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Lucía Scarselletta - Alhaja

written by Tereza Blahova

Like nature herself, the gaucho can be at times tough, and, at other times, light and musical. A man suited to nature; a man reflective of nature. ¹

Stitched together from pieces of repurposed leather, Lucía Scarselletta’s large-scale installation Cincha Alhaja curves its way around two of the Gallery’s interior walls. Paired with Lazo, a video installation which showcases archival footage of the Argentine Pampas alongside Scarselletta’s own visual process and gaucho braiding instructionals by Martin Gomez, the space is transformed into a doubly tender and critical elegy for Indigenous, Hispanic, Arab and North African craft practices. It touches on themes of forced displacement, violent re-shaping of Indigenous lands through settler colonialism and the agro-export industry, and the capacity of the material to embody traces of craft histories within its own self irrespective of changes to the land from which it had once emerged.

Entering the small gallery space, the thick smell of leather is immediately palpable. As stripped animal hide, leather is an innately natural material, and yet in the present day connotes much modernity — the smell of a new car interior, industrialisation, wide-scale manufacture. This is antithetical to the small-scale, storied craft history origins of the gaucho, for whom leather production and braiding constituted livelihood sustenance on a micro individual scale in the absence of personal land ownership (Scarsaletta/curator Isabel Reed defining the folkloric figure as “a cowboy from the Pampas region, originally referring to landless River Plate settlers who slaughtered cattle for hides on behalf of the Rio de la Plata region”).

The oversized cincha (“a broad leather or woven girth used in traditional South American horsemanship to secure a saddle to a horse’s body”) is simultaneously a spatial barrier and contour; constructed from fragments of traditional leather clothing, the colour palette and sweeping form may very well reference the Argentine Pampas plains themselves, a comparison furthered by the prominent inclusion of landscape imagery in the adjoining video work. Browns, blues, blacks — fauna and grassland crisped by exposure to sun, blue skies and rivers, cowhides. The ever-present red, meanwhile, bears a striking duality — at once a blood-red sunset, and a reminder of the violent settler colonialist structures faced by the land’s Indigenous occupants.

Similarly complex are the markings embossed onto these leather swathes, the resultant work both an installation and a landscape. Stitch lines weave through the leather, rivers and trails situated in the natural both visually and metaphorically; along with seams and buttons, they form an entangled visual map, as marks which both hold together and tear apart the land they occupy — tender portraits, and violent rips. Three gaucho braids knotted onto metal hooks tether the cincha to the gallery walls at either end. These braids become as integral to the physical display of the work, as they are to the gaucho’s storied workmanship practice.

Tension, thus, is pervasive through the work on all levels — structural, visual, and metaphorical. A new materialist approach to art making posits that the non-human material has as much of a capacity to act, as much as it is acted upon by the artist through its transformation into new states.² Through Scarselletta’s profound dialogical engagement with leather and braiding, she produces a deeply affective installation, invoking a pervasive theme of displacement through simultaneous recontextualisation of material function and form. Removed from their context as garments, the leather pieces become equally displaced from the notion of the land from which their manufacture originates. The gaucho braids themselves experience a similarly temporal and situational dislocation — they exist as remnant of and reference to life-sustaining cultural craft practice, visually identical yet now functionally altered.

This complex, entangled network of visual affect and meaning reflects the rising disappearance of the gaucho from modern-day Argentine life, a drastic decline in independent, small-scale cattle ranching instigated by the move to large-scale commercial row-crop farming;³ the land now a capitalist commodity, a source for exploitation by way of endless and unendingly harmful material extraction. A practice originated by those traditionally without land, whose unowned land is now co-opted by global forces — Scarseletta gives the material itself the ability to speak, and encompass this innate connection to land within its own matter.

Alhaja is, in many ways, an act against forgetting. Scarselletta foregrounds a diasporic history, necessarily carried over through the physical act of creation, rather than situation in one specific geographic, rapidly changing area. The leather and braiding contain essence of the land from which they originate, while existing as wholly standalone, materially self-referential objects. Much like the exclusion of craft from the art historical cannon due to its association with female, and thus ‘lesser,’ labour, the craft of the gaucho has been othered due to his status as an outsider from a colonial standpoint. By creating a “personalised postcolonial manual language,” Scarselletta reappropriates this act of creation, transposing it into a modern context and transmitting it to new audiences, an act of honouring and remembering practice of the past in the present, granting new and ongoing life. She allows the material to underpin physical and metaphorical land — a land held together by craft, embodied practices, reclamation, remembrance.

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¹ Adam Barkman and Enzo Guerra, “The Gaucho in a Globalized World” in: Contemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture, ed. Clint W. Jones (Lexington Books, 2023), p.4
² Sungjin Park, "Artworks as Agential Forces: A New Materialist Discourse on the Aesthetics," Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 37, no. 1 (2025): [9-18], https://doi.org/10.5209/aris.95432.
³ "From Cattlemen to Crops: Can Argentina’s Ranchers Cash In on the Commodities Boom?" Knowledge at Wharton, October 5, 2011, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/from-cattlemen-to-crops-can-argentinas-ranchers-cash-in-on-the-commodities-boom/.

Alhaja
Lucía Scarselletta

Curated by
Isabel Reed

Photos by
Isabel Reed

27th March -12th April 2026

at outhouse gallery