“Buenos Aires”: Interview with Adriana Rosenberg
¿What is the general view of the exhibition?
The exhibition presents the city of Buenos Aires from the point of view of art. It’s the artists, musicians, filmmakers and painters who leave their impressions and conform the history and the lasting images of our city. For example: the exhibition strats out with an investigation by Cecilia Rabossi about the story of a painting that portrays the foundation of Buenos Aires, a work done by a Spanish painter on ocassion of the country’s first centenary. This image, that accounts for the first conquerors and founding moment of the city, has had and has a story that tells of our depency of Spain and the falseness of the situation that it depicts. The story of its making is part of the view we have of the city. That’s why the artists, urbanists, architects and creators are the protagnoists os this exhibition. It’s they who, through their work, show a perspective and a reflection about our urban environment.
¿What precedents are there in Fundación Proa concerning the urban problematic?
With the choice of La Boca, in the city’s limit, for its emplacement, Fundación Proa poses already the question of our point of view of Buenos Aires, from its margins. Throughout the years we’ve made had many exhibitions, film programs and discussion panels on the subject. Notably, the City Editings exhibition, curated by Catherine David in 1999. At the very end of the 20th Century, this exhibition called for an observation on how the city was becoming both a topic and a stage for art, be it at biennales or in public space. When we decided to expand our building, we closed it for remodelling and has two important editions of The City and the River, curated by Sergio Baur with the collaboration of Cecilia Rabossi. It was a momentary closure that allowed us to rethink the origins and the future of our venue, of our activities and what we hoped to do in this part of the city. Following that path, Buenos Aires furthers the questions posed early on.
¿How is the exhibition organized?
In the different galleries, Buenos Aires presents the first images of the city, its approriation by film as it uses urban space as a setting.
Then, from the point of view of literature, a novel sound installation created by Daniel Link, in which the voices of Argentine writers come together in a space that is soley occupied by the images conjured up by language.
In the exhibition there is also place to point out the importance of architecture, the modernization of the city with the creation of the Plaza de la República, and the life that is infused into the city through many anonymous events. Video, film, photographic documents and newscasts give form to all this material.
The questions about the limits of the city, of its conflicts, are presented in the works of artists like Marcos López, Marta Minujín and Ana Gallardo.
Summing up, the exhibition assembles expressions from different artistic disciplines: visual arts, photography, film, literature, architecture, urbanism, publicity and design.
¿What definition of the city could be given today?
What is the city’s population? How many people live in it? Anyone would say: “twelve or thirteen million”, and with that answer they’d be immediately displacing the city’s limit, for that number includes the population of the suburbs, that are already implicitly incorporated to the city. There is a, however, a limit, factual, according to which there are approximately three million people that live in the city. But it’s only a legal situation, not a real one. That limit is merely administrative or economic.
The gathered material rethinks the space of Buenos Aires and the confrontation between the legal and administrative organization and the imaginary. Although they actually are, statistics aren’t presented as imaginary but rather as that which is, as the real. The exhibition tries to evidence that difference between the map and the territory, between the representation and the represented, between what effectively is and that what tries to explain that which is. Anyone could think: “Only three million?”, because we actually live with the feeling that we are more than that. When stastics show us that number, it surprises us.
El material reunido vuelve a pensar el espacio de Buenos Aires y la confrontación entre lo imaginario y la organización legal-administrativa. Aunque lo sean, las estadísticas no se presentan como algo imaginario, sino como “lo que es”. La exhibición trata de poner en evidencia esa diferencia entre mapa y territorio, entre la representación y lo representado, entre lo que efectivamente es y lo que trata de explicar aquello que es. Cualquiera podría pensar: “¿Solamente tres millones?”, porque en realidad vivimos con la sensación de ser muchos más. Cuando la estadística arroja ese dato, te sorprende.
¿Is it a historical exhibition?
No, and it wouldn’t be right to try to circumsribe it within the exclusive domain of one discipline. Buenos Aires is not an attempt to classify and archive. The aim of the exhibition is to assmeble the fragments of the city, the fragments of its daily life, he fragments of images that are brought to us by film, by the situations we live ourselves and other situations that are unknown to us. These fragments, historical and present, put ART in the first place as an inhabitant and an active citizen of the city.
