As I believe I’ve previously mentioned, Buenos Aires Tour was a project that invited three artists to provide content for a book on Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods, on its life. The final product looked like a tourist guide, but it was not. Negroni, who i think was quite overwhelmed after witnessing the performance piece that CAGE UNDER COVER had been turned into, told me that Jorge Macchi, a photographer, had proposed the idea.
Macchi invited a musician and Negroni to join him following the cracks of a piece of glass over a map of Buenos Aires. The lines were treated like a fictional subway line, and forty-six “stations” where invented. They took photos, collected found objects, and recorded sounds, including the political protests of recent street demonstrations, and linked them.
According to Negroni, however, Macchi didn’t want the three of them going out together. Each one of them was supposed to go to the selected places by themselves, whenever they wanted, and write, compose or photograph whatever they wanted. The subsequent museum installation offered the visitors eight itineraries. Text that wasn’t specifically related to the pictures–except for the fact that it was inspired by the same neighborhood–complemented them. People could activate the accompanying sounds only if they chose to, but, as everything else, those sounds didn’t attempt to represent the same information offered by images or words.
Why not related? I asked, but Negroni didn’t think about it twice. It was all about chance, she said. Things happen anew all the time. Besides, I understood, neither the photos nor the captions wanted to become a documentary, the kind that when including some things also exhiles other. The project didn’t aspire to cut a definitive pattern to define the city.
So, Negroni went to the previoulsy agreed-upon sites and walked them, not exhaustively. She later worked on prose poems that were linked to various street corners of the city (not necesarilly all the ones she visited).
For me, it was surprising to find out that, after all, it was not a free-for-all. Because common themes emerged. They found similar images repeating themselves across the diferent points they visited. That was the emphasis of their finished piece. The common points served as entry places that gave the audience the chance to create their own itinerary, to go further than the eight already proposed ones.
Very interesting background here, especially on your realization on the way that “common themes emerged.” Might happen in your project too.
I find their approach so refreshing and illuminating. It’s so unscripted and non-linear, leaving much room for creative surprises. As new art forms are constantly being generated, why not cross boundaries in documentary work?
I recall an interesting book of photos and text that tries to rearrange the more conventional meshing of text and images. It’s a collaboration between writer and photographer in the shape of a lyrical novel about the experience of Irish emigration.It’s called “I Could Read the Sky” with photos by Steve Pyke and text by Timothy O’Grady.
I only wish I had seen the performance at NYU.
Hey, I’m trying to make some extra cash and just started looking on the internet for online businesses, and I was wondering if anyone was doing a startup as well as what they were doing.