Guillermo Mena’s practice moves between charcoal drawing, weather archives, performances, and installations shaped by wind. He makes charcoal from branches gathered in places tied to his past, collects traces from drawings destined to disappear, and uses Morse code to explore communication across distance. We spoke with the Argentine artist about material and memory, the role of chance in his process, and how travel and residencies shape the way he observes and makes work.

To begin, how would you introduce your work and your journey to someone who is not yet familiar with it? Where do you currently live and work, and what questions are at the heart of your artistic practice?

I make drawings. I like to think of them as vast, moving, inhabitable aerial phenomena.
Starting from drawing, the formats I work with range from works on paper in charcoal, graphite, and ink to much larger scales: drawing installations, ephemeral murals, digital animation, performance, and video.
I was born in Los Cóndores, Córdoba. I grew up and trained as an artist between Río Cuarto and the city of Córdoba, and I have been living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for almost nine years.
The questions that run through my work are constantly changing. They are never fully answered, and others are put off for later.

At the moment, I am intrigued by the different ways reflections can take shape as drawings, experiences, or ideas in relation to specific places, distance, and nostalgia.
I find it mysterious that my focus on stormy, atmospheric drawings now seems to be seeking a possible explanation: Why do I make them? What conditions lead me to feel the need to draw these scenarios? What conditions of production, movement, and inhabiting a place cause my attention to gravitate toward these atmospheres, sometimes fictional and sometimes real?

Drawing occupies a central place in your work, and the charcoal you often make yourself allows you to move beyond traditional drawing on paper. What possibilities do you find in this material, and how do its qualities shape the way you work and think?

I remember drawing as a way of dealing with tedium, of getting through empty stretches of boredom — perhaps simply as a form of entertainment. It seems only natural to me that drawing should become a habit. Charcoal entered the picture when I asked my grandfather to help me make larger drawings. That was when I first came into contact with it. I recently remembered how simple that moment was: with charcoal, I could cover more surface and draw faster and on a larger scale.

I think that anecdote points to one of the main things I am trying to explore. Charcoal makes larger drawings possible because of the volatile, slippery, expansive nature of wood charcoal. Many times, I have felt that I had exhausted the possibilities of this material, only to discover new ways of adding detail, creating contrast, smudging, blowing, making things transparent, collapsing forms, or making them burst open.
At a certain point, making my own charcoal became important, and I found myself returning again and again to the same question I am answering now: Why charcoal?

An illuminating exchange of emails with Claudia del Río (Argentine artist and educator)   brought me closer to what I see as the material's most essential quality: its connection to origins, both personal and universal.
I tend to overthink projects before trying them out — a bad habit. I imagined travelling to my hometown, collecting dry branches from a forest where I used to walk as a teenager, and making charcoal from them. This tendency to sabotage a project by overthinking it before even testing it delayed the idea. Then, encouraged by Claudia herself, I began exploring the simple act of making charcoal from particular places. The experiment became a way of absorbing a place, interpreting it, and processing it through a nostalgic gesture in which materials undergo alchemical transformations only to return to themselves: tree, branch, fire, charcoal, a mark on a wall, a trace, a memory, and so on. The cyclical nature of materials has had a profound influence on how I approach these weather-like images: cyclical, sometimes melancholic, sometimes catastrophic.

In your projects, you draw on weather archives, maps, and local histories to investigate natural phenomena. How do you move from your observations and the materials you collect to the creation of a work? What relationships between landscape, time, and memory are you interested in exploring?

My drawings have always moved back and forth between direct references to archival images and invented storms — abstract drawings in which those two approaches sometimes intersect.
Between 2019 and 2020, I began experimenting with screenshots of archival satellite images. I would come across particular dates and find myself wondering, “What were the clouds like that day?” The idea of trying to capture an atmospheric phenomenon thus shifted into an attempt to capture an unrepeatable moment. The cloud formations at a particular point in time became a direct way of thinking about this fleeting “now”: clouds are never the same.
I began building an archive of screenshots of live weather-satellite images from wherever I happened to be at the time. By chance, this impulse grew stronger when I was on my first artist residency, far from home. At the Banff Centre in Canada, in February 2020, I began drawing the skies there intensively, on paper and on walls, while also drawing the skies over Argentina. It was a kind of distant connection made through the two skies.

In Detachment Action, drawing becomes a physical action: its traces can disappear before they are transferred to paper. What draws you to this process and to the relationship between action, trace, and disappearance?

