The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work. 

This week, The Open Call Podcast is happy to host Elisa Insua, a globally recognized, conceptual artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Elisa has a background in economic theory and her work explores consumption and waste as they relate to finances and politics. She assembles mosaics and sculptures from recognizable objects that have been discarded. The dense, rich tactility of her artworks underscores the different semantics and unexpected relationships between the embedded objects and the overall structure. Through these juxtapositions, Insua deftly posits new questions and narratives. 

Elisa’s work embodies the expression, ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’. She literally transforms cast away bits into lux visual critiques of socio-economic policies. The associations she draws between the objects she assembles in relation to her finished works is not dissimilar to the way that micro and macro economics work to show how separate things come together to inform a broader understanding of the bigger picture. Giant barcodes are formed from plastic containers placed alongside deprecated technologies like old cell phones, various monetary instruments are created from cheap and colorful plastic beads, and large razor wire fences are assembled from hundreds of gold chains and bits of lost or discarded jewelry. Insua uses color and texture to lure viewers to explore her work in detail and simultaneously examine our relationship to the objects we see. 

Check out this episode to learn more about the concepts and processes that frame Insua's work. Also be sure to visit out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast. 

We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks however we will be taking some time off in December for the holidays. Listen to some of our past episodes to get caught up and we will be back in January 2022 with  new episodes. 

Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants:  Ally Price,  Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller  who provide production support, web, and social media design.