Talking with Mariela Scafati is a rare opportunity to dive deeply into intersecting concerns—artistic, political, affective—thanks to her trajectory and her unwavering commitment to the urgencies of the present. Not through frontal activism, but through choreographed actions that traverse the uncertainty of beginning-middle-beginning, she invites us to embrace the vulnerability that shapes us and to radicalize everything.

After several attempts, we managed to schedule our meeting. At the time, Mariela was in Arévalo, Spain, in the midst of an artistic residency at Collegium. For Scafati, the place became a refuge—for herself and for one of her life companions: her child—a space to paint, sew, and most of all, to think. The interview was held online, and despite the distance, everything aligned to create a palpable sense of closeness.

"It happened to me with painting: when I dress it, it becomes a body; just like bodies, when tied, become a little like objects," she said, while figuring out how to attach a birthday candle in the shape of a five they'd found earlier that day. We spoke for over an hour about her recent exhibition at Travesía Cuatro Guadalajara, Painting, Painting, Painting, about her relationship with the house that hosts it, her collaborations with queer collectives, and her practice as a painter in a country like Argentina, where the current government led by Javier Milei threatens to dismantle everything that carries the scent of community, culture, care, or life.

In this ebb and flow between Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, Scafati weaves an artistic practice that is both intimate and political. Her paintings do not seek definitive answers, but questions to be shared.

A Work That Inhabits the House and the Body

In the first rooms of the exhibition, brown stretcher bars hang from the ceiling, crossing the space like a choreographed installation. There are nine of them. Among them, a pink painting—Rosa Maravichonga—emerges like a bright whisper. The arrangement evokes her concept of the "tender mob": suspended bodies, within reach, but not fully graspable. The space between the pieces becomes air for thought.

The choice of color, especially pink, is never decorative. It is political. It is also memory. She tells me that for her, pink is not merely a soft tone, but a sensitive archive: In marches in Argentina, pink is used in banners, in flags, on lips. It is the color of desire, but also of mourning. When Mariela talks about color, it becomes clear that no gesture in her work is empty of meaning.

Kamishibai and Velvet: Art From the Lap

In an adjacent room, the work Kamishibai marrón recreates a small Japanese paper theater. But instead of narrative drawings, it holds small monochrome canvases, framed by hand-stitched waves of velvet. Mariela explained how this piece speaks to the intimacy of sewing, to the paused time of care. For her, such minimal gestures are forms of resistance. Against the vertigo of neoliberalism, her proposal is radically different: to slow down, to draw near, to return to origins.

The other textile piece, Pintura despierta (Awakened Painting), plays with the idea of a soft frame. A square of eggplant velvet houses a smaller rectangle painted in pink oil. Mariela describes it as a "rascuacho," referencing the vernacular aesthetic of oil-on-velvet painting common in border areas. "It’s a word used to describe something cheap or of little value, but I reclaim it. I'm interested in the rascuache, in what is unrecognized, what lives in the margins." Like her own practice: not quite painting, nor sculpture, nor textile, nor performance, nor politics—and yet all of these at once.

Painting and the Body: A Blurred Border

In the second gallery, two body-paintings tied using the shibari technique hang from the ceiling. There is no voyeurism, but there is a tension between the erotic and the political. "I'm interested in that edge between pain and pleasure," she notes, "that line where certainties dissolve and all that remains is touch, friction, the rope." It is here that her work becomes most queer. Not because of an overt identity representation, but through her disarticulation of binaries, allowing materials—and bodies—to contradict, to unravel, to rebuild themselves.

The final piece, a torso composed of a cascade of inverted frames cloaked in a pink knitted sweater, directly recalls her 2015 exhibition Las cosas amantes (Loving Things). The gesture of flipping the canvas and painting its reverse is itself a statement: to show what is unseen, to give form to the hidden side of painting.

Activism, Community, and Serigraphy: Another Way of Painting

Beyond her solo exhibitions, Scafati has built a deeply collective practice. Since 2007, she has been part of Serigrafistas Queer, a group that creates slogans to be printed on T-shirts used in pride marches and transfeminist demonstrations. "We don’t do merch," she clarifies. In their workshops, slogans are discussed and created collectively, and then printed on shirts with phrases like "The body, fluid barricade" or "Queer love for all."

I ask her about the collective and she tells me about Rancho Cuis. They decided to unfold the project toward questions of dwelling, drawing on the figure of the "cuis," a small rodent native to southern South America. "We ranch together. We take care of each other. There’s no artwork to sell, no product to measure. There is process, listening, joy." Against an art economy that demands market-ready outputs, Scafati responds with affection as methodology.

She is also involved in Cromoactivismo, a collective that uses color to intervene in political events. They painted banners for abortion rights, took part in pride marches, and organized "cromoactivations" in schools and neighborhoods. "Color is not neutral," she says. "Painting a cardboard green or pink is a political position." In the face of rising hatred, they respond with color.

Being Queer Under a Government of Austerity

Inevitably, our conversation circles back to Argentina’s current political climate. "The situation is suffocating," Mariela says. "Milei's government wants to erase anything that smells of community, of rights, of culture." She speaks of friends who have lost their jobs in public institutions, of trans companions without access to healthcare, of police repression during protests. "Everything we do, even a show like this, becomes a political act. It's not just aesthetics. It's about sustaining a way of life that is under attack."

Yet she doesn’t position herself as a victim. Quite the opposite. Mariela believes in the force of the collective. "We're still organizing. They won't isolate us. Art is also a trench, and in painting there is strength." She tells me about the ways people are responding: through meeting, through commitment, through collective learning and unlearning, through the school YoNoFui and through Columnas Mostri.

A Way of Being Together

As the call ended, I kept thinking about something she had said near the beginning of our conversation: "Sometimes painting is not about showing anything. It's about being. About being with others. About accompanying. About not giving up." In these times of violence and dispossession, her work becomes a practice of care, a strategy of sensitive resistance, a home inhabited by different questions.

In Painting, Painting, Painting, Mariela Scafati is not simply exhibiting paintings. She is exposing a way of living, of loving, of resisting. Her painting is body, is community, is affective archive. It is pink, brown, and flesh. It is a space where it is still possible to hold one another.

 

The exhibition opened this past February and continues through May 17 at Travesía Cuatro in Guadalajara, Mexico.