2. The Argentine Phalanstery

I would advise everyone to first enter Buenos Aires through the school of architecture of its National University. If there is one single space where the image of the entire city can fit is this one. This cavernous, mega-structure is the paradigmatic Latin American institutional building, where the utopian and the dystopian meet. Literally, a few minutes after landing, I found myself walking inside this vertical, ‘rational’ slum, in the midst of thousand young bodies who were restlessly meandering under the expansive roof of this single, total building – A truly Argentine Phalanstery. After moving across endless corridors flanked by Kafka-in-steroids, dark bureaucratic offices and visually entertained by old and new revolutionary slogans, I reached a small window to finally see the landscape around me. (If a crime has many stories, most of them begin here) What I see in the distance is the city meeting with the Rio de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean. I hear a voice behind me (a real voice): “…From here to there, the marshes below, these buildings are witnesses of the thousands of bodies that were dumped in the waters…” Where do the collective passions that a city emanates come from? They do not come from the autonomy of the author’s room nor in the heterogeneity of the flaneur’s sidewalks. They can actually unfold from a critical transit through a city’s (hi)stories, moving insurgently from generation to generation, the ‘20s, the ‘60s, now?- like a ball silently trafficked by the magic feet of Messi. I found these collective passions mirrored in the haudenschildGarage metropolitan caravan, hidden in the many stations along its trajectory across Buenos Aires and made visible through the chunks of history that the artists’ works recuperated in and out of each of those stations. And as it is the case with any event whose main intension is to generate multi-layered conversation and exchange, I also found these passions in the informal debates, that circulated around café cortado, bife de chorizo and chimichurri and through the wide and narrow streets of the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6