Here is what she says about it:

if i was to open my chest, with a swift surgical move, lots of things from the inside would come out. a heart and bones and blood –all of the things that allow me to breath and walk this earth– but also the spirit of all the things i’ve done. all of my creatures and all my creations in a giant contorting wave would pop out for everyone to see.

my eyes would also float back and forth, letting themselves be carried by the flow, picking up wherever they go bits and pieces of the sea. i would lose my head as well, of course, and my legs and my arms to the sea of colors. and the huge grey walls of the city would suddenly become the beach where all of this will drift ashore.

day one means white walls, a scary and exciting feeling. knowing what I have to do and being afraid of screwing up. then i begin drawing and i realize everything is going to be ok. from then on it is pure joy. the main character of the project is born, my alter ego of course, because everything i do seems to start with myself. and in this particular case, i’m taking a look at my insides.

day three lucía joins for the first part of her intervention. it’s always exciting to work with somebody else because of the challenge. it slightly changes the course of things and you need to rethink things to keep going. but most of all – it’s fun!

day five is one of the most frustrating days. having a very certain idea of what you want to do, but not being able to do it…well, i guess we all have bad days at work…

day six starts with the major destruction of what had been done the previous day. and from the ashes out comes the phoenix, reminding me that there is nothing that cannot be fixed. and this is how the máquina de hacer (the making machine) is born. a máquina de hacer, we all have one inside ourselves, there’s always a part of us creating – good and bad – but creating after all.

aside from a lot of smoke (which would be the bad part) my máquina de hacer is producing explorer astronauts which become visible around days ten and eleven. and this is where my inner self connects to the outside world: – the city is born.

this city is vast and complicated and sometimes it doesn’t even make sense, like real cities. fast and furious, with the shape and the force of water, swallowing everything as it passes by.

day fourteen lucía comes back for her second and last intervention. and the city keeps growing like a monster from day twelve to the very end of the project, when it takes the shape of a giant wave about to hit me.

and so the circle is closed.

and so everything begins again.

About Cecile Perret

I was born in Rio Negro, Argentina in February 1977 and I expressed an interest in painting and drawing from an early age. I was encouraged by my parents to take lessons since I was 4 years old and did so on and off until the age of 21.
After graduating from college, I moved to Buenos Aires with my family and studied Visual Arts at the Escuela Panamericana de Diseño y Publicidad and an introductory year of Graphic Design at the University of Buenos Aires. It is at that time that I started showing my work and participating in competitions.
I lived in Paris, France for three years from 2002 to 2005. This was an extremely enriching and introspective period where I spent much of my time in my studio, seldom showing my work.
I moved to Milan in 2005, encouraged by close friend and trompe l‘oeil master Guesso. I spent one year working as his assistant and continuing my studio work.
Through the years I developed a great interest towards graffiti and street art, as well as comics and illustration. Elements from which started to gain space in my canvases.
I returned to Buenos Aires, where I currently live, in 2006 and immediately started to connect with artists, organizing group shows and contacting galleries. We created a series of massive group shows called Supermuestras and recently smaller versions called Veo-veos.
My work can be seen in galleries such as GP espacio de arte (Palermo), La Guanaca Azul (San Telmo) and VYP (Retiro).

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).

———

[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.

A Crime Has Many Stories (English)

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line

November 29 2008, Buenos Aires, Argentina

A Crime Has Many Stories, is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin of the haudenschildGarage, based on Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s short story, La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (Madwoman and the Story of a Crime, 1975) set in Buenos Aires and plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. Piglia’s text generated two site-specific pieces and a commissioned story by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto.

In May of 2008, the haudenschildGarage traveled to Buenos Aires to meet with its advisory curatorial committee. Argentine curator Sonia Becce and Argentine artist Judi Werthein selected a short list of artists for the project, working in installation, photo and video. From this short list, Eloisa Haudenschild, Steve Fagin, and Alejandro Ruiz selected artists Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Rosalba Mirabella for the two site-specific pieces. Monica Jovanovich-Kelley coordinated the project in San Diego and Buenos Aires.

