6. Where the City is no Longer

That rainy night it was disorienting to see Boca Junior’s stadium from the small streets that surround it. Not only it is unconceivable to find such a huge scaffold of popular culture smacked inside the small fabric of a neighborhood, but also its shape defies any perspective equation. The setback between this huge yellow structure and the first bar or house adjacent to it is so small that the perennial contrasting division between figure and ground (solid and empty spaces) represented in a city map is physically blurred here, mixing object and background and producing a strange continuous urban intercourse of houses, stadium, bars, stores, streets and alleys. I finally arrived to La Boca. This neighborhood is not only the home of the famous stadium of Boca Juniors, but I see it as a unique micro-heterotopia: an intense urbanism made of soccer fans. The caravan was to end in the counter-space to MALBA: Eloisa Cartonera’s workshop, where writer Washington Cucurto would read his crime story, outdoors, in the alley next to the home of this artists collaborative. As the rain continued, making it impossible for the crowd to occupy the street, one more act of improvisation cemented the idea in my mind that a real city will always resist the control of planned destiny. As the mixed smell of chorizo and wet pavement was in the air, people began to drift into the second floor of a nearby fire station (These probably were the same fire trucks that came to the futile rescue of Mirabella’s space in Avenida Colon). How ironically appropriate it was that the pilgrimage was ending up there, above the firemen, in a community hall that was quickly improvised as a performance space for Cucurto’s reading of El Hijo, and later into a dining hall and a dance floor. The story that Piglia read that morning, I thought, is already emblematic of the city’s mythical aura, but the story that Cucurto was reading now at the end of the day is still grounded here in the life of this neighborhood and others like it, resisting its mutation into some kind of metropolitan cultural icon. Here, the story does not want to be owned by the author yet, but wants to remain a little longer in the collective voices of its social actors and the collaborative efforts of its producers: Eloisa Cartonera, Cucurto and the others. Aldo Rossi, the famous Italian architect, once described the Punta della La Dogana in Venice (the lonely, small building that ends in a sharp corner against the grand canal), as the site where the city ends and the irrational begins. This final station in A Crime Has Many Stories produced the same feeling. This is the place where the generic city ends -understanding that the contemporary city has been shifting from being the ideal laboratory of artistic experimentation into a passive site of display and consumption- and the new neighborhood begins: Re-conceived as contemporary culture’s privileged site of artistic production.  The social salon above the firemen was by now filled with bodies, and in the midst of choripans, projections of the day’s actions already turned memories and the sound of cumbia, everyone, I mean everyone, began to dance. Eloisa and Steve did it again, I thought, blurring the line between enabler and producer, they brought together high and low, sacred and profane, the consolidated and the emergent to momentarily commingle in unselfish exchange: A carnaval where everyone is a participant and the everyday has kidnapped art without asking for ransom.

—Teddy Cruz, 2009
Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. He obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on affordable housing in relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 1991 he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and he is currently a Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego.

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