Teo Salvarrey is an Argentine historian, archivist, and filmmaker based in Buenos Aires.
He is pursuing a PhD at the University of Buenos Aires examining cinema as an instrument of cultural diplomacy between 1930 and 1946, with growing attention to Argentina's relationship with Germany, particularly the infrastructure UFA built in Buenos Aires, set against the wider international contest with Britain and the United States over cultural and economic influence. He also teaches Historia del Pensamiento Sociológico (History of Sociological Thought) at the same university.
Alongside his historical research, Teo works as an archivist. He has worked in the Área de Gestión Documental, Archivo Histórico (Documentary Management Area, Historical Archive) of the Argentine Foreign Ministry, and with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He coordinated the creation of the audiovisual archive at Palacio Libertad (Centro Cultural Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, under Argentina's Ministry of Culture), and collaborated with the photographic archive of the Argentine Antarctic Institute. In 2026, he was invited to speak on the links between history, archives, and the arts at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA).
His artistic work draws on that same scientific background, his experience working in archives, and an audiovisual sensibility built independently. History, archive, and image inform each other throughout his work, rather than operating as separate practices.
He is currently developing a transmedia project rooted in his own experience as a member of an Argentine Antarctic expedition. In the summer of 2023, he spent three months at Cerro Nevado, Snow Hill Island, as part of the Argentine Antarctic Summer Campaign, carrying out historical and archaeological work on the Refugio Suecia, the Swedish Hut, listed as Antarctic Historical Heritage Site Number 38. An immersive documentary drawn from that work premiered publicly later that year, and in 2024 the project was selected for Talents Buenos Aires, held in partnership with Berlinale Talents. Alongside it, he continues to work across other audiovisual, photographic, and literary projects, several still in progress.
The project moves across several threads at once, all of them connected. At its center is the story of the Swedish expedition led by Otto Nordenskjöld, which carried José María Sobral to Antarctica as the first Argentine to winter and work there scientifically. Diaries, photographs, objects recovered through archaeological work on the island, and film footage from Argentine archives of the 1940s and 1950s surface alongside Teo's own footage, letting the past speak directly into the present. The same ground carries the project's second concern: global warming is reshaping the polar landscape, and the historical heritage and archaeological work now underway on the hut is itself a record of that change. A third thread stays with the camp as it is lived today, tracing how isolation and a harsh climate shape the mind, a subjective map of a mind isolated by ice yet still tethered, however faintly, to a hyperconnected world.
Across the archive, the thesis, and the camera, the same question keeps coming back: how the past presses into the present, and what it takes to let it speak again. That question is less a subject Teo returns to than the ground his work is built on, one throughline running under everything he makes.