On November 29, 2008 a multidisciplinary, one-day extravaganza organized by Argentine producer Alejandro Ruiz began with a video of Ricardo Piglia’s elegant interpretation of his own text performed especially for our event and premiered at Malba – Fundación Costantini (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). We traveled from the opening of the project at Malba – Fundación Costantini to the closing celebration in La Boca by way of the projects by Jacoby, Laguna and Mirabella in a movable feast of culture and repast. The climax of our extravaganza was the inaugural performance of Washington Cucurto’s savagely brilliant short story, El Hijo, commissioned by the haudenschildGarage in response to Piglia’s La Loca y el Relato del Crimen. Cucurto and the literary collective Eloisa Cartonera performed an ensemble reading of the story in La Boca. A catalog of the entire project and a limited edition Survival Kit was provided to the participants at Malba to facilitate their journey. Both were produced in collaboration with Eloisa Cartonera.

The goal of this project was to generate a dynamic event that worked across literature, art and the city. Our hope, by joining artists from the 60s with young artists of the present and crossing the boundary of literature and fine art, was to “perform” the continuity and range of Argentine cultures at its strongest. We feel that the role of South America and Argentina in general has been greatly underestimated on the world stage and we hope this event, in its modest way, will support the growing awareness of the quality and specificity of Argentina’s historical and current contributions to world culture.

This project is dedicated to the wisdom, energy and spirit of generous debate that Olivier Debroise (1952-2008) provided us in regard to Latin American culture. With our project, we wish to continue that path.

*On October 2009 the haudenschildGarage invited Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez of Eloisa Cartonera for a residency at the Garage and a Garage Talk on October 15th. From October 16 – 18, 2008 Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez traveled to Tijuana to present a lecture and a two-day workshop in conjunction with the haudenschildGarage, inSite, Nortestacion, Epicentrico and the Escuela de Artes de la Universidad Autonoma de Baja California.

In May of 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with artist Lisa Tan. While in Buenos Aires she made a collection of grave rubbings from the Cementerio de La Recoleta and sent the Garage daily images and thoughts on her experience of the city.

*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.

*In January of 2010 Lisa Tan revisited her project Recoleta and reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience. See ‘Related Content’ below for a link to her text.

Provisionally titled Recoleta, this project began during my first trip to Argentina in August of 2006. The Recoleta cemetery is located in a well-heeled neighborhood in Buenos Aires that bears the same name. Initially, this site piqued my interest when I learned that it is configured like a city. It is in fact a city of a couple hundred mausoleums—a distinctive and elite necropolis.

The graves vary in style, density, and material. Some are ornate over-built structures that could house a small café, and others are minimal blocks of smooth granite. They all exist side by side along paths that branch off from main “boulevards,” mimicking the cosmopolitan surroundings just beyond the cemetery walls.

To take this potent site into account, I decided to make grave rubbings of select mausoleums, while avoiding all literal and figurative aspects—including areas of text, image, or overly descriptive textures. Marble statuary, glass doors, bronze plaques, and crosses, all dissolve into a collection of black monochromes. En masse, they vary little from one rubbing to the next; they become voids that reflect of a repository of unknowable histories.

Over the course of my stay in Buenos Aires, I will be posting a selection of images of my daily experience in the city. (Viva Argentina!) — Lisa Tan

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).

The haudenschildGarage supports el Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas’ 2010 art and theory courses and seminar program.

Art and theory course participants included Pablo Fessel y Pablo Gianera (August, 2010), Ana Longoni (March, 2010), Victoria Noorthoorn (March, 2010), and José Fernández Vega (March 2010).

