In 2010, artist Lisa Tan proposed a second chapter to her Recoleta project started in Buenos Aires in 2007. She reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience.

In May of 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with Lisa Tan. While in Buenos Aires she made a collection of grave rubbings from the Cementerio de La Recoleta and sent to the Garage daily images and thoughts on her experience of the city. See ‘Related Content’ below for this project.

On September 5, 2007 Lisa Tan presented her project Recoleta at the haudenschildGarage and was in conversation with former San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick Cartwright and LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg.

Lisa Tan, New York, January 2010

We often preserve the memory of an indefinable charm from these towns we’ve merely brushed against.   The memory indeed of our own indecision, our hesitant footsteps, our gaze which didn’t know what to turn towards and that found almost anything affecting… — George Perec[1]

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Cover

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. — Jorge Luis Borges[2]

The guidebook read: “The cemetery’s giant vaults, stacked along avenues inside the high walls, resemble the rooftops of a fanciful utopian town from above”[3].   It sounded compelling, given an emergent attraction I had to cemeteries—and so I packed a pad of 11 x 14 inch paper and some black pencils, and one day—after we arrived back to Buenos Aires from the northern Patagonian Pampa—I went to the Recoleta Cemetery and spent a couple days making grave rubbings—avoiding any text or overly decorative textures.

The walk from the hotel to the cemetery took me past a small bakery, then the Israeli Embassy Memorial (it was bombed in 1992), then across Avenida 9 de Julio—the iconic wide street that bears the white obelisk, toward an ornate fountain near the Brazilian and French embassies, fancy retail spaces, a grand hotel, and then finally, a family of huge Banyan trees.  Along this route, the international modernist apartment buildings, that are so plentiful in downtown Buenos Aires, give the walk a decidedly cosmopolitan tone.  This became part of a ritual of going to the cemetery and coming home, and these nighttime walks would inform another work of mine.  Both inside and outside of the cemetery I was fascinated by the built space around me and how each had formed its own image of the unknowable.

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Open

When I went back to Buenos Aires the next time, it was with the generous assistance of the haudenschildGarage.  I had decided that I wanted to make very large grave rubbing drawings (84 x 48 inches each) to capture the scale of the structures.  It took the better part of a day to make one.  I thought they would turn out to be impressive monochromes that had a weight and aura imbued by way of a literalist minimalism.  The experience was truly amazing, but not long after I transported the suite of drawings back home, I realized that they failed to hold much resonance.  The small drawings were still convincing to me though, and the haptic process mattered somehow in relation to their scale.  They could be inventoried in a single stack, and I could hold and flip through them, one structure after another.  I decided that this was the best way for the piece to live, and so I designed a cloth-covered box, blind-stamping it with “RECOLETA”.   Perhaps it is a tomb for the unknowable.

I continued to go back to Buenos Aires, and last year I completed a video about the apartment lobbies, called Language Barrier.

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Detail

ABOUT LISA TAN

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).

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[1] George Perec, edited and translated by John Sturrock, Species of Space and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, 1997, p. 64.

[2] Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964, p. 114.

[3] Danny Aeberhard, Andrew Benson and Lucy Phillips, The Rough Guide to Argentina, Rough Guides, Second Edition, p. 122.