Free Third Thursday

Join us for a free evening at MOCA with galleries open late, live music by KXCI Community Radio, food by Herculean Chicken, and drinks by Brick Box Brewery! Don’t miss this lively time to gather with friends and family around art, music, and drinks; all ages are welcome!

At 5pm, MOCA Members are invited to come early for a special Members cocktail reception with the guest speaker, curator, and historian Veronica Rossi.

At 6pm, MOCA presents a special one-night screening of the film Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive), by curator and historian Veronica Rossi, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

Inspired by the film’s concept of the archive as a living site of metamorphosis, join us on the plaza for a physical media swap. Contribute your personal archive – books, records, CD’s, DVD’s, VHS’s, artwork, and beyond – and swap with others and share the transformative nature of communal cultural exchange!

The Pima County Seed Library will be on site with a seasonal collection of seeds – another kind of living archive of our diverse desert ecosystem.

Plus, an archive-inspired collage-making art workshop for all ages throughout the evening with teaching artist Brissa Villa.

About the film (New York, 14’50”, 2025)

Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive) examines what archives preserve and, at the same time, what is lost, scattered, or deliberately erased. The film understands archives as unstable spaces, traversed by decisions, affections, and forms of control, where memory is constructed both by accumulation and by absence. Documentary materials intersect with personal stories and everyday gestures, shifting the idea of the archive as a repository toward a metabolic entity that overflows and transforms. Rossi’s film approaches the archive of Argentinean contemporary artist Claudia del Río to declassify it, to allow its fragments to reveal unexpected relationships. Archivo deshilachado proposes a form of fragmentary, layered biography and autobiography, where the preserving impulse also implies hiding, dividing, and letting grow. Rather than securing a legacy, the archive here is a place of metamorphosis.

About Veronica Rossi (Buenos Aires, 1973)

A historian and archivist, Veronica Rossi has organized literary and artistic collections and was a curator at MALBA, Buenos Aires. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Biography and Memoir at the Graduate Center (CUNY, New York), where she explores experimental forms of storytelling based on documentary materials. Archivo deshilachado is her first film essay.

Monthly Free Thursdays are presented in collaboration with KXCI Community Radio.