Seminar participants include Florencia Abadi, Yanina Di Giusto, José Fernández Vega, Paula Fleisner y Edgardo Gutiérrez (September, 2010), Rosario Bléfari (September, 2010), Gonzalo Aguilar (October, 2010), Roberto Amigo (November, 2010), Daniel Link (October 2010), Roberto Amigo (August, 2010), Gonzalo Aguilar, Roberto Amigo y José Fernández Vega (August, 2010), m7red (March, 2010), Ricardo Piglia (April, 2010), Washington Cucurto, María Moreno (April 2010), Rosario Bléfari, Andrea Giunta (May, 2010), and Pablo Gianera and Pablo Fessel, Daniel Link, Doris Sommer (April, 2010).

Workshop participants include Juan de Nieves (August, 2010), Nicolás Guagnini (August, 2010), Jorge Macchi (September, 2010), Marcelo Expósito (September, 2010), Vasco Araujo (March, 2010), Yoshua Okon (April, 2010), and Mike Smith (May, 2010).

Past 2009 program participants included Tania Bruguera, Germán García, Josep-María Martín, Sergio Vega, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Lucio Castro, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Roberto Amigo, Alejandro Ros, Ernesto Ballesteros, Reinaldo Laddaga, Tulio de Sagastizabal, and Gonzalo Aguilar.

Click here for more information on el Centro’s programs.

About el Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas

El Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a physical and virtual space of interaction and debate for artists and thinkers from around the world, particularly those in Latin America and Spain. The purpose of el Centro is to provide critical tools for the formation and development of the artistic community in order to intervene in the constantly redefined cultural map of the moment. The work of el Centro goes beyond the frontiers of genres and disciplines, with an emphasis on those that expand the borders of practice, genre and media; those that propose new ways of production, of exhibition and exchange; those that explore broader social contexts than the institutionalized one. Writers, musicians, philosophers, architects, designers, film-makers, historians, psychoanalysts, technologists, performers, photographers, visual artists, and theatrical artists, among many others, will converge at el Centro. The activities will have a strong pedagogical component based on historic research and art theory conducted virtually and physically.

El Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, founded by Graciela Hasper, Roberto Jacoby and Judi Werthein, is a non-profit organization under the legal umbrella of the Start Foundation. In the begining of 2006, during the International Residence for Argentine Artists (RIAA), these three artists engaged in an exhaustive discussion on art education. Since then, they investigated a number of teaching models and possible education environments. It took three years to analyze and find the means to realize a project that would establish a dialogue that could go beyond disciplinary and geographical frontiers. By the middle of 2009, CIA’s infrastructure and project launch plans were in place. The development and continuity of this project depends on the engagement of artists, scholars, cultural private and public institutions and enterprises, as well as philanthropic organizations and individuals

Donations, Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby’s project for A Crime Has Many Stories, was completed in early December. The replicas Laguna and Jacoby created were selected from the Museo de Calcos’ collection and given to the Belleza y Felicidad (ByF) art space in the community of Fiorito, a small town outside of Buenos Aires. ByF Fiorito, open since 2003, functions as a workshop and art center for local children.

Below are photos of the installation and videos of their presentation at the Museo de Calcos on November 29, 2008 and transfer of the pieces to Villa Fiorito on December 2, 2008 as part of A Crime Has Many Stories.

A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by the haudenschildGarage, based on Ricardo Piglia’s short story La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (1975). The November 29, 2008 multidisciplinary, one-day traverse of the city of Buenos Aires was plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. In response to Piglia’s short story, the project generated two site-specific pieces by Argentine artists Rosalba Mirabella and Roberto Jacoby and Fernanda Laguna, and a commissioned story, El Hijo, by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto. The literary collective Eloisa Cartonera produced a limited edition Survival Kit and a catalog of the entire project.

