Nina Suárez

Nina Suárez doesn’t need a stage to be a musician. It’s in the way she gets into her gray Gol with a Mar del Plata sticker on the windshield, the car she bought with her savings and that smells of long trips and decisions made on the fly. Her sound isn’t something she plays on the guitar; it’s something that breathes between her ribs when she raps over borrowed beats or strums a Nirvana cover on a criollo guitar with her hair covering her face. She’s not the kind of artist who waits for the perfect moment to begin: Nina Suárez was already there, on the margins of stages, making noise before anyone asked for permission. And she keeps doing it, now with a Premio Cóndor de Plata for Best New Female Talent hanging on her living room wall, won for her role in Implosión, the film about the school massacre in Carmen de Patagones that made her feel, for the first time, like she was playing at being an adult with a choripán in one hand and a beer in the other.

Driving that Gol wasn’t a coincidence. No one in her family knew how to drive, but everyone dreamed of having a car, even before her mother, Rosario Bléfari, passed away in 2020. Nina was the first to get her license, and she celebrated by driving the car to the waterfront and treating her driving instructor—a bandmate ten years her senior—to a choripán. It wasn’t just a car: it was a trophy, a collective dream they had started saving for when she was still too young to know that music and film would become her life. Her father, Fabio Suárez, had been the frontman of Suárez, the band that in the nineties shook the foundations of Argentina’s independent music scene without making much noise, as if austerity were its trademark. Nina inherited that mix of discipline and boldness, but also that luminous humor that makes her laugh at herself before anyone else can.