Not every creative practice fits a single category. Sonia Lucía Pirchi, a Buenos Aires-based artist and founder of studio tisdis, has long operated at the intersection of three disciplines that most practitioners keep separate: visual art, design and art direction, and bio construction. What she is doing now is making that intersection the point.
Pirchi was born in Argentina in 1978 and has spent her career building an unusually varied body of work. By her own account, her studies took her through the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, where she pursued coursework in architecture and visual communication, and to the institution then known as IUNA, now the Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires, where she studied ceramics and fire arts. That breadth shows in the range of what she makes.
Her visual work spans photography, mixed media, and digital processes. Recurring across the pieces are questions of light, color, and what her studio materials describe as sacred geometry. The visual language is consistent: luminous, formally considered, oriented toward inner experience as much as outward form. Works such as d’or, made in 2016, and light art, from 2013, trace a line of sustained inquiry rather than restless experimentation.
Into Venice and Beyond
In December 2021, the photographic work Inner Light was selected for the 14th edition of the Venice International Art Fair, held at The Room Contemporary Art Space in Venice and running through January 2022. The fair, organized by ITSLIQUID Group, brought together around 100 artists from more than 40 countries for a group exhibition exploring the relationship between identity, space, and contemporary experience. Pirchi’s inclusion placed her work inside an international conversation that is very much ongoing.
Her work is also represented through the Circle Foundation for the Arts, an international organization for professional visual artists. Writing there, curator Cristian Jesús Agostini described Pirchi’s practice as functioning as a “tangible, visual gateway, allowing people to step into a new era,” noting that the work, in his reading, harmonizes external and internal realms simultaneously.
The Third Discipline
The design and art direction work has run in parallel to the visual art practice throughout Pirchi’s career. But it is the third strand, bio construction, that speaks most directly to where the studio seems to be heading.
Pirchi’s engagement with bio architecture has also taken a more formal academic step. She graduated from the Diploma Program of Bio Architecture at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), adding a specialized foundation in sustainable architectural practice to the architectural and visual communication studies that informed her earlier work.
Bio construction, as a practice, is rooted in building with natural materials: earth, stone, timber, and other low-impact resources managed in ways that minimize environmental damage and support community health. Pirchi brings her own framing to this work: she describes her aim as building sustainable communities around what she calls the principle of the center, a balance between giving and receiving. It is the kind of language that travels across her platforms, bridging the visual and the material.
The @tisdis_bio Instagram presence, which Pirchi maintains separately from her broader studio presence, documents this dimension of the work and has become the most direct public record of the bio construction practice.
One Name for All of It
Tisdis is the label above everything. The studio name appears across Pirchi’s website and online channels, and she describes tisdis.com, by her own account a registered trademark, as the platform through which all three practices will eventually be unified. The intent, as she has stated it, is not simply to keep parallel activities running under a common banner but to move toward genuine integration: an approach to making and building in which the visual and the structural, the aesthetic and the ecological, inform each other directly.
Her graduation in Bio Architecture reinforces that direction. Rather than treating sustainable construction as a separate professional interest, Pirchi‘s training gives the bio construction strand a deeper architectural grounding and places it more firmly within the larger trajectory of her practice.
It is an ambition that takes time to realize. Studio tisdis operates from Buenos Aires, with an international reach through exhibitions, gallery partnerships, and the growing tisdis platforms, and Pirchi is still in the middle of the work. What the full convergence looks like remains, at this point, a live question.
