5. The Traffic of Fakes

The ubiquitous border that is deployed in every region between sectors of wealth and rings of poverty is reenacted in Buenos Aires, as the Recoleta neighborhood, one of the most glamorous zones of Buenos Aires, with its neoclassical grandeur and high real estate, is barely a few blocks away from a necklace of villas –working class urban shanties- which, different to other sites in Latin America, are not ‘on your face’ (slums in Caracas or Rio, are always visibly present on the slopes that surround those cities). Here they are carefully camouflaged by over-development, as these small Argentine slums are squeezed within transportation infrastructures or become transitional zones between more established official enclaves. So, in a sense the cultural traffic produced by A Crime Has Many Stories event, from MALBA, in the neighborhood of El Retiro, to the neighborhood of La Boca does not follow a straight line, connecting predictable destinations, but becomes a jagged pilgrimage across neighborhoods of display and consumption, production and labor and back. A careful choreography of artistic interventions into the spaces of a city can be a tactical tool for socialization, approximating formal and informal institutions. This is how we approached Puerto Madero, one of the most dramatic urban intersections I have ever seen, where many of these contrasting urban ecologies collide: casinos, luxury condos, environmentally protected park and a slum. To add one more layer to this zoning club sandwich, the third station of the pilgrimage was sited here: The small Museum of the Calcos, where a large collection of replicas of historic statuary is housed in a former leprosy hospital. The collection of copies inside the museum resonated with the huge array of urban replicas found outside, as faithful copies of the same typology of luxury condos that sprung all over the world during the pre-economic crisis boom are also re-deployed here, in this corner of Buenos Aires, to form the largely privatized homogeneous spaces of vertical gated communities and commercial malls that make the hyper gentrified enclave of Puerto Madero. It is at this blurred intersection between the fictional and the real where the project of Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby took me into another detour. As I entered the space, the sight of two tables filled with cheese and wine symmetrically arranged beneath the legs of Michelangelo’s David dominated the space, and immediately exposed the informality that the ‘copy’ offered, as we moved irreverently munching and sipping through the classics. Moving through a parade of fakes reminded me that originals do not exist but only the functional transference of their ‘useful’ meaning, and that, in this case, the close proximity of flesh bodies in motion touching the usually untouchable completed the functional aspect of this experience, closing the distance between the subliminal and the prosaic. In the middle of this theater, the artists began to speak of a circuit of donations and reproductions: They suggested that the choreography of capital and symbols become the material of the artist for the creation of agency. At this station of A Crime Has Many Stories, the expedition became promiscuous, transforming into many others.  The legacy of any artistic intervention in the city, I thought, should be to enable other things to occur, beyond itself, leaving an institutional trace, a cultural platform of exchange where new social configurations can take place. This whole thing had become an orchestrated excuse to generate a new museum of reproductions in the marginal neighborhood of Fiorito, where, Maradona, the patron saint of Argentine soccer was born. This would be a neighborhood-based new Museo de Calcos that would bring together replicas of Maradona’s foot, Michelangelo’s David and Duchamp’s Fig Leaf as its foundational, collection pieces.

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