18.4.–31.5.2026

Vernissage 17 April 2026 from 17:00 to 20:00

Museum of Impossible Forms is delighted to present Productive Unit, a new body of work by Diego Bruno.

Productive Unit is a 57-minute experimental film and installation developed through a research process in collaboration with militants from the MTD–Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers Movement) in Argentina. The work brings together archival documents and newly produced footage to reflect on the political capacity of this movement, while simultaneously interrogating the forms through which such histories are communicated. It asks to what extent experimental moving-image practices can offer compelling modes for representing radical political processes.
Emerging in Argentina in the late 1990s, the MTD constitutes a key moment within an ongoing political history. Rooted in collective knowledge and lived experience, the movement developed forms of social organisation that resist capitalist structures—foregrounding self-management, autonomy, and communal modes of production. Over the past decades, it has contributed to the formation of worker-run cooperatives, recuperated factories, and grassroots organisations that sustain alternative economic models and forms of political articulation.

Bruno’s film weaves together archival material from the movement’s early years with newly produced footage filmed within a contemporary cooperative facility operated by the MTD. This site—bringing together industrial workshops, political training schools, and community media platforms—functions as a space of encounter, exchange, and collective organisation, countering the isolation imposed by conditions of poverty and marginalisation. The work examines how such spatial relations can be translated into cinematic form, articulating a situated documentation of the movement’s everyday practices: from assemblies and marches to cadre training sessions, community radio and press, carpentry and metal workshops, canteens, and other forms of cooperative labour.
Rather than offering a descriptive account, the film approaches these spaces through the formal logic of cinema, seeking to render the organisational totality of the cooperative through movement, duration, and spatial articulation. Through a deliberate use of camera movement—tracking shots, repetitions, and interruptions—the film constructs a dynamic and, at times, unstable representation of space. In this way, space becomes a means of accessing both the processes and the inherent difficulty of representing political subjectivity—asking what its image might be, and how it can be seen. Bruno’s interest lies in attending to the sites and spatial configurations produced, reorganised, and redistributed by this people’s movement, as they construct alternative conditions for collective life.

This concern with space extends beyond the image into the conditions of its display. A series of walls constructed specifically for the exhibition reconfigure the space to accommodate the video projection, transforming the conditions of viewing and reception. This spatial intervention is not merely functional; it emerges from the conceptual and formal concerns of the works themselves.

The exhibition also includes a series of large-format photographs derived from archival file folders containing brochures, pamphlets, and documents of the MTD, held at the Center for Documentation and Research of the Culture of the Left (CeDInCI). This institution—comprising a library, newspaper archive, and research centre—is dedicated to the recovery, preservation, and dissemination of the political and cultural production of the Latin American left from the late 19th century to the present. Following the format of axial specular photography, these images capture the reflection of the camera flash on the plastic covers that protect the documents. Light here operates as a mediator of history—both revealing and obscuring the materials it illuminates.

The problematisation of space in the film, together with the role of light in the photographic works, becomes a structuring principle of the exhibition as a whole. In this sense, the exhibition does not present the works as content to be interpreted, but as a set of conditions to be encountered. Form is not secondary to meaning; it is the terrain through which meaning is produced, displaced, and contested. By insisting on the materiality of language, image, and spatial arrangement, Bruno situates the exhibition as an active site where aesthetic propositions are not only shown but tested in their capacity to circulate, to sediment, and to re-emerge within the social and political fabric of their reception.

Diego Bruno lives and works in Helsinki. His multidisciplinary practice spans moving image, writing, drawing, and photography, emphasising the friction between artistic forms and political awareness within their respective narratives, and engaging with the epistemological, artistic, and political disputes of the present. He studied Art History at the University of Buenos Aires, holds a BA in Fine Arts from Escola Massana in Barcelona, and completed an MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His work has been presented internationally, including at WIELS (Brussels), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Manifesta 8 (Murcia), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Extra City (Antwerp), MACBA (Barcelona), Malmö Konsthall, BIENALSUR, and EVA International (Ireland). His works are held in major public collections, including Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).

The film has been produced and edited with the support of AVEK, Koneen Säätiö, Linnamon Säätiö, and Carbon Copy ky.

The exhibition at Museum of Impossible Forms is presented within the framework of Institution(ing)s, a medium-scale collaboration project co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.