Roberto Jacoby, 1944, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Roberto Jacoby, an artist and a sociologist, is considered to be one of the first conceptual artists. In 1966 he co-published the Manifesto of Media Art that proposed a dematerialized art genre that made use of social material, the mass media and various communication structures. Almost all of his work has been collaborative and it has produced various actions, events and happenings.  Jacoby showed at the Instituto Di Tella and in 1969, after the Tucumán Arde communications campaign and the publication of the clandestine magazine Sobre, he gave up working in the visual arts and instead investigated social conflict and political epistemology. In the 1980s, he joined the pop group Virus as a songwriter and staged shows and multimedia parties, among others, the Club Social Deportivo y Cultural Eros. Virtually his entire output since the 1960s has been designed to intervene in the circuit of communication and actions through the use of technology as a tool for collaborative creation. He co-founded Ramona, a magazine of the visual art and grounded Proyecto Venus, a virtual and offline community that issued its own currency and several artists’ networks. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Fernanda Laguna, 1972 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Fernanda Laguna graduated from the Prilidiano Pueyrredon School of Fine Art, her work combines literature, installation, performance and painting.  Since 1992, Laguna has been active in the local and international art world with multiple solo and collective exhibitions and in 1994 she was selected to be part of Guillermo Kuitca’s program for young artists.  From 1999 to 2008 she and Cecilia Pavon (1999-2001) ran the art space and publishing house Belleza y Felicidad where she curated exhibitions and published books of poetry and fiction including El Loco, La ama de casa, Salvador Bahia, Ella y Yo, Los celos no ayudan-la culpa tampoco, Samanta and amigas. In 2003 she opened a branch of Belleza y Felicidad in Villa Fiorito and in 2008 her workshop for teenagers was included in the public school, Number 44, in Villa Fiorito. Laguna’s work has been featured in many publications such as The Nineties from Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the catalog of Donations and Acquisitions of Malba in 2007, and in 2005, the British magazine ID selected Laguna as one of the two hundred and fifty upcoming artists.  Ines Katzenstein, Argentine curator and art historian, writes “Fernanda Laguna epitomizes what you expect from a present day artist, not only because of her work but also for her activity in the art circuit as a gallery owner and curator. Laguna is a poet and fiction writer as well. She is a creator within a wide range of activities and this makes her a model whose influence will grow with time.”

Chronicle of a Commissioned Crime – “C” Day: A Crime Has Many Stories

By Francisca Mancini for Arte Magazine, Buenos Aires, December 2008

Date: Saturday, November 29th, 2008
16:00 Hours
Location: Malba
Activity: Project Presentation

Heat, a lot of heat, tropical heat. Heavy and uncertain weather.

–Do you know what this is about?

–No, I’m not sure, I think we’re going to follow the clues of a crime.

–Oh.

(Silence)

The line in front of the auditorium grew as the appointed hour approached. We all wanted to know the same thing: What would happen the rest of the afternoon? What was this all about?

The doors open and we all enter, one by one, filing past the T-shirts and catalogues by Eloisa Cartonera that were exhibited on stands.

The presentation begins: In their disorderly excitement, the organizers attempt to explain what we will be doing for the rest of the day. Four years ago, Eloisa Haudenschild, an Argentine living in the United States, founded an artistic platform known as the haudenschildGarage, from which she commissions and finances artistic projects that take place in different locations around the world. For the first time, the destination was Buenos Aires. The project of A Crime Has Many Stories had as its starting point a text by Ricardo Piglia titled The Madwoman and the Story of the Crime. It was co-curated by Judi Werthein and Sonia Becce, and called together Rosalba Mirabella, Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Washington Cucurto. The artists came up with urban interventions that would guide us on this journey through the city and that would end at a street party in front of Eloisa Cartonera publishers, which had been in charge of the catalogue. They introduce us to the artists responsible for our destiny as they announce a change in plans: one of the locations we were supposed to visit had burned down the day before and they had relocated it elsewhere. The first crime? The prospect was rather unsettling and adrenaline-charged.

A map of Buenos Aires appears on the auditorium screen while they inform us that they are going to hand out survival kits. The sense of calm that the explanations given by organizers Steve Fagin, Eloisa Haudesnchild and Monica Jovanovich-Kelley had given the audience suddenly dissolved. Survival kit? What’s that? Survive what? What do you mean a place burned down?