Daniel Link. “En obra” (In Progress), a sound installation
I. Theoretical Framework
The idea of the city seems to have deteriorated to a degree that would most likely have been unfathomable at the beginning of the last century. A new sort of millenarianism has taken hold of our imagination: large cities, even those in the Third World—especially those in the Third World—were seen as uninhabitable spaces. At base was a well known myth, the myth (and fascination) with dead cities. Since the nineteen-eighties, the theoretical implications—and specific political consequences—of imagining the exhaustion of cities have been different from those found in the writings of European intellectuals of the thirties: culture was searching for a new historical response by means of which to impose a new form of (economic, political) domination. This is why we believed that the city was no longer the necessary setting of subjective experience or capable of meeting the cultural demands for which it had been devised.
From its very beginnings, the culture we know—the culture we call “bourgeois culture”—has been related to the city, and the city-form has changed over time, turning into what we now know it to be and, in most cases, abhor: urban interventions of the last twenty-five years (in Buenos Aires, in Berlin) that seem intended to wreck the urban grid. Once the city-threshold had been done away with, nothing could counteract the normalizing and fascist power of the State (any and all States) associated with international Capital.
II. City and Literature
Cities have been produced, but they have also been imagined. While we do not aspire to establish any relationship, whether causal or consecutive, between the imaginary and the real, we assume that there is some sort of correlation between the two. Our aim is to read the renderings of some moments of that power of imagination in literary texts. We also assert that that power of imagination is not strictly literary (nor—of course—is it strictly architectural; we would not want to fall into the widespread belief that architects hold a monopoly on urban imagination). Literature does not imagine cities, but (like politics, architecture, and theatre) produces urban imaginaries.
What relationship can be established between urban space and textual space in modernity? What mutual implications, what forwarding systems, can be found? Bakhtin’s1 research has been particularly clear along these lines: the novel—the literary genre of modernity—is in essence and specifically polyphonic. It evidences the intersection of voices characteristic of urban culture. Literature, marketplace, money, city. The genealogy of the novel that Bakhtin traces is entirely based on genres linked to urban culture (political pamphlet, Menippean satire, Platonic dialogue). The epic/novel opposition that he outlines coincides with the country/city opposition. On the basis of these (obviously schematic) formulations, there is a correlation between urban space and textual space, and a specific type of enunciative system.
That space (like the city) is marked by the intersection of voices and languages, and the imagination of space (imaginary space) can be tied not only to specific points of reference in the field of representation, but also to the potentials of voices, to their language and textures (or grains). The path goes from abstract universals (characteristic of urbanism) to concrete singularities (characteristic of experience). Urbanism draws abstract lines in space (in Buenos Aires, the obelisk is the most emblematic figure of those lines). Experience (voice) explores those lines and endows them with meaning.
III. The Black Box
“En obra” lets the voices of 20th- and 21st-century Argentine writers be heard as they read texts on Buenos Aires (its streets, its atmospheres, its inhabitants) in the most absolute perceptive vacuum. The mere cadence of the voices, the different accents, intonations, and inklings would have sufficed to evidence the city just as it comes before us: a synthesis of heterogeneities, a disjointed set of contradictions. There can be no breach between aesthetic experience and urban experience, and all thought of the social and all imagination of the urban necessarily begins, as they say, with recognition of terrain. Not the recognition of the typographer or the realtor, but of the strategist, because in the city there is war (of images, of tones).
We have placed these voices in an urban wasteland (in a space iconographically marked as wasteland) for two reasons: to emphasize the empty nature of the images that the texts summon or produce, the specific perceptive void that powers these images; and, second, because in Buenos Aires, unlike most cities in the world, there is an abundance of wastelands (empty spaces), and the interruptions they effect affront urban continuity and the powerful processes of modernization that have laid siege to vast areas of the city of Buenos Aires; these spaces are what make possible an (imaginary) debate on the city and its future.
“En obra” also means that these voices constitute a work in progress on the city and that what its future holds remains to be seen. The city is endlessly a work in progress, and the wastelands of Buenos Aires are the clearest mark of this incessant construction.
IV. The Voices
We have combed the sound archives of the Audiovideoteca of the City of Buenos Aires, the National Library, the Argentine National Archives, as well as some private sources, to recover the voices of dead writers. We have asked living writers to record a fragment for this installation.
Poets, novelists, playwrights, authors of children’s literature (men and women, young and old) will be heard: we don’t want to conform to the conventional image of literature, or to the most common figures of the literary experience of this city (the obelisk, Caminito, Florida Street, Puerto Madero). Of course, these figures are present since we are obsessed by their (in)significance, but they appear as ruins of a lost civilization rather than tourist catalogue.
