EXHIBITED WORKS

Text by Santiago Villanueva / PDF ↯

Speculation is both content and form in the work of Liv Schulman. Whether religious, economic, or emotional, her dizzying reasoning is the chosen rhetoric for grasping an equally fast-paced and absurd reality.

Todo es prestado, her third solo exhibition at PIEDRAS, brings together two parallel narratives: the film Un círculo que se fue rodando (2024) and Dios (2025), a play without actors—or perhaps a visual radio drama—structured in eight scenes built inside cardboard boxes.

A relative of the diorama, Dios invites scaled-down, intimate contemplation, where the scenography is made of humble materials, much like the God it portrays. Like a premodern theologian, the protagonist tests the existence of the divine through heretical and hilarious methods—because, really, how can one know if they’re still the same person after dating God?

In Un círculo que se fue rodando, long takes follow the frenzy of downtown Buenos Aires while we hear a polyphony of passerby conversations, brimming with symptoms and pathologies. As in any contemporary metropolis ruled by incoherence and fragmentation, if in the midst of the frantic overlap of theories and opinions we look up to the sky in search of answers, what shines back isn’t a revelation, but the glowing sign of a multinational financial company crowning a skyscraper.

The ceramic creatures that greet us at the exhibition wear the T-shirts from the film, their printed phrases joining the endless conversation of the pedestrians. Like fragments broken off from the film, these mobiles—made of pistols, flowers, gin and liqueur bottles—condense a reality composed of loose pieces and fractured signs.

After all, if any sense of unity persists, it’s something we invent in the details.