The image of Ricardo Piglia’s mouth (the neighborhood and his mouth at the same time!) reading his story on the auditorium screen signaled the beginning of the journey.

Torrential downpour. The street was deserted and all the participants stared at the buses that had been placed at our disposal to take us from one point to another, with our noses stuck to the glass doors of the museum that nobody dared cross. While waiting, we all searched the contents of the survival kit with the hope of finding something waterproof. Some discovered in the chipás a good way of calming their anxiety.

The situation at this point was worthy of Un chien andalou–all of us soaked, traveling in school buses through flooded streets without street lights, to arrive at Rosalba Mirabella’s (new) space.

18:00 Hours
Location: Space in Tucumán and Salguero.
Activity: Artist Rosalba Mirabella’s piece.

The rain had taken pity on us, and had decided to stop. Once inside the garage, set up the day before, we found ourselves before the artist’s intervention. Two giant screens simultaneously projected images of the previous location and the original installation. On a table set up like a memorial, were the charred remains of what had once been the artist’s computer. Many of the participants kept on eating chipás, storing nutrients in case of another catastrophe or a crime, an attitude that given the circumstances seemed very logical to me.

19:00 Hours: Following the clues we board the collective speedboats again and head toward the southern coastline.

19:30 Hours
Location: Museo de Calcos
Activity: Piece by artists Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby.

For many it was our first time at the Museo the Calcos Ernesto de la Cárcova. Taking this situation into account, the artists had selected a guide to give us a tour. We then entered a gallery where there were bundles covered with sheets and a projector.

Laguna and Jacoby had decided to make a donation of sculptural works to the new headquarters of the Beauty and Happiness space at Villa Fiorito. The crime of forgery of works of art was redeemed by authorized copies and tracings, and master Duchamp’s seal of approval.

20:30 Hours: Once again aboard the (by now) well-loved buses, we depart for La Boca. Anxious to see Eloisa Cartonera and to hear Washington Cucurto, who would be giving a live reading.

21:00 Hours
Location: Headquarters of the Eloisa Cartonera cooperative, La Boca
Activity: Washington Cucurto’s reading. Party at Eloisa Cartonera.

We got off at the stop, one of the most alluring of the day for many, and we came across another unforeseen event that, among the participants and in honor of the project, we had termed a “crime”. This new “crime”, also caused by the rains, would take us, following a tour and introduction to the activities of the Eloisa Cartonera collective, to the fireman’s ballroom in La Boca: the new location designated for the party, since doing it outdoors, as was originally intended, would have been a real crime of colds and pneumonias.

After waiting a few minutes next to the fire engines, we went up to the first floor where we met with Cucurto’s reading, two live cumbia bands, choripanes, and local neighbors to celebrate the end (?) of the day. As a keepsake, Cucurto’s story The Son.

00:30 Hours
Location: Uncertain.
Activity: Undefined.

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line

The Artwork Killer

By Diego Erlan for Clarin, Buenos Aires, December 2008

The audience prepares for the excursion. Ricardo Piglia’s story already happened: the video-projected reading of The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime that was seen at the Malba auditorium last Saturday that began with a close-up image of the writer’s mouth and ended with the figure of Piglia, in the distance, in an empty and dark auditorium. The presentation of A Crime Has Many Stories is over, the “exquisite cadaver” project that collector Eloisa Haudenschild had been preparing for almost a year along with film director Steve Fagin and the collaboration of Alejandro Ruiz, Judi Werthein and Sonia Becce within the framework of the haudenschildGarage, a platform that seeks “cultural experimentation, play and conversation”. The explanation for the goal of this project has already occurred: “to generate a dynamic event that takes place across literature, art and the city”. Some of the participating artists have already gone up on stage: from Roberto Jacoby and the Tucumán-born artist Rosalba Mirabella, to Washington Cucurto and the troupe of Eloisa Cartonera publishers, that had set up a kiosk with T-shirts and books at the entrance of the space and was in charge of putting together the catalog of the event. The “survival kit” has already been presented, which those assisting will receive to begin a journey that will take them from the museum to a abandoned garage on Tucumán Street, from there to the Museo de Calcos, and finally to La Boca. But when the audience spills out of the auditorium enthused, it encounters the rain, a gray wall that looks like a huge blank television screen. “Deluge in Buenos Aires,” announces the radio. Avello’s luminous work in the museum esplanade is at the red limit due to the thunder and the water that drenches the wood. Suddenly those assisting search the damn survival kit for something that will help them survive the weather. There is a map, some chipás, but no raincoat. Not even a plastic supermarket bag to improvise with. The most adventurous of the lot make a run for the school buses parked in front.

