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Reinaldo Laddaga: - I do not know whether
I will ask only one question or more than one, because there are
a number of things in your talk that call for questions, for curiosity,
even for a debate. As you talked I have been trying to imagine how
does this place in Buenos Aires where we are now, the physical spot,
stand co-mmunity wise. Especially with regards to those you mentioned
at the end, which come from abroad: Bolivian street vendors, Dominican
women who do the streets. We are quite a few here who do not belong
to either group. You also mentioned Trama in relation to urban tri-bes,
the relation between the State as a disciplinarian organization
and/or settlement policies and the self organization of the tribes
that you construed in the motoqueros series, in H.I.J.O.S and for
example, in Trama. This seemed to me a rather complex operation
as I see it, that places Trama in an awkward situation. First of
all it is funded by state funds, not necessarily Argentine, deviated
for an end that is not disciplinarian and neither does it seem to
rally round shared con-sensus as in the case of the motoqueros or
H.I.J.O.S., so that it does not seem to be a tribe in the same sense
as theirs. The term tribe sounds attractive in regards to its self-organization
aspect but it is problematic with regards to exclusion and to the
type of identity that is construed round a tribe. I wonder if Trama
is not an experiment in the building up of a community in a manner
that is not tribal, and that it is not strictly of the state. It
is mystifying that it is on the threshold of the city of Buenos
Aires, together with a few foreigners, and with myself -and I do
not know how I fit in, who am from Rosario but live in the US. It
would seem that Trama is placed on the threshold of a city in a
different manner from those new comers you mentioned.
I wonder if what emerges is a figure of a city that does not answer
strictly to... It does not emerge in places where the city folds
on itself, places that do not acknowledge the city as fountainhead
or places of state and area orga-nization, and whether it implies
a wider vision of the city, in which the limits of the city are
not clear, which complicates the relationship between the city and
its heroes, the city and its artists, the city and its communities.
Christian Ferrer: - On the one hand, not all forms of tribal
association are the same. On the other hand, all State funds are
not State funds; they are also public funds. In the third place,
one of the traditional tasks of tribal groups is to depend on the
State. The fact that they are public funds is neither here nor there.
It is simply what tribal groups have always done, which is to try
to plunder the State when po-ssible. A traditional classic case
is the mafia, for example. In its current form, at least in Argen-tina,
it is part of the State. What I was trying to demonstrate with that
series -and, anyway, I am more interested in the concept than in
the series- is that there is a sort of permanent com-bat in every
society between the tribal order of ways of association, which is
not the same as the old tribes or the functional needs of a state.
Which does not mean to say that they are perfect or pure.
What I am really interested in is in the metamorphosis of these
tribal ways that I believe decisive to Argentine life from here
on and may be elsewhere. That is to say, I suspect that, if a group
like Trama, is a group of peers as so many others in the city of
Buenos Aires, it does not operate according to established institutional
hierarchy, as it is necessary in the State pattern. These groups
of peers are an interesting transformation of the old friendship
relationships. Argentina is so broken up, so destroyed in its classic
organizing patterns: family, labour order, traditional institutions
with which people rela-ted, such as political parties, clubs, that
little by little friendship is no longer the sentimental interrelationship
it was twenty years ago. It is slowly becoming a manner of people
organization, that is obviously influenced by affection, but it
is also influenced by functions, by objectives, work processes,
web interrelations, a net - I do not like words like web or net
to measure this process. It is simply a new pattern of social life
that is replacing, changing and, at the same time, building new
forms of existence in a so-ciety that is completely destroyed. It
is in this sense that the different tribal groups connect with groups
of peers that respect each other on the basis of what they do, it
is in this new patterns of friendship configuration, different to
the interrelation in classic sentimental friendship. I don’t
know if I am answering your question. There are many types of tribal
forms, not one, from the hard hooligans and motoqueros, to the far
more mobile and operational.
Eduardo
Molinari: - I would like to ask you if you could
explain further the definition of monsters, as you speak of monsters
and why the facúndico (Facundo-like qualities) are monstrous.
What is a monster?
Christian Ferrer: - I mentioned Sarmiento to relate one
thing and another with Goya aspects, but I believe he was the first
one to realize that Argentina was a monstrous country, and that
if he could not solve the enigma posed by Facun-do, that monstrosity
would continue to grow. It is quite clear to me, at least this is
the way I understand Sarmiento’s Facundo, not that Sar-miento
thought in terms of barbarism, but that he realized that there is
an interrelation between civilization and barbarism, and that the
more public conscience was appeased thinking that European urban
life had replaced the life of the desert, the more it fooled itself.
