The haudenschildGarage commissioned architect Teddy Cruz to write about the hG, Spare Parts project A Crime Has Many Stories and his experience of the city of Buenos Aires as a first time visitor.

A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by the haudenschildGarage, based on Ricardo Piglia’s short story La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (1975). The November 29, 2008 multidisciplinary, one-day traverse of the city of Buenos Aires was plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. In response to Piglia’s short story, the project generated two site-specific pieces by Argentine artists Rosalba Mirabella and Roberto Jacoby and Fernanda Laguna, and a commissioned story, El Hijo, by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto. The literary collective Eloisa Cartonera produced a limited edition Survival Kit and a catalog of the entire project.

Cruising Buenos Aires by Teddy Cruz

1. Arrival to the City of Fury

It was impossible for me to arrive to Buenos Aires for the first time without being followed by the mythical images I’ve had of this city.  Anticipating, before landing, for example, that I would be finally walking along the very streets where Ernesto Sabato’s character Pablo Castel roamed desperately, after failing to recuperate the personal letter he had given to that generic Post Office employee. The letter he did not want Maria Iribarne to receive after all because it would finally reveal to her the depth of his own emotional tunnel, ultimately leading to her killing. Or, visualizing the huge penis that Ernesto Subiela moves during his film The Dark Side of The Heart, as a nomadic obelisk, across the huge width of ‘9 De Julio,’ aligning its size with the endless axis of this -according to proud Argentines- ‘the widest boulevard in the world,’ and in so doing, humiliating its own Parisian mother: Champs-Elysees. Or, for an instant, lifting up -vicariously through a Soda Stereo’s song- from the streets of the neighborhood of Palermo to reach to the sky as a ‘daytime vampire,’ just to free fall again into the neighborhoods that turn Buenos Aires into the ‘City of Fury.’ Or, finally, imagining finding my own father among the many terrestrial faces in the city. The man who my mother has silently claimed, in a couple of occasions, to have been a ‘Porteño’ graphic designer, and with whom, even though she has not officially confirmed it yet, she spent a wonderful night -a furtive encounter in Guatemala City, when she also lived her own urban derive- allowing my passage into the world. All of these images converge -now- here as I came to be part of the metropolitan pilgrimage A Crime Has Many Stories, invited by this event’s enablers: The haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts’ producers Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin. The memory-filled weight of these personal mythical images will transform very soon through this cultural caravan along Buenos Aires, either dissolved by the physical reality of this city or amplified at the various urban intersections, where the haudenschildGarage, as part of this urban experiment, has asked many local artists to perform their own interpretations.

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