Matter, Memory, Construction

Marcello Mercado is an Argentine artist based in Germany whose work moves between collage, sculpture, installation, and digital media. Since the early 1990s, he has worked with organic and discarded materials—especially palm bark, fibers, and residues collected in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina.

Chaco refers to this territory: a vast subtropical region extending across northern Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. It is marked by intense ecological transformation, extractive economies, deforestation, and the persistence of vernacular forms of building. For Mercado, Chaco is not only a place, but also a material archive: a landscape where memory, erosion, labor, and construction are inseparable. The materials used in these works were collected over many years in the Gran Chaco and preserved as a long-term archive of forms, textures, and construction.

Early Work: Palm Bark, 1990–1995

Marcello Mercado, untitled, palma collage and oil on canvas, 1995

Image digitally reconstructed from archival documentation. The original work was stolen in the late 1990s.

The works gathered here do not present architecture as form, but rather as a condition of matter. Since the early 1990s, Marcello Mercado has worked with palm bark, fibers, residues, and fragile structures. He does not treat these materials as representations of nature, but rather as carriers of memory, labor, weather, and time.

Even his early collages made with palm bark contained an architectural impulse: layering, support, tension, and enclosure. They were not images of buildings but rather constructions made from what remains after use, erosion, and extraction. Their structure emerged from fragments.

His recent works return to those same materials and gestures, now closer to the vocabulary of architecture: shelter, platform, threshold, and ruin. A sheet of palm bark becomes a roof. Fibers become joints, supports, or scaffolding. The object resembles a model, yet it never fully becomes a building. It remains suspended between landscape and structure, memory and projection.

These works do not envision architecture as permanence, monuments, or control. Instead, they ask how a structure begins when its origin is precarious, how a place can be built from instability, and how matter itself can remember.