Resistencia, the Capital City of Chaco Province, is located at the North of the Argentine Republic.

Like in a magic setting, there are more than 520 sculptures performed by prestigious authors who have been convoked in other times to build this unprecedented Cultural Heritage that turns the City into a modern and incomparable Outdoor Museum.

Since the year 1998, this activity has been followed up by UNESCO and the necessary formalities have been initiated to declare Resistencia “Cultural Heritage of Humanity”.

HISTORICAL REVIEW

The city of Resistencia was founded in the year 1878. The first urban monuments (1920) were erected by the Italian community and were a reminder of immigrants.

Since the settlement of El Fogón de los Arrieros in 1954, a group of artists and intellectuals joined together to transform the place into an art exhibition and diffusion center.

In 1961, El Fogón launched Resistencia Beautification Plan, which constituted a new stage in the task of integrating Art into the public space. In certain way, this idea of creating a “City-Museum” was already wandering around; probably thanks to the language overlapped with the sculptures already erected in streets.

Little by little, the expansion of these artworks were turning our symbolic-historic assessment of the city into an artistic-cultural one, under a process that were placing sculptures as true urban reference points and icons of each place. The campaign was continued by COPROAR between the years 1977 and 1991, and then, by Urunday Foundation. To date, more than 500 sculptures have been erected, forming a particular image of the city. This image made it possible to emphasize the urban area, turn the city into a tourist attraction and define a singular profile that qualifies the “culture” of Resistencia.

The remarkable tasks developed since then provided the city with artworks from renowned artists such as Luis Perlotti, Gonzalo Leguizamón Pondal, Lucio Fontana, José Fioravanti, Emilio Pettoruti, Raúl Monsegur, Libero Badíi, Juan Carlos Labourdette, Noemi Gerstein, Mimo Eidman, Tanya Preminger, Enio Iommi, Ted Carrasco, Mirko Basaldella, Fernando Arranz, Miguel Angel González Salazar, Ferruccio Polacco, Serge Gangolf, Jaak Soans, Thomas Kühnapfel, Mitko Dinev and Fabriciano, among others.

Resistencia is today like a large outdoor museum. A museum in which, besides the relevance of its artworks, we should emphasize the level of acknowledgment, respect and proud felt by its inhabitants for having received an artistic heritage as the one exhibited. Stone and marble, cement and iron, wood and assemblies, matching shapes in avenues and squares, in parks and buildings. A body of topics and expressions that foster the critical reflection.

This remarkable action that was performed almost naturally has turned Art - both in this city and in the heart of each of its inhabitants - into an expression of coexistence. Art as a mechanism of improvement and, in its turn, a means of spiritual elevation and joy.