Matter, Memory, Construction

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.

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

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

Even his early palm-bark collages carried an architectural impulse: layering, tension, support, and enclosure. Rather than images of buildings, these were constructions built from what survives use, erosion, and extraction.

His recent works return to these same gestures and materials, shifting closer to the spatial vocabulary of shelter, platform, threshold, and ruin. A sheet of palm bark functions as a roof; fibers act as joints or scaffolding. The resulting objects resemble models, yet never fully become buildings—remaining suspended between landscape and structure, memory and projection.

Rather than permanence or control, these works ask how a structure begins from a position of precariousness, how a place is built from instability, and how matter itself retains memory.

Existing between bark and model, object and ruin, these works propose an architecture of sediment, erosion, and time.