Directed by Julio Grinblatt, Nicolás Guagnini: Self-Portrait with Cucumber / Autorretrato con pepino, 2020–21, documents the Argentine artist's engagement with self-portraiture and autobiography.

270.02 documents the artist's engagement with self-portraiture and autobiography, two forms defined by the imbrication of intimacy and publicness, the subject and the social. Director Julio Grinblatt interviewed the artist, posing the same questions in two languages and eliciting two different sets of answers. Guagnini’s words are overlaid in a vertical montage, with the Spanish text subtitling the English conversation and vice versa. The result is a formal and conceptual exploration of the tension between reflecting on our own subjectivity and confronting the strange reflections of our subjectivity returned to us in the symbolic world of language and images.

270 is a series of short films created to preserve and amplify the rich contributions of Latin American artists. Each film is one artist’s homage to another, resulting in an intimate portrait of a single living artist whose work has shaped engagement with contemporary art.

The series title, 270, alludes to the concise length of the films, varying at brief vignettes of around 270 seconds or four and a half minutes. The resulting films capture facets of each artist’s life and creative journey, shining a light on the networks that have supported artistic production and celebrating the subjects’ contributions to our shared cultural histories.

The 270 film series was produced with creative direction from artist Julio Grinblatt and supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York.


Directed by Julio Grinblatt
Featuring Nicolás Guagnini
Edited by Dahlia Fischbein
Sound design by Manuel Pinto
Translation by Jane Brodie

Thanks to Nicolás Guagnini, Jorge M. Pérez, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Tobias Ostrander and the curatorial team at PAMM, Ana Tiscornia, Alexander Alberro, Bibi Calderaro, Inés Katzenstein, and Iair Rosenkranz, Guillermo Stein, Nina Grinblatt

© Institute for the Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)