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| Household
Paperwork |
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| Installation
(jointly with Esteban Alvarez) |
| (2002
- 2005) |
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| Arte
y Compromiso |
| Museo
Extremeño de Arte Contemporáneo - MEIAC , Badajoz, Spain |
| Curators:
Javier Marroquí and David Arlandis |
2005
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| Ansia
y devoción. Imágenes del presente |
| Curator:
Rodrigo Alonso |
| Fundación
Proa, Buenos Aires |
| 2003 |
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Cite
des Ondes
|
| Curator:
Stephen Kovats |
| 5ª
Manifestation Internationale video et art electronique, Montreal,
Canada |
| 2002 |
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| Unterwegs
nach Timbuktu… |
| Curator:
Robert Novak |
| IFA
Gallerie, Berlín and Bonn, Germany |
| 2002 |
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Catalog text by Fabián Lebenglik |
|
| Rules
of the Game |
I
The rhythmic, staccato sound of the word "Timbuktu" has inspired
stories, travel diaries, novels, poems, and now, an exhibition
on nomadism. Any trip will go on to take the form of a story.
One travels to be able to tell the tale. The Scotch explorer
Alexander Gordon Laing was the first European to arrive in
Timbuktu. His stay there was brief, between the 18th of August
and the 24th of September, 1826. But he died two days later,
assassinated. He didn't have time to convert his travel into
narrative. The French traveler René-Auguste Caillié had different
luck. He arrived in Timbuktu on the 20th of April of 1828.
He spent two weeks in the mysterious city, then crossed the
Sahara, passed through Morocco and returned to France. The
three volumes that covered his travels were published soon
afterward.
I like to think of the nomad as a traveler through cultures
and geographies. As symptom of a world in crisis, as a consequence
of economic, political and social cycles. At the core of nomadism
are dispersion and movement, and these are the basic principles
on which the installation by Esteban Alvarez and Tamara Stuby
is based. A nomadic culture modifies a sedentary one, not
so much for the things -he who moves cannot take along too
much baggage- but because of the stories and customs, that
are taken along always, everywhere. Esteban Alvarez and Tamara
Stuby evoke nomadic ideas of travel and dispersion from various
perspectives. The work initially hinges upon the contrast
between concepts of movement and stillness. What travels is
the mind, in a context of waiting, ennui, routine in front
of the television screen. |
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II
Argentina has a long tradition of diaspora. During the 19th
Century, many of those whom history has revered because of
their contributions to the country´s independence, its constitution
or consolidation, were obliged to spend a large part of their
lives in exile, or to die on foreign soil. The partisan conception
of Argentine politics was always accompanied by the expulsion,
annihilation or disappearance of rivals. In the 20th Century,
the addition of a strong wave of European immigration that
had begun during the latter third of the 19th Century and
extended until the middle of the 20th with the second world
war, resulted in a more complex situation. Along with the
phenomena of immigration came a wave of illustrious exiles,
due to numerous and prolonged dictatorships, as well as periods
of economic crisis. In the Argentina of 2002, her society's
imagination is fixed on exile as a response to the extreme
political crisis and complete economic debacle. From this
perspective, combined with the fictional idea of the trip
as movement and its relation to a curatorial proposal, the
installation by Alvarez/Stuby can be seen as a critical vision
of this past and present. Additional levels of complexity
arise from this mix of hyper-reality and hyper-dream.
On the table can be found an airline ticket, an overseas work
permit, a travel clock and a Rubik's cube.
Seen up close, each reveals some peculiarity.
The airline ticket is drawn by hand: it is a hand-crafted
imitation. The overseas work permit is emitted and signed
by the artist's mother. The Rubik's cube, instead of being
comprised of different colors on each side, is all white,
converting it into a challenge that is either infinitely difficult
or ridiculously simple.
The clock doesn't seem strange at all. Nonetheless, it isn't
the only one in the installation. There is another, on the
wall. And between them there are several hours of difference:
in the same way that there is play within the same physical
space -like in airports, like on international news broadcasts-
between the hour on two continents. On the headrest of each
armchair, a cloth protector embroidered with the name of the
artist explicitly makes reference to airline seats. |
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III
A trip in an airplane is a voyage in time, that violates time
zones and generates maladjustments and paradoxes, like adding
or taking away hours of our lives in a single day. The temporal
dimension of the idea of travel comes from these airline references.
But the spatial, geographic and territorial dimensions are
also evoked, by the drawings that hang on the walls, by way
of decoration. They are house plans and projections drawn
over the grid of coordinates from a world map. In this way,
the projected lines relate to a point of disappearance on
the horizon and to paths of escape, that wind up literally
transforming the dream home into a world. A nomadic concept
-dispersion and movement in space- intersects with the idea
of the cosmopolitan- all cities being one city; all citizens
in one, all spaces in one-. |
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IV
Within the installation's atmosphere lies an enigma, like
in mystery tales: the presence of the Rubik's cube.
In principle, this cube, had it been found on a medieval geographer's
table, could have been inferred to be a projection of the
world, a variant of that flat earth that existed in the pre-Renaissance
imagination. To unite this cube with the other elements related
to travel generates the same effect as a piece of erroneous
data, a cog left over, a false lead. Or, like the effect of
reading that allows for the tension between seeing either
the image of two profiles or one vase, it may speak of an
enigma. In the construction of a fiction -above all of a fiction
reduced to a minimal repertoire, as in this case- every element
must be taken as a clue. In this sense, the strangest element
is, without a doubt, the Rubik's cube. On the television that
forms part of the installation, we see how the artist's hands
(Alvarez and Stuby) manipulate the cube, with the purported
intent of discovering its solution. The combination of rotating
movements that govern the logic of the Rubik's cube wind up
to be invalid in the Alvarez-Stuby version, because all the
faces are chromatically uniform. But it is obvious that here,
it's not about an enigma, but a loop of logic, a problem with
no solution, an exitless maze, a game with no rules. |
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* Editor
and art critic (Argentina, 1961). Visual arts editor for Pagina/12
(major daily newspaper in Buenos Aires). Executive Director
of Adriana Hidalgo publishers. Member of the Board of Directors
of the Antorchas Foundation.
Translation: T. Stuby |
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