Three fields, one studio.
There are artists who occasionally design, and designers who occasionally make art, but practitioners who hold all three disciplines at once—and do so with considered intent—are considerably harder to find. Sonia Lucía Pirchi, the Buenos Aires-based visual artist, art director, and bio constructor, has spent years working toward exactly that kind of synthesis. The vehicle is her studio, tisdis, and the work it encompasses ranges from abstract painting and light-based installation to graphic design and projects grounded in natural, sustainable building.
The breadth of that practice can read, at first glance, like an overcrowded professional biography. In reality, it reflects something more coherent: a set of recurring preoccupations with form, environment, and materiality that surface across disciplines and find different expression depending on whether the medium is paint, printed image, or compressed earth.
A Practice That Resists Narrow Categories
Pirchi was born in Argentina in 1978 and works out of Buenos Aires. According to her professional biography, her background includes study at ESDG and the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, as well as training at the institution now known as UNA, the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. Her education later extended into the field of bio architecture, with her graduation from the Diploma Program of Bio Architecture at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN).
That educational arc traces a route from applied design into fine art and, increasingly, into architecture and natural building—a trajectory visible in her practice as an ease with moving between disciplines without losing visual coherence.
The studio she founded, tisdis, takes its identity from the conjunction of those activities. According to Pirchi, the name covers her work as an art director, her practice as a visual artist, and her activity as a bio constructor, a discipline concerned with building through natural materials and what she describes as intuitive structural thinking with a focus on sustainability. The tisdis name, Pirchi has noted, is registered as a trademark and operates as the umbrella under which all three threads are organized.
Her visual art sits firmly in the abstract register. Works documented across her practice include the light-based piece “Light Tube,” compositions titled “Golden Light,” “Love,” “Portal,” and “Core,” and the 2016 sculptural photographic work “d’or.” The Circle Foundation for the Arts features several of these pieces alongside a written response from curator Cristian Jesús Agostini, who described her output as “the embodiment of the new age, or perhaps the era of timelessness.” Circle Foundation for the Arts has included Pirchi in its member gallery, where the pieces are available for direct inquiry.
The design and art direction side of the practice draws on the same visual instincts but occupies a different professional register. In her own description, maintained on the Iberoamerican art platform Arte Informado, Pirchi identifies herself as active across all areas of design, with the art direction work absorbing the same sensitivity to form and spatial logic that runs through her gallery output.
The Bio Construction Thread
The third strand of the tisdis practice may be the least familiar to American audiences, but in Argentina and across Latin America it has a well-established tradition. Bio construction, sometimes called natural building, refers to approaches that use materials such as compressed earth, adobe, clay, or stone in place of conventional concrete and steel. Practitioners in the field tend to combine structural considerations with a particular philosophy about the relationship between the built environment and the natural landscape.
Pirchi‘s formal training in this field includes her graduation from the Diploma Program of Bio Architecture at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), adding an academic foundation to the bio construction work represented through tisdis. Her own description of this work specifies a focus on intuitive architecture and sustainability, two principles that together suggest a method responsive to specific site conditions rather than one that applies a standard approach regardless of context.
That framing aligns with how the rest of her practice tends to operate. Whether she is making a large-format abstract work, directing a design project, or approaching a building site for natural construction, the underlying questions appear to remain consistent: what does this material do, what does this space ask for, and what would it mean to make something that genuinely belongs where it is?
The vision Pirchi has articulated for tisdis, as described in her professional materials, is to bring these three activities under a single operating identity, developing the studio into a structure capable of building not only objects and images but communities organized around principles of exchange and balance. That is an ambitious scope for a studio practice, and in the Argentine context it places her within a tradition of artist-practitioners who have long resisted the separation of aesthetic work from the social or physical conditions that surround it.
Working Out of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires supports one of South America’s most active contemporary art ecosystems, with a gallery and exhibition culture that has extended considerable international reach over the past three decades. Pirchi works and lives there, and Arte Informado, one of the Spanish-language world’s principal art directories, maintains her profile as a practicing artist whose work spans geometric abstraction, photography, installation, sculpture, and light art. That breadth of categorization reflects the range that tisdis, as a studio, contains.
Her studio site presents the tisdis operation as the convergence point for all three disciplines. For visitors arriving from a design background, a fine art background, or an interest in sustainable building, the entry point is different but the studio is organized to accommodate all three.
For an audience in Los Angeles, where interest in natural building materials and sustainable architecture has deepened considerably in recent years, the bio construction component of Pirchi’s practice may be the most immediately recognizable point of entry. But the studio makes more sense as a whole. The art, the design work, and the building projects are each expressions of the same underlying preoccupation with how form, environment, and material intersect—and what it would take to build something that belongs where it stands.
Pirchi’s graduation from UTN’s Diploma Program of Bio Architecture makes that third discipline more than a parallel interest within the studio. It represents a formal extension of the same interdisciplinary approach that has defined her work across art and design: an ongoing investigation into how ideas can move between image, object, space, and the materials from which environments are made.