Fernanda Laguna's new book, an affective and sensorial map of contemporary art

The first time the artist , poet and curator Fernanda Laguna took a painting class, she learned – she says – to copy: a magic spell to make something last forever, like a Dorian Gray of beauty and tenderness. Thus, at 22, she created her first painting, “Niña con perro” (Girl with Dog) (1994), a small, naive, self-adhesive decal in pastel colors and “the desire of a figurine to become a painting.” It is precisely this work – now part of a private collection – that illustrates the cover of ¡Muy Espectacular! (Very Spectacular! ), the visual artist ’s brand new book published by Penguin Random House, which brings together “wishes, letters and art texts” that span from 1995 to the present and that trace, over a three-decade time span, the creative, emotional and sensorial map of one of the founders of the legendary Belleza y Felicidad gallery.

"The small, the strange, the broken, the left aside are spectacular for their epic nature," writes the author at the beginning of these pages – who has published in this same publishing house with her alter ego, Dalia Rosetti – and lays the foundations for this literary and essayistic hopscotch where, once again, she captures on blank paper, to repeat the same mechanism of conjuring and perpetuation.

While preparing for an exhibition at Malba in 2026 and a retrospective at Spain's Museo Reina Sofía in 2027 , Fernanda Laguna, who runs a Beauty and Happiness venue in Villa Fiorito, proposes in this book "an exhaustive and hallucinatory tour of contemporary Argentine art" through essays that range from epistolary to prologue and from fanciful conversation to existential rapture.

From a letter dedicated to New York City to a text for the 2010 São Paulo Biennial, to an article for Chile's The Clinic magazine, Laguna brings together a selection of texts that mark the course of his career while tracing an emotional map and establishing his position that appeals more to the heart than to the encyclopedia, far removed from any hint of solemnity. In the chapter titled "Montajelandia," for example, he speaks of how "reality is cis" while the poem is "a trans portal."

This set of texts, which celebrates the fragile—or that which doesn't fit— also constitutes a form of resistance: “Life is divided between 'what fits' and 'what doesn't'; the healthy versus the broken, the beautiful versus the ugly. This has no end. And the beautiful thing is that new systems of evaluation can be conquered. What doesn't fit doesn't want to become normal, but rather wants to be integrated in its difference. Celebrating a diverse world would be the greatest thing,” says Laguna (Buenos Aires, 1972) in an interview with Clarín .

–In several texts in the book, love, friendship, and art intertwine as forms of mutual support. How do you think today about this "affective map" you draw between artists, friends, and allies throughout the book?

–There's a very beautiful concept shared by indigenous community feminists in Central America, which is that of body-territory. Our bodies are territories of occupation, conquest, colonization, but they're also territories of refuge, places of creation, of resistance, of celebrations, of collective rituals, of love. Friendship is the multiplication of a territory; it's sharing, and where we can open soup kitchens, cultural centers, etc. Like with Cecilia Pavón, Beauty and Happiness was about sharing the territory of our friendship. What Roberto Jacoby said is very important to me: friendship as a technology that seeks to strengthen collective strength.

–The work that illustrates the cover, “Girl with Dog,” was also your first painting, and in the book you mention that it was a gift for Isolina Silva, a key figure in your life and in the history of the foundation of Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito. What legacy of hers lives on in this space?

“I was lucky enough to meet her. I think something really strange happened when I went down the street with ten packets of noodles to donate and found her collecting cardboard so we could give food to her soup kitchen. It was a crazy coincidence, but the most beautiful thing is that we became very good friends, despite being very different and complete strangers. We needed each other from the very beginning, and that brought us together. Her legacy is so vast, but it's all made up of micro things: the gallery's aesthetic in its early days, with cardboard walls covered in paper—the gallery was a wall dividing rooms. Her incredibly strange and crazy crafts set the course; our first dining room, built in the courtyard with a fire; our conversations about amateur existentialism. I started with her from almost zero, to see what everything could be like with her help.”

–You say in one of your texts that art can't be institutionalized because "it's a mystery," "an imprecise variety." How do you get along with art institutions?

–I was never interested in institutions because I chose the independent path, and it happens that when you have to start from scratch with an independent space, you have to forget about them, no matter what. Institutions generate prestige, they give value. And when one seeks the independent path, one must generate one's own forms of appreciation, independent of the rest. Now, at 53, I'm going to have two museum exhibitions, and I feel very grateful. It's a great opportunity to see how I make my works look fragile and tender, among other things. I'm working hard; I have to adapt and somehow filter through the precariousness.

–You say that Beauty and Happiness didn't analyze what was happening so much as what was experienced. And you also say that, for some reason, it was associated with superficiality, as if art linked to enjoyment or emotion were less serious. What do you think about that perspective today?

–We were associated with superficiality because of some people's interpretation of the name, also because it was a continuation of Rojas's work, where the feminine was highly disqualified. Women and gays were superficial, and men were intellectual and profound. Emotions were minor and arbitrary, so people distrusted them. But we wanted all that stuff that was frowned upon, because of this thing about love that is generated by the fragile, the tender, the broken. These qualities serve people too, and that doesn't mean that what we did at ByF didn't have a social impact: like the queer and super-affordable publishing house (thinking of a time of crisis) we created, a publishing house created to be collectivized. Like the cultural space we were, which fostered many artists for nine years, expanding the meaning of that word.

Very spectacular! , by Fernanda Laguna (Random House).