Detachment Action (Acción de Des/apego in Spanish) grew out of a need to document — or, rather, to salvage something from — charcoal murals that were destined to disappear. When I began thinking of drawing as an action or a way of inhabiting a space, my reflections on attachment and detachment shifted into a series of experiments in collecting. Taking advantage of charcoal's volatile materiality and the difficulty of fixing it in place, I set out to extract traces or residues by dragging notebooks and sheets of paper across these drawn walls. The action itself became a farewell ritual, or perhaps a way for a drawing that seemed to be disappearing to continue.

These monotypes later became collections: groups of papers associated with different ephemeral drawing installations. Over eleven years, I assembled an archive of marks and began to consider this performative action as a practice in its own right. It could be understood as a transition from one state to another, in a process in which drawing and its materials are manipulated in tune with the cycles of nature — with transformations that are tense and violent, but sometimes also imperceptible, subtle, and unconscious.

So rather than disappearance, I imagine transmutation or alchemy. I think of the structure of clouds as a kind of “process of volatilization” that blurs the boundary between the permanent and the ephemeral. Years later, this has led me to question the project's very title: it began as an “action of detachment,” yet I have come to realize that perhaps the physical act is charged with attachment.

In Telegraphic Readings, you work with Morse code and transmitters connected to your grandfather's story as a ham radio operator. How did this family history lead you to explore communication across distances through art? What interests you about the very possibility of transmitting messages, connecting people, and bridging distances?

Telegraphic Readings is a performance drawn from a broader line of inquiry prompted by my grandfather's story and my memories of him: his work as a ham radio operator and his creative, artistic, and experimental personality, which extended to this and many other subjects. During the final years of his life and around the time of his death, I began making room for ways of remembering him without realizing that I was already doing so. Looking at rooftop antennas as drawings in the sky, coming across illustrative images in old watchmaking books, and discovering the world of amateur radio all filtered into the way I observed, collected, and reproduced images. From drawings based on a photographic archive of antennas around the world to the sculptural game of building antennas out of scrap metal — a project encouraged by artist friends — I began allowing myself to play and make space for these ways of remembering him, keeping his practice alive, or perhaps, at times, embodying it.

In 2024, I decided to take a ham radio course, driven by an impulse that was unclear but direct. It was a way of imitating or taking part in one layer of my grandfather's activity, in order to understand it or perhaps make it my own in some way. Much of the world of radio grows out of the need to communicate across distances, to perceive those distances, and to remain in constant movement as a way of being. Telegraphy and Morse code are central to ham radio. I was drawn to the idea of transmitting messages — at this stage, simulated transmissions — in which a message is sent out into the air. I learned Morse code, and in this performance I use several antique telegraph keys connected to lights and sounds to read and translate selected texts into Morse code in real time. The result is a series of pulses of light that intervene in particular skies or spaces, sending a message that remains an enigma. Its receiver is absent or distant, and the only constant is a distance that cannot yet be measured.

In several projects — from actions with flags along the coast to the installation garganta at the MAC in Córdoba — wind, air, and the specific qualities of a space influence the work. How do you work with forces you cannot fully control? What changes in your approach when the outcome depends not only on your decisions but also on the surrounding environment?

The question of how much I do or do not control external forces has always been present in my work. At first, I approached it through drawing as an action and through accidents involving materials, charcoal, walls, and deterioration. Gradually, as happens with any sustained practice, some accidents can become techniques, tools, or carefully studied ways of working. The idea of uncontrollability then becomes questionable — or I begin to question it myself, even asking whether it is something I actually want to happen.
Over time, I have accumulated experiences involving genuine accidents, oversights, a certain untidiness, precariousness in many senses, or perhaps even clumsiness. After blaming myself for some of these things, I feel the need to move forward: to take whatever is happening, observe it, and accept it for what it is. I have begun allowing myself these stumbles — or the contingencies of each situation — and understanding them almost as phenomena in their own right. In essence, they are what they are because they are largely impossible to capture, as charcoal can be at times.

When I began working with wind, I focused on the possibility that it might generate patterns, movements, and drawings, and positioned myself as an observer of those drawings, investigating possible ways of capturing them. Various performances involving drawing in the wind, as well as devices for capturing wind developed during residencies such as Amanei in Italy, Pouch Cove in Canada, and Epecuén, grew out of an attempt to “standardize” a state of precariousness or improvisation. I imagine something that might happen; it fails or does not turn out as expected, and I work through that difficulty. I then find myself shifting toward whatever does emerge — becoming the body holding a mast so that it does not blow away, for example, or climbing trees in Epecuén to intercept air currents that will create living lines in the landscape.

