On the Uruguay Bridge in Villa Carlos Paz, where light is usually synonymous with spectacle and incessant traffic, a short sentence interrupts the dullness of the landscape: “Everything is carefully empty“. The artist’s work Cruz Margaretwas installed on the LED screens of this critical passage not only as an aesthetic intervention, but as a political and sensitive warning signal.
The piece was originally presented as part of the First Villa Carlos Paz Contemporary Art Week – an event on the verge of Contemporary art market (MAC) from Córdoba – and is integrated into Marguett’s research on the word as a means that can transform public space.
A bracket in the tourist window
The choice of support is not a coincidence. LED screens, normally used for advertising and quick consumption, here become a vehicle for an unpleasant question. For Marguett, writing has the power to change perceptions of the environment, especially at a point in the city that acts as an obligatory link for both the tourist and the locals. “The work has a poetic tone, I am interested in how writing changes public space. In this case, it ultimately changes the landscape in which this sentence is inscribed,” explains the artist.
As Marguett points out, the work transforms the text into an experience at a place of transit: a gap that invites us to ask ourselves what actually remains intact and what discourses are neutralized when order and entertainment close off the possibility of critical thought.
The political construction of emptiness
What the work suggests is not an accidental absence but a manufactured emptiness. The adverb “carefully” acts as an axis of criticism. Marguett points to a deliberate strategy behind the lack of deep content, particularly in contexts where culture is relegated to the logic of stillness and glass.
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“The ‘careful’ has to do with the planning of this void,” claims the artist, linking this observation directly to local reality: “It happens that the city does not have cultural policies that support the growth of cultural issues, and it is good as a city of tranquility, but there is a lack of depth in cultural policies. There is a strategy behind this emptying“.
This perspective is not limited to the geography of the mountain town, but rather extends to a reading of the national situation. The emptying, from the author’s point of view, is a calculated process that runs through Argentine society, in which active cultural production gives way to tacit agreements that favor a quiet and superficial harmony.
A pause in the face of the digital maelstrom
In a present characterized by the speed of social networks and the ephemeral consumption of images, “Everything is carefully empty” acts like a handbrake.
The intervention aims to ensure that thinking does not stop feeling and opens a gap in which the word regains its character as a living act.
Marguett states that her intention is to break with the dynamics of advertising language to create a reflective moment. “This emptying is calculated and not a given. Today we have no moments to pause, it’s all social networks,” he analyzes.
The work, which is still open for viewing, does not aim to impose closed answers, but rather to activate a persistent question that resonates in the body and the city.
In short, it is about criticizing both the landscape in which it finds itself and a society lost in the vortex of inability to stop.
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