That is why Sarmiento had only one passion, a passion for teaching:
to found schooling, to found architectonic spaces such as observatories,
schools, public gardens, zoological gardens to establish ways of
illuminating the funnel of ignorance that existed in the country.
He realized these were vital ideas and not architectonic spaces
or, to say it differently, that if they were not inhabited by life,
they became… how can I put it… bookkeeping specifications
of the annual budget, that could be raised or lowered.
He was the first to grasp this monstrous component of Argentine
society. This component has apparently become more subtle and sophis-ticated
in the XX c. Whoever follows the dates in Argentine history of the
XX c. will find that the country has been a disaster. All kinds
of civil wars, massacres too, fratricides. He was the one to discover
the monstrous component of Argentina that I call facúndico
and not Facundo, which is different. This component is still active,
permanently active. The old colonial despotism, the old absolutism
of the Argentine ruling classes of the past century, continues today
in the fee-ling of impunity felt by our political classes, in the
decisions of the supreme court of justice, in the eagerness for
profit displayed in a hurry and without any restrictions, limits
or barriers for the country. That is the facúndico is still
in force.
I spoke out because Sarmiento was the first to grasp this latent
wildness in Argentina, of a country that thinks of itself as cultivated,
very European and as a country where the things that happen in Bolivia,
in Paraguay, that is, in the neighbouring countries, do not happen.
From another point of view the city of Buenos Aires is seen as a
monster as well in the work of Sarmiento, because of how he sees
the need to take the capital outside Buenos Aires. He proposed a
place called Argirópolis in the Martín García
island, which is not too far away, but… By this I mean that
he was the first to realize that Buenos Aires was the measure of
the failure of the country.
The more Buenos Aires grew, the more the country failed. Slowly
the city became a Wag-nerian opera, a monstrous oeuvre, and at the
same time it was becoming the figurehead of the Republic, beautiful,
but neurotically vital. That means a producer of culture but at
the same time, a kind of marvellous work that destroyed each one
of the inhabitants. Two heads of the same coin. The city is monstrous
because the mould of the city abuses each one of its inha-bitants.
This is why I used the metaphor of the sphinx; she cannot understand
what is happe-ning. The consequences are the different types of
psychological illnesses that go from depre-ssion to permanent complains,
including bed complains, ill at ease with one’s own body, existential
malaise, etc.
Public: - I wanted to ask you two things, I think they are
basically methods in relation to a pro-ject I am developing and
I am interested in a couple of things you said, as the idea of taking
over spaces in the street that have not been ta-ken over by the
State or by corporations. What are your ideas with regards to those
spaces?
Christian Ferrer: (…)- There are no spaces that have
not been colonized. I did not say that. I said that an artist has
to try to establish an area, a free creative space, or freed of
the symbols representing the interest of the large corporations
and of the State. Which is not the same as a geographic area. This
free imagination, these areas of free imaginary meanings are fundamental,
if not one becomes a prisoner of those symbols, even when one turns
them into parody, or even when one plays with them. This is what
seems important to me, to be able to es-tablish a free imagination
area in your head. And to give something back: to return a world
of meaning to the city. There are many ways to do this, but not
because there are non-colonized, virgin spaces in the city. We should
see what there is in ourselves, in our sense of sight, our sense
of hearing that fights against the system of meanings that stem
from sound and from vision. We all have an acoustic imagination.
There are jingles in my ears that I hear again and again, even after
years of not having heard them, they inhabit us. The head of an
Argentine works as a telephone out of order, therefore it never
works well: the jingle, the visual image, the logo, the stereotype…
But what I was su-ggesting is the imagination of the artist as a
proposal. Eduardo Molinari, for example, who presented his project
today, works with the forgotten graphic memory of a specific area
in the city. One walks in the area, and does not see anything, but
he has seen a number of things, that are on sight and that spark
when stimulated, no matter how lightly.
(…)- In what way can we capture the city? We cannot achieve
the old experience of arriving in a city. The only way is by plane,
when we see an enormous stain down there. Because the old experience
of arriving in a city is not possible any more, of climbing somewhere
to look down at the city. Cities are too large; they are metropolis.
The only means to recover the city is through television. Television
gives us a total image of the city, though fragmented. What it is
not very clear to me is whether we can only tolerate looking at
the city on television because we cannot stand the experience of
the city itself, or because it
is the only way, being so large, that we can re-capture it. What
other means do we have to recapture the city? Sometimes in the way
of postcards; and when we realize that all of our senses: taste,
hearing, vision, tact and smell are full of the city, that is to
say, they have captured all the stimuli there are in the city. We
ourselves are the city, our body is the city. This is why I said
that cities are somatic surfaces, they are not outside the body,
there is a continuity between the skin and the city.
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