4. From MALBA to the C.I.A.

The caravan moved from the pristine auditorium of MALBA where Ricardo Piglia read his text in a short film directed by Steve Fagin, to a small commercial space along Avenida Colon to witness the traces of the interior urbanism produced by artist Rosalba Mirabella, to the public interstices at the intersection of luxury condos, museums of fakes and urban slums at the Museo de Calcos, where Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby unveiled their own artistic copy, to Eloisa Cartonera’s La Boca workshop, where Washington Cucurto provided the book end and the contemporary spin to Piglia’s short story. And as we moved through these sites, we were moving through the cross-generational and spatial meandering of literature, art and film that has also produced this city. In essence, the recuperation of a fragment of literature, just to spill it back to contaminate other stories, conversations, artistic acts and places seems to me a more accurate definition of urbanity. This thought guided me through that intense rainy-day of the event, from the moment at MALBA where I saw Ricardo Piglia’s words being gently extracted from his lips by a camera, slowly filling an empty auditorium that was now filled with people. A story within the story, like Borges’ temporal trampoline that thrusts one forward and backward simultaneously, -yes- like the amazing image of Christ nailed to a F-15 of Ferrari I saw that morning on the second floor of this museum. Here, in this cultural expedition, art is rest-less as it wants to distribute itself through the unpredictability of the city. The drama of this unpredictability, for example, was tangibly manifested on artist Rosalba Mirabella’s work, as it unexpectedly mutated from its temporal occupation of a generic local on Avenida Colon (a space that would have been filled with her private traces of public images but burnt in an accidental fire just before the pilgrimage began) to the memory-filled dusty walls of Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas –C.I.A.- an experimental art center that is under construction, founded by Graciela Hasper, Judi Werthein, and Roberto Jacoby. Here, in the improvised occupation of the C.I.A., the project took a phenomenological detour: as the every day urban scratches of Mirabella’s work in the space of Avenida Colon disappeared into ashes, they were provisionally resurrected inside C.I.A.’s basement as a series of video narratives. Images of the burnt traces were projected on the walls and ironically reflected on a thin pool of water that had trickled into the room from a broken pipe inundating the floor before the audience arrived. As the audience moved randomly through the basement, between light projections of charred surfaces, Rosalba’s recorded narration and the plane of rainwater, the piece took a performatic dimension, suggesting again that in a true city the event is always nomadic and uncertain.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6