Portfolio (Manifesto)

García Uriburu participated in the international neo avant-garde movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a pioneer of land art and ecological art. On June 19, 1968, he tinted the waters of Venice’s Grand Canal with an innocuous fluorescent green dye called Fluorescein. The action, which altered the appearance of the Italian city for the course of one day, aimed to bring attention to the relationship between nature and civilization and to promote ecological consciousness as a critical part of culture. Following this intervention, in 1970, García Uriburu colored green the East River in New York, the Seine in Paris, the Rio de la Plata in Buenos Aires and again the Grand Canal in Venice. These actions and their motives were recorded in the Portfolio (Manifesto), a series of six screenprints that the artist made to disseminate his ideas more broadly. Portfolio (Manifesto)/i> won the First Prize in the Tokyo Graphic Art Biennial of 1975. While García Uriburu stated that his work had the metaphysical intention of reuniting man and nature, he also envisioned it as a critique of the pollution committed by industrialist countries and its dramatic effects in developing countries, hence the reproduction of the South American map and the Iguazu Falls in the Portfolio.