatomies (2018), is a project based in bringing back the imaginary of a university museum of anatomy to the ex-intensive care room of this old hospital, by interventions and pieces made in situ with found objects, photographs and chirurgical gynaecological material. Blinking lights inside the room, infinite dust to be removed, ghosts stories, moisture and rust stains, strerchers and old documentation readings are just a few of the experiences that led me to think this room not only as an abandoned place, once assigned to body control and administration, but also as a receptacle for knowledge still to be judged. In fact, among scattered papers along this hospital halls and rooms, some manuals, blood protocols and supplies were found. Most of them were German with instructions translated to Spanish. This demonstrates the persistence of an ethnocentric paradigm and the urgent need for a situated knowledge. 

Stopping at this exercise of objectifying, practiced by the professional when naming and classifying someone in the name of science and its methodologies, proofs it as a point of inflection that turns the hospital and the anatomy museum into permeable spaces.

Meditations over a Christmas recipe (2018)

Pencils on the table, I try to draw something and I look at the snow through the window. Snowflakes fall covering the branches of a tree and I only think about the cold outside. Suddenly I listen to two birds, they are fighting over a little branch. Is it for a nest? Are they cold? Kids are running around me, restless, bored and locked up at home. They don’t want to go out, they are cold and I understand them. It’s already Christmas and in the middle of a nonsense stress, time goes by and all the situations of the pleasing culture lead us to quick recipes. I couldn’t find a way to entertain the kids, until I proposed them baking some cookies and a ginger cookie house. It’s Nordic festive tradition for Christmas. When I asked them if they felt like doing it, they answered an emphatic “yes!”. Luckily, we had de molds and a hand-made pre-done dough. I put the flour out and while I watch those plump and dirty hands kneading, I listen to TV in the background. It’s a well known politic’s voice that says: “our taxes don’t afford to support everybody” and then a woman adds: “apart form that, there’s no space. You tell me where we will put everybody… Its’s better to help refugees at their own place.” I start thinking over these expressions till my daughter tells me something’s burning. I run to the kitchen but it’s too late, the cookies are all burnt. I look through the window but the birds are gone. Again, kids are happily cooking and I listen to somebody else on TV that explains: “…they come from other culture and cannot understand ours. Furthermore, they take our jobs…”. I turn off the TV and we decide to build this cookie house that, as a prefabricated home, has parts already cooked that must be put together with burnt sugar and must me decorated with candies and frosting. It’s an industrialized and easy-assembling recipe that includes an instructions’ manual. Avoiding mistakes and frenzy, is essential for a happy image in the pleasing culture. Months later, I am told that the design company that produces the dough and molds for these cookie houses, has decided to change the constructive scale to attract governmental and international cooperation organizations that work with the humanitarian refugees’ crisis. The sale of quick-assembling houses was celebrated with a prize to the best design. • During 2017, Sweden was one of the first weapon exporters and USA was one of the first consumers. • According to official sources, military equipment`s exportations have risen to 11,3 billions Swedish Crowns in 2017. This means that today they are selling three times more weapons than ten years ago, ranking the 14th world post of war exporters between 2013 and 2017. • Sweden is a 450-295 km2 country and according to December 2010’s census, its total population was estimated in 9.415.570 habitants. • If we take into account the proportion of weapons sold per habitant, Sweden is the biggest weapon seller in the world. Swedish people have not gone through a war in their territory, since the beginning of the XIX century. • Currently, 1 of 3 Swedish people wants to vote for the Swedish Democrats (SD) party in the Prime Minister elections, next September. Among their proposals, they include fighting against crime and a restrictive refugees and immigration policies. • Swedish Democrats are a nationalistic party funded in 1988 by active people coming from the extreme right wing of racist organizations. Its leader since 2005 is Jimmie Åkesson. 

Ephemeral drawings (2008-2025)