Alongside drawing, you explore analog animation, ceramics, and other media. How do you decide which format to use for a project? What remains the same, and what changes, when the same line of inquiry takes shape through different media?

I think the formats I use have been, and continue to be, fairly repetitive: drawing on paper, canvas, or walls keeps recurring. Many of the other formats have emerged from the same process — from discoveries or from the results of trying something out.

As for analog animation specifically, I tried it during a residency at Solanas in Uruguay, and it came about as a direct reaction to using digital tools. I usually work with digital animation, rotoscoping over video. In this case, I felt repelled by the device itself. Having access to space, time, and tools at SAE (Solanas Art Experience) led me to experiment with analog ways of animating and perhaps to immerse myself more fully in the act of imagining transitions between drawings, transparency techniques, frames, and so on. In other words, it was not a deliberate decision. It emerged when I paid attention to a resistance I was feeling toward the digital medium at that moment.
As for ceramics, for now I am still learning: getting to know the material and its processes, and paying attention to the results in case they lead me toward a more concrete idea.

I like to think that, even when the medium changes, the sensation of drawing remains — the fluidity and a state of visual tension. The most significant changes have to do with the spontaneity of working in a technique I have not yet explored or mastered, as well as, in these particular cases, the spatial and three-dimensional possibilities that two-dimensional drawing sometimes does not allow itself.

At the independent space todavía estamos acá (“we’re still here”), you accompany other artists as they discuss and develop their work, make things together, and reflect on their practices. What does this experience bring to you, and how does it relate to your own artistic practice?

Todavía estamos acá is an initiative intended to create exchange and support for artists who are questioning their direction or pursuing their own artistic paths. I want to create a space where we can share reflections but also work and make things together in a shared space — a studio. I am interested in sharing perspectives and bringing artists into dialogue with one another, finding ways to unblock processes, work through creative blocks, or imagine projects.

Personally, the experience renews my own ideas and allows them to circulate again, reinforcing some while also putting them to the test. My experience has not been shaped by projects in which I have acted as an educator, so it took me some time to understand what I wanted a space like this to be: what I wanted or was able to share, and how I could accompany other artists through their processes while thinking of them as peers. For now, the space is still taking shape, and I am curious to see where it might go.

You have worked in different countries and taken part in international residencies. How does moving between territories influence the way you observe, research, and make work? What does the concept of transhumance mean to you, and how does it relate to your sense of home and belonging to a place?

Over the past few years, constant changes in my surroundings have become a determining factor in triggering certain states of observation and attention. The ideas of transhumance and nomadism have shaped, in many ways, how I inhabit spaces. As I have combined this movement with an active artistic practice, the two have become increasingly intertwined. Lately, I have felt that most of my work has been made while travelling or during residencies.

Recently, I have been intrigued by this question: Why does the need to produce work grow stronger when I am in transit or travelling? I understand that the residency format, as a contemporary model within the art system, often prioritizes process, and I think this undoubtedly has an influence. Beginning to feel that I have a base — a home, a workplace, a studio — creates a contrast with this idea and makes me wonder what I do when I am not travelling or on a residency. It also makes me question how far, or for how long, I want to continue working this way.

Today, I understand these elements as foundational to who I am as an artist, shaping my processes, outcomes, and ways of thinking. This very uncertainty becomes the driving force behind certain projects and metaphors: skies that dissipate like days, and the places and people we pass through.

When exploring different opportunities, how do you choose the ones that genuinely connect with your interests and artistic inquiries at this stage? What makes a residency experience a living impulse that helps you continue developing your practice?

The opportunities that interest me always depend on two factors. First, how well they respond to specific needs I may have in relation to my project. What generally attracts me most to residencies is their geographical setting: a degree of isolation, dramatic climates and geology, and very particular histories.

Although this is not an entirely specific criterion, I feel that my practice is drawn to places where nature has a strong presence, and where atmospheric phenomena such as winds and geological events are defining features that shape a particular landscape or culture. Some of this is intentional and sought out; some of it happens by chance, and I decide to follow it—for example, volcanology in Iceland and Italy, or distinctive geological formations such as Punta Ballena in Uruguay and Stromboli in Sicily.

It is also inevitable that, as I focus more seriously on my professional career, these opportunities need to align with institutional considerations that can make the project possible and help it gain visibility. They need to provide ways for the work to circulate and create opportunities for formal presentation or recognition, such as public openings, publications, or funding. At the intersection of these two major factors, I think there is one essential element: the way these situations enable relationships between different places, artists, curators, and scientists, strengthening a network that allows everything to be sustained and to continue.

Images: Courtesy of the artist