In the ordering of these fragments, we privilege the treatment of the sensorial: light, climate, sounds (hushed tones, choleric shouts). We have limited ourselves to collecting voices because we want to present the experience of text (of the poem, the novel, the ditty) at the precise point that it is joined to a body and, therefore, to something still alive: the voice. Voice is where language and body touch: it is possible to read the experience of the city in words, but also in intonations, in emphases, in the grain and the texture of the voice.
In the texts, images of / in struggle are heard: the (mythological) foundation of Buenos Aires in Borges and Mujica Lainez; the exile in the cadence of the French spoken by Copi; the Criollismo in the weary pace of the verses recited by Osvaldo Lamborghini; and the contained paranoia of Manuel Puig. Cozarinsky’s whispering, Spregelburd’s shout, Isol’s song, Walsh’s dry and measured tone... And the call of the land in intonations (the provincial and foreign accents). Love (or Kamenszain’s “Buenos Aires hate”), what there is (Cabezón Cámara’s shantytowns), what is banished (Cucurto’s slums), what remains (the rain, the faint light, the passing of the hours)... It is not our intention to offer a literary canon in either a hagiographic sense (that is, a celestial order) or a harmonic sense. Thus, these voices attest to love and hate, foundational myth and utopian power, that is, the constituent contradiction and the war of images on which our ecology is based.
1 Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Epopeya y novela”, Eco, XXXII-3 (Bogota: January 1978); Bakhtin, Mikhail. Estética de la Creación Verbal. Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1980; Bakhtin Makhail. Problemas de la poética de Dostoievski. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986. (English titles: Epic and novel; The Aesthetic of Verbal Creation; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics)
Daniel Link. “El look del cielo”
Qué fantasmáticas, podría decirse, y al mismo tiempo heroicas, qué extrañas nos resultan estas imágenes de Sebastián Freire, aún cuando sea fácil describirlas: son imágenes que reproducen fotografías clásicas de figuras célebres del star system. Analía Couceyro como Joan Crawford, Luna Paiva como María Callas, Celeste Cid como Louise Brooks...
No se trata, claro, de un ilusionismo barato que pretendiera confundir la copia con el modelo (Albertina Carri con Katharine Hepburn, por ejemplo), o la mirada de Avedon en la toma de Catherine Deneuve con la de Freire en la fotografía de Esmeralda Mitre. No hay disfraz ni semblante, aún cuando haya travestismo (Paloma como Marilyn Monroe, Gaby Bex como Gloria Swanson). No es la imitación lo que importa en estas imágenes (prueba de lo cual es la interpretación de Audrey Hepburn por Nora Lezano), aún cuando lo que se cite sea del orden del gesto, la pose, la iluminación y el encuadre, el registro completo del look (Lisa Kerner como Marlene Dietrich), un tortuoso manierismo formal (que, como siempre en los trabajos de Freire, pone en primer plano a la fotografía como trabajo y no tanto como arte), sino la constatación de que siempre hay un resto o núcleo de vacío que permanece.
Porque estas imágenes también convocan una ética, completamente extraña a nuestra época, que ha decidido prescindir de las formas y arrojarse al caos, donde la ética brilla no tanto por su ausencia sino por su imposibilidad. Se trata sólo (¿sólo?) del amor (en el sentido en que el amor es lo imaginario).
La cultura de la que participamos ha optado por un dispositivo rabiosamente sádico que hace de la mujer (ese misterio) un animal en un corral reproductivo o una tajada de carne. Conocemos esas imágenes que la cultura industrial (citada irónicamente en el título de esta muestra, y que Freire conoce con precisión de entomólogo) reproduce maniáticamente: ponen en marcha el dispositivo sádico, cuya función histórica es precisamente volver imposible toda ética. La humillación, en su forma más pura.
Freire, que en trabajos anteriores (Tipos, 2005) no ha titubeado en investigar el alcance de ese dispositivo en relación con el cuerpo masculino, ha renunciado a él en esta serie de retratos de mujeres. Y ha renunciado a él por la vía del dispositivo masoquista, haciendo de cada una de estas "reinas" (que por eso lo son) el objeto del amor cortés, al que vuelve con toda su fuerza colocándose, como fotógrafo, en el lugar del vasallo, y colocándolas a ellas como dóminas, como puntos ciegos y por eso mismo infinitos de lo que no puede y nunca podrá explicarse: el amor como sometimiento puro o como distancia insalvable, el sólo deseo del deseo, el ansia de tomar al otro por su alma (dado que lo otro, la cosa, es directamente imposible: no la hay).