Itinerantes Series

Technique

Acrylic on canvas, oil on canvas, and acrylic and pencil on missionary paper.

Year

2003-2025

Concept

This series represents the misachicos or religious processions in which a group of people carry the image of a Virgin or a saint on a litter. I began to develop this motif in 2003 with the exhibition Tierra y eternidades at the Centro Cultural Rougés. A few years later I continued with the series Itinerantes in three successive exhibitions in 2022 in the Museo de Arte Sacro of Tucumán, and in 2024 in the Mamore gallery in Salta and later in the Hoy en el Arte gallery in Buenos Aires.

Itinerantes represents the religious devotion of northern Argentina. The religious ceremonies are a blend of mysticism and celebration. A celebration that is simultaneously “time”, the time of eternity, and “faith” in relation to the sacred.

Participating in religious festivities in Cachi, Iruya, Casabindo, Yavi, and Tilcara has filled me with images that serve as inspiration for these works. Virgins and saints carried on litters by devoted hands, worn in this enduring tradition. The iconography is garnished with colorful flowers, banners, flags, and ribbons fluttering in the wind, in an essential, minimalist landscape of sky and earth. In the middle we see figures on the horizon whose prayers unite both worlds, the earthly and the sacred. It is a world of silence disrupted by the rumble of drums, dissonant violins, erques (Andean horns), litanies, firecrackers, and their echo in the mountains.

Enrique Salvatierra says about this series: “The optical and chromatic values present in Silvia Sanchez’s Misachicos series acquire a particular formal aesthetic reality and a cultural identity, filtered through the lens of her craftsmanship and exquisite sensitivity.”