At nightfall the event will conclude with the reading of The Son the story by Cucurto, but before that, the first stop. The abandoned garage on Tucumán Street. Peeling walls, water-logged corners, darkness. There, artist Rosalba Mirabella asks a woman as blonde as she is what she thinks of the piece. “It’s perfect, cousin,” says the blonde woman. “I’m serious, look, I’m getting goose bumps,” says the blonde woman without averting her eyes from the screens that show different images of the apartment where Mirabella worked for a month and twenty five days, an apartment located in San Telmo that now appears to be destroyed. This isn’t the original piece. “I didn’t want to talk about the piece I was working on, the piece I lost, or about what happened,” the Tucumán-born artist told me. But one finds out: a fire destroyed her piece. All of her work. All that is left are the three screens that show the remains of the apartment, a close-up of the artist facing the camera, describing the place, and a third off to the side that shows her staring at the ground. “The only thing left is a wrecked laptop,” she says and points to a corner. A charred Olivetti resting on a wooden box. Nobody says anything, but those returning to the school buses to continue with the excursion know who the guilty party is. Who killed the work of art. Rosalba also knows, but she doesn’t say. That much is clear.

The Itinerary of a Crime

By Justina Cantón / Photographs by Justina Cantón and Jorge Miño

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line, at least on this occasion. The invitation was more than tempting: we were going to be a part of an urban intervention organized by thehaudenschildGarage for the first time in Buenos Aires. It began at the Malba at 16:30 and ended at a party in Boca. And at the foot of the convening email a mysterious and inciting postscript: “With your RSVP we will provide you with a ‘Survival Kit’ for your itinerary made by Eloisa Cartonera.” We headed over there without delay.

Trigger Shot

First things first: A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite cadaver project commissioned and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin of thehaudenschildGarage. It is based on The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime (1975), the short story by Ricardo Piglia that takes place in Buenos Aires, and was cooked up by co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. Piglia’s text generated two site-specific works and a short story commissioned from Argentine writer Washington Cucurto.

In May 2008 the haudenschildGarage traveled to Buenos Aires to meet with its curatorial assessment committee. Argentine curator Sonia Becce and Argentine artist Judi Werthein selected a group of artists for the project working in installation, photography and video. From this group, the haudenschildGarage and Alejandro Ruiz selected the artists Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Rosalba Mirabella.

“The goal of this project is to generate a dynamic event that takes place across literature, art and the city. Our hope, in bringing together artists from the 1960s with young artists working today, and blurring the border between literature and plastic arts, is to ‘interpret’ the continuity and sphere of Argentine culture in all its richness. We believe that the role of Latin America and Argentina in general has been enormously underestimated, and we hope that this event, in a modest way, will support the growing awareness of the quality and specificity of Argentina’s current and historical contributions to world culture. This project is dedicated to the wisdom, the energy and the generous spirit of debate that Olivier Debroise (1952-2008) provided us with as regards Latin American culture. We wish to continue that path with our project,” says thehaudenschildGarage.

