Maia Gattás Vargas - Atmospheric Inquiries

Maia Gattás Vargas is a visual artist, researcher and teacher.

D. in Arts (UNLP). She works as a CONICET postdoctoral fellow at the CITECDE Institute in Bariloche and as a teacher in the subject Theories of Media and Culture (UBA).

In 2022 she published her first book, Diario de exploración al territorio del color, edited by the Biblioteca Popular Astra of Comodoro Rivadavia. He premiered his first feature documentary Viento del Este at the Doc Buenos Aires Festival (2023), which won Best Film at the Festifreak Festival (La Plata) and at the Cordoba Film Festival. Its international premiere was at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic, where it won the Original Approach Award.

His visual and audiovisual works have been exhibited in different provinces of Argentina and in countries such as Ecuador, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Czech Republic and Canada.

His artistic work addresses the relationship between scientific imagination, nature and colonial history.

About his project

The project Atmospheric Inquiries seeks to think about the epistemological dimension of the climatic and atmospheric. It aims to observe how the ways of measuring and forecasting have been transformed, how climate cycles and ecosystems have been affected, and how this affects the lives of humans and non-humans and the relationships established between them. Gattás is interested in investigating the transformations that have taken place in the meteorological sciences in light of the ecological crisis we are experiencing.

Through an anti-archaeological methodology, he will analyze the archives of the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) and the photographs of the Augusto Arcimis Wehrle archive, who was the first professional meteorologist in Spain and who created the Central Meteorological Institute in 1887.