Margaret Whyte’s work is linked to many contemporary practices that respond to a specific aesthetic and political regime. For decades, her projects have connected elements belonging to different systems—each contaminating the other, both visually and conceptually, through a speculative poetics. The ontology of her objects arises from a web of connections in which the remnants of contemporary society are juxtaposed. These residues—what define us as active participants in ultra-capitalist systems—are stripped of their value to become part of a speculative poetic regime, where the human coexists with everything else we do not define as human.
From this multinaturalist perspective, Whyte’s operations can be read through three complementary theoretical vectors: the political dimension of textile practice, the metaphor of interweaving, and an ecology of materials and networks. Politics of representation determine a politics of the gaze.
If we understand contemporary textile practice as a field that rearticulates ancestral techniques, care work, and industrial circulation—blurring hierarchies between art and design—we can grasp the conceptual complexity of the installation Antifragile. The concept of antifragility, developed by Nassim Taleb, describes systems that not only withstand disorder and instability but actually grow stronger and transform through them. In contrast to the fragile, which breaks under pressure, and the robust, which merely resists without change, the antifragile finds in vulnerability and exposure to risk the very source of its power. This framework is particularly fertile for thinking about artistic and curatorial practices that resist the monumental and the stable, emerging instead from the accumulation of tensions, contingencies, and extended temporalities—where value arises from the interweaving of fragilities that sustain and expand the work rather than weaken it.
Thus, Margaret Whyte has built a pioneering body of work, both in its conceptual strategies and in its formalization. Focused on social and gender issues, her extensive spatial practice features soft sculptures and volumes as emblematic as they are unique. Her production defies any constraint or simplification and occupies an essential chapter in the analysis and construction of South American art history—one that dismantles the notion of a single genealogy.
Artist: Margaret Whyte
Curator: Patricia Bentancur
Production: Silvana Bergson
Commissioner: Martín Craciun – INAV-DNC
Supported by: Magma, Fundación Cervieri Monsuarez, Fundación Amoedo