The Target

The chronicle of our itinerant Saturday begins at the reception in the Malba auditorium. The clan of Eloisa Cartonera and Cucurto arranges the survival kits they put together to guide us during our voyage. The guests begin perusing some colored books laid out on the tables. One after the other, we arrive and settle into the seats of the museum’s auditorium. A video and the projected image of Ricardo Piglia; a soundtrack and the reading of The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime by the author himself seated before us: “Overweight, spread-out, melancholy, the green fil-a-fil nylon suit…” he began. What was supposed to come out of all this? I was seated and felt myself an accomplice. I thought I was supposed to decipher who had committed a crime. Was I a spectator? Victim? Detective? I was a witness. A movable feast of food and culture was given free reign.

I put my hand inside the kit and find a printed map of the tour. Five minutes had passed since the end of the first action, that of the story. And aboard a school bus we were about to begin tracing the map route on our way to the second stop. Take your place everybody, and suddenly we were preschool buddies again.

Sure enough, there were unforeseen events. The first, a downpour that was neither in the program notes nor at the following destination. Furthermore, a correction had been made to the map. It so happened that Rosalba Mirabella had spent two months preparing a crime in one of the city’s apartments, two months of work with a lot of paper and a lot of stories, and the crime arrived in the guise of fire. Yes gentleman, the apartment burned down just one week before our visit. So then we found ourselves in a garage with two huge telling screens on which Rosalba constantly described what the apartment was like, and on the other one she was there in silence.

Meanwhile, sodas and more chipás. Next are Jacoby, Laguna and Judi. We were at the C.I.A. (Center for Investigations on Art). Outside the rain continues. I don’t know what time it was, as I had surrendered to the experience; I think we all had. And once again we piled into the bus. On this trip friends seemed better acquainted or there was more familiarity. The streets were wet, the windows foggy, and in the chaos of the transit-weather the fire engines showed up. Sirens, traffic lights, and another flourish in the map that takes us to the Museo de Calcos. Calcos: I thought of cartoons–I am such an ignoramus! A place full of sculptures, replicas, the majestic David at the door, the Pietà at our right, all the masters together in one gallery. The sculptures, the feast of cheese and wine, and the unceasing rain.

And suddenly it was time to depart for the last stop in Boca. It was pouring rain, our destination was flooding, and I hear Steve Fagin say: “This is epic, first came the fire, now comes the water…” We were experiencing the legacy, the passage from the seemingly the same to a world of difference, as intended by the duo Laguna-Jacoby. Now it was Eloisa Cartonera’s turn: a magical place full of colors and words, books everywhere, and the water that took us to an additional destination: thanks to the kindness of the neighborhood firemen we moved into their headquarters ballroom. That’s how The Son comes about, a recently commissioned detective story by author Washington Cucurto, written in response to Ricardo Piglia’s story. And this time it was being read by Eloisa Cartonera’s art collective. And there were children running around and people listening. It was the moment of the final touch: free reign to the power of cumbia, beer, wine, empanadas and choripán; and everybody dancing until midnight struck and the school bus took us home. Exquisite!

A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by the haudenschildGarage, based on Ricardo Piglia’s short story La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (1975). The November 29, 2008 multidisciplinary, one-day traverse of the city of Buenos Aires was plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. In response to Piglia’s short story, the project generated two site-specific pieces by Argentine artists Rosalba Mirabella and Roberto Jacoby and Fernanda Laguna, and a commissioned story, El Hijo, by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto. The literary collective Eloisa Cartonera produced a limited edition Survival Kit and a catalog of the entire project.

El Museo del Calco está ubicado en la Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova, a pasos de la reserva ecológica. Allí se albergan cientos de calcos de esculturas de diferentes épocas de la historia. Parte de la mística de este museo es que todas las piezas están distribuidas por los salones sin un criterio cronológico, sin distinción de estilos ni épocas. Como en una suerte de jeroglífico donde se mezclan todas las culturas, uno puede pasear por las salas como si atravesara de una sola vez cientos de años de historia, y si va silencioso nunca sabrá qué vino antes o después en esa madeja anacrónica.

