The possible gesture is a political gesture. A gesture towards the polis.
A warning gesture.

I walked the streets of the neighborhood with pieces of political discourse prin-ted on my T-shirt. Opinions and promises from other times. In front of me, people in their daily routine. Every once in a while I stopped and talked with them about those places. I was inte-rested in that information. In exchange I showed them the texts. If they wanted them, they had to read. Maybe these words evoked, fleetingly, pieces of memory that were the source of the questions. Or not. But I didn't provide explanations. What you got was what you saw: two quotations, front and back, of opposing political pre-ference. And I in the middle, a link between texts, places and people, between past and present, written and oral. All focused by the camera lens.

Under the top T-shirt I had others, which I re-moved as I progressed in my journey. New po-liticians and other words appeared. Or the same ones. An interrupted "strip-tease" which, igno-ring the rules of masculine glance, withheld the last garment. A failed attempt to discover the layers of superposed discourse: when it's a question of history, there's no beginning. It was my intention to give them away to whom-ever wanted them. It happened once.
A battlefield laid to waste. Places for legitimization par excellance now stage competitions and deals. It is still called public space, and it begins at the façade of the houses, where relations have been negotiated centuries ago, with some variations, and there is nothing of interest to distribute. This ancient pact, of gender, is re-peated on a greater scale in the public sphere, where there is something in dispute: power. Walking along the sidewalks was also walking along a border: between private property and the supposedly "common space", which, not being claimed, turns into nobody's space, avai-lable, appropriable. It then becomes used by politicians. Citizens granted them exclusivity for its exploitation. And everything that happens here is connected to what happens inside.

"The Gesture" as an exercise of and in the public sphere is still possible, feasible. "Tempo-rary" marks its impermanent condition: it can stop being so. That is why it is also a warning.

Sonia Abián

Sonia Abián. Born in Posadas, Misiones, in 1966. Degree in Drawing and Painting at the Instituto Superior del Profesorado Antonio R. de Montoya. Completed her education with the workshops for analysis of work organised by Fundaciones Antorchas and by Fundación para la Amistad Americana in the Nea. At the moment attends the course of Social Communication at the University. Had solo and group shows at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Goethe Institut and Galería Ruth Benzacar (Buenos Aires), Museo Lucas Braulio Areco (Posadas, Misiones), Centro Cultural Nordeste (Resistencia, Chaco), Museo Ramón Vidal (Corrientes), Centro Cultural Casa Viola (Asunción, Paraguay), amongst others. Was selected for the Project 1 Pause, at Gwangju Biennial, Korea 2002. www.gwangju-biennale.org and for a publication linked to the former. She is a teacher and writes in local papers. In 2002 got the Regional Grant for Stimulus from Fundación Antorchas. E-mail: sonia_abian@yahoo.com.ar

Others participants. Research workshop on artistic practice and its social projection