2012-2018
Installation (various formats): inscribed bedsheets from Extimum (2018), atril, “Partitures”, sound loop, video (performance EXTIMA 2016), public readings, poster walls origin (2002)

Extima — The One and All unfolds as a layered and evolving body of work that navigates between the autobiographical and the public, the intimate and the political. Emerging from a collection of handwritten poster texts produced between 2001 and 2002, during a period marked by the Argentine economic crisis and personal migration, the work spans nearly two decades of material, spatial, and linguistic exploration. The piece comprises fictional diaries interwoven with fragments from newspapers, grammatical exercises, idiomatic expressions, and daily observations in a newly acquired language. These writings are inscribed on bedsheets—blankets sourced in Brno—transformed into text-bearing surfaces that blur the line between public report and private voice. The handwritten block letters, mimicking the authority of newspaper typography yet rendered on fragile fabric, challenge both the form and content of official discourse.

Conceptually, the textile elements play a central role in the work’s articulation. Though industrially produced, the blankets become carriers of memory and sites of transformation. Their reuse as inscribed surfaces aligns with traditions in textile-based artistic research, where the material functions as both archive and utterance, resonating with histories of protest, care, and displacement. The blanket—typically associated with sleep, comfort, or shelter—is here recontextualized as a linguistic skin, hosting migrant traces and reactivated speech. The act of inscribing by hand collapses the boundary between writing and weaving, turning language into a tactile experience—a material voice.

Exhibited in various formats—wall-hung textiles, sound installations, micro-performances (such as Kunstzelle, Vienna), and poster walls (La Mia Camera, Mein Zimmer, Mi Cuarto, My Room)—the work invites open and shifting readings. It references the theatrical structure of Bertolt Brecht and Paul Dessau’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, the philosophical reflections of Jacques Derrida in Monolingualism of the Other, and the quiet labor of linguistic and cultural translation.

As critic Ruth Horak writes in her essay Notensatz, “Herrero’s inscriptions become increasingly cultivated… her original diary entries are transferred into a stable, deliberate script. Were we not literate, we might read them as drawings.” In this light, Extima — The One and All performs an enduring gesture of survival and presence, where text becomes textile, and identity is unspooled, folded, and rewritten in more than one language.