A ese museo donde el tiempo parecía estar congelado ingresó una pieza muy particular: una réplica de una obra emblemática de Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Feuille de vigne Femelle –que puede verse por estos días en la muestra de la Fundación Proa en La Boca– es ahora parte del acervo del museo del calco.

El proyecto fue llevado a cabo por Fernanda Laguna y Roberto Jacoby y es parte de una iniciativa que tiene como contrapunto otra interesante arista. Pero antes hay que saber que esta obra de Duchamp es de por sí un molde (supuestamente es el negativo de una vagina) hecho en yeso y policromado. En el prólogo de El punto de vista anacrónico George Didi-Huberman dice respecto de esta pieza: “En estos objetos no hay nada que mirar porque tampoco hay invención formal, y no hay invención formal, porque son solo muestras, huellas –la no obra por excelencia”. Según leyes aún vigentes, los moldes hechos del natural no pueden tener derechos de autoría, o sea no pueden ser registradas como obra de alguien. Entonces, esta pieza legalmente no puede ser considerada obra. Ahora bien, también sabemos que desde Duchamp es ridículo pensar (por más leyes vigentes y prejuicios que existan) que eso no es una obra de arte. Duchamp mismo hizo más de 50 réplicas de esta pieza (en yeso y en bronce) y todas ellas son consideradas no sólo obras de arte sino también originales. Además, según Duchamp, no existen las copias, toda obra es original.

Entonces al ingresar esta obra al museo del calco, se abren dos opciones. O bien podemos pensar que es la única de las cincuenta y tantas réplicas que no es original y es la primera “copia” de Feuille de vigne Femelle que hay en el mundo (cosa que sería absurda siendo que es una obra de Duchamp). O podemos pensar que a partir de ahora todas las esculturas que conforman el museo del calco pasan a ser obras de arte originales. El David, Nike de Samotracia, los retratos romanos, las tumbas, los relieves precolombinos, etc: todas las réplicas que conforman el acervo del museo del calco, después de Duchamp, pasan a ser obras de arte originales. En ese punto es fascinante el legado que nos dejó este artista que (si queremos) aun hoy en día puede seguir desquiciando las nociones de autoría y originalidad que podamos tener sobre cualquier obra.

El proyecto de Laguna y Jacoby comprende una segunda instancia (o primera, da igual: fueron simultáneas) que también sugiere un corrimiento en cuanto al origen u originalidad de una obra. Como contrapunto de este proyecto el Museo del Calco donó cinco calcos “originales” de obras históricas al Centro Cultural Belleza y Felicidad de Villa Fiorito. Una cabeza de Buda del siglo XII, una cabeza de Palas Atenea en versión romana del siglo III, un fragmento del David de Miguel Angel, una cabeza de Cristo del período románico y una de Afrodita del período clásico griego. Todas estas piezas formarán ahora parte del Centro Cultural.

Entre las cinco piezas donadas hay una que es quizás el protagonista de esta acción: el fragmento de la escultura del David de Miguel Angel. El pie izquierdo, el pie que casi no se apoya del héroe que venció a Goliat hace miles de años, será emplazado en un espacio público a la entrada de Villa Fiorito.

Si hay algo de lo que el arte es capaz es de desarticularse y a su vez desarticularnos. Cualquier obra se hace con el que la piensa y la mira, y allí no se sabe nunca qué pasara. Sin embargo, arriesgo una hipótesis: como todos sabemos quién fue el héroe que nació en Villa Fiorito, no sería raro pensar que ese pie izquierdo llegue a ser un símbolo muy diferente del que pueda tener en cualquier otro lugar del mundo. Ese pie no sólo pasará a ser un punto de encuentro para los que visitan y habitan la Villa, sino también seguramente será una suerte de homenaje a un héroe nacional muy lejano en el tiempo al David y sin embargo muy cercano en sus características.