Full dress rehearsal for a libertarian museum

Ensayo de un museo libertario is the title given by Magdalena Jitrik to her instaliation at the F.L.A. -Federación Libertaria Argentina-, the local enclave of the anarchist political movement in Argentina.
Jitrik first went to FLA in 1996 locking for titles for her paintings, geometrical compositions with surrealist undertones. Politically conscious, it bothered her that politics had become a non subject in the local art world and that the general political mood was imbued in neoliberalism promoting selfish values. She started going regularly to the old house that serves the purpose of club, discussion forum, library, a place to research union and social developments in Argentina and abroad and bookstore, and collaborated with the library, helping to file journals, books and other publications.
When she was granted a TRAMA award to develop a project that would be analysed and discussed by local and foreign master artists, she remembered the material she had seen at F.L.A. and set up a temporary museum of the anarchist and union movements. It is temporary, and to a point, arbitrary, because though the material and information she used are legitimate, her choices were aesthetic, rather than historically rigorous. The result, nevertheless, illustrates the atmosphere of the house and the spirit of the movements well.
Jitrik was fiee to chose furniture, photographs, publications and every item she thought she needed to set up her installation. She worked on the light, and added objects in stone and paintings by her that blend quite naturally with the historical material.
Her pieces in stone and ber drawings on the type written pages were shown in L'espace del Art Concret in MouansSartoux, France, last year, in an extensive exhibition called the Fille indigues de l'art concret. Here objects and drawings have acquired new life and new meaning. She has manipulated old weathered pages on which she has typed political texts in the old machines so as to undulate some of the lines of the text designing patterns on which she has painted with a brush thick and thin black strokes. The painting on the papers stuck on the wall read as calligraphic symbols or musical elements that generate rhythmic energy.
The house in itself and the commitment of the members of the F.L.A. are worth the visit. As is the installation by the artist and her reinterpretation of political and social data. AT
Federación Libertaria Argentina, Brasil 1551—Monday to-Friday, 6 to 10 pm.Alina Tortosa

Alina Tortosa es escritora, crítica de arte y curadora independiente. Crítica de arte del Buenos Aires Herald.
Libros publicados de poesía: Las piedras bajo el agua, Centro y Periferia, y Ritual doméstico. Libros publicados de cuentos: Cuentos burgueses, El jardín de la abuelita Ana y otros cuentos y La entrevista inédita y otros cuentos. Escribe sobre arte contemporáneo en catálogos y en publicaciones periódicas. Las principales curadurías realizadas son: Curadora del British Arts Centre de la Asociación Argentina de Cultura Inglesa en el 2000. Xul Solar / Jorge Luis Borges: Lengua e Imagen en el Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, en Río de Janeiro y en el Memorial de América Latina, en San Pablo, Brasil, en 1997-1998, el grupo TAUPE: 6 grabadores xylógrafos del NE de Brasil en el Centro Cultural Recoleta de Buenos Aires en 1997, el envio argentino de la MOSTRA AMERICA, Curitiba, Brasil en 1995, y junto con Silvia de Ambrosini: Los 80 en el MAM, en el Museo de Arte Moderno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, en abril de 1991.