Maps to get lost is a unique and fascinating project. A plastic artist, Horacio Sánchez Fantino, and a writer, Reynaldo Sietecase, gather their views to retell Buenos Aires through a story of love and failed encounters. The idea is to show the city with the tools of art.
They will walk through the geography of the city with, as Rimbaud said, "the crazy eye of the foreigner". With the freedom and strangeness of lovers in their first meetings. Sánchez Fantino and Sietecase, more than ten years ago, have decided on Buenos Aires as their vital destination and launching platform for their professional projects.
The artistic strategy chosen by the authors includes the making of around twenty works (the Maps) which will be accompanied by narrations, chronicles and poems, acting together as an urban Log Book.
The Maps will be rendered in canvas, wood, collages, papers and cardboard. The city of Buenos Aires will be narrated, and at the same time, will function as the scenario of a quest.
The artists will translate the chosen places of the city (avenues, streets, neighborhoods, fairs, bars, squares, cemeteries) from every possible angle. Even from above. There will be underground views and also maps of the sky.
The works and the stories will be part of an exhibition –scheduled for April 2010, at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires- and will include different multimedia items. Along with the exhibition, an art book will be published –reproducing the paintings, the literary texts and accurate references to the real places there mentioned (with addresses and photos). In its proposed design the book will have hard covers, 26 per 26 centimeters in size (10,23” x 10,23”), full color pictures and approximately 150 pages.
The Work in Progress of Maps to get lost can be followed through the Internet. At the Web site http://mapasparaperderse.blogspot.com/ you will find the genesis of this work. In this site, the artists will be releasing the drafts of drawings and texts, pictures and researches, videos, music and any other item related to the project.
Maps to get lost tells the story of a quest.
A lost man in search of a lost woman. Both of them, prisoners of lust, walk the city as tireless ghosts.
The urban scenario is the involuntary main character in these desperate walks. Public spaces are transformed in a whimsical manner. Nothing is what seems.
Buenos Aires is not the biggest city in the world, but is indeed one of the most mysterious. Everything may happen.
The streets lay out their traps. There are futile shortcuts. Too many one way tickets to nowhere.
When the lovers are closer is when they get most apart.
As an inventful cartographer, this born-in-Buenos-Aires Ulises will draw impossible maps with the aim of finding the love he has lost.
With the faith of the desperate he will follow these disturbing routes. He will pass through milongas - tango balls- squares, harbors, neighborhoods. He will sleep in cheap hotels, in shanty towns, in fairs.
Many times they’ll try to halt him. He will fall in the temptation of giving up. He will stop, but only to keep walking.
Our hero will have to come up with a plan to go back to the place he has never been: the heart of the woman he lost.
In search of his dream he will descend to the very underground of the city.
To arrive to his destination he will invent signs, he will draw in the sky, he will gather the foot prints of his wandering.
And when he is about to reach his goal, he will be lost again.
As in a tango by Piazzolla, as in a tale by Cortázar, there will be in this story a destiny of failed encounters. Loves and enemies will emerge. Passion and betrayal. The deep marks of the city will be exposed. Sometimes Buenos Aires will be easy, some others unapproachable.
And when he can no longer stand, “when every bell you rang has run out batteries …” ….far from giving up, the illusion hunter will imagine a new way through.
He will draw another map to get lost.
Maps of the cafés – Essential cartography, allows us to quickly get to our bars and cafés which -though possibly distant in time or space- we always feel close to us.
Mixed media on canvass – 160 x 200 cm
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Ojalá ta (1)
Is there in the slum an open door to heaven? Ojalá. Going through it will be the end of all misfortunes? Ojalá. The slum is Latinoamérica. It smells of urine, limitless sun, open skies, children running, violence, little joy and more. Football, drug dealers, teachers, hookers, scrawny dogs, laborers, sweet women, dumbos fried from crack, priests like Mugica (2), nasty policemen. I went to the heart of the settlement for you . Arrived at a narco's following your waist. Through mazy corridors, in the deep night I pursued your fears and vices. “A beautiful sad woman never goes unnoticed”, old ladies told me. “She's not here”, “she never came”, some bums explained. No one knew about your brief trips. You went for a day, I remained. You only get out of a maze flying upward. You only get out of the slum by chance. Or in a bag. Dead you get out. Ojalá, hojalata, ojo la lata (3). Words that say nothing when said. Ojalá God sometime gazes at this ill-stricken place of oblivion. Gazes at it and comes down to turn water into wine, sadness into party, poverty into justice. Amen.
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(1) Ojalá ta: pun. Ojalá: word of arabic origin; it literally means “Allah willing”. Ojalá is a colloquial expression of hope in Spanish. It translates as I hope, Hope so, Wish so. Hojalata means tin. In slums, houses are mainly made of tin. (2) Mugica was an Argentinian third world priest killed during the last dictatorship. (3) Ojo la lata: pun. It literally means "mind the tin". Ojo (n, eye) Arg. colloquialism: watch out, be careful, mind.
Map of shanty towns –Bases on the aerial vision of Villa 31, we dive into its labyrinthian streets, stopping at those places that interest us.
Metal and acrylic on wood - 150 x 300 cm.
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Neighborhood carrousels.
Ships traveling on their axis. Same as the dreadful world bearing them. Spinning. Neighborhood carrousels. Keys to joy. Spinning. Races won in wooden horses. Flyovers in airplanes never leaving the ground. Spinning. Trips to nowhere that are worth a childhood.
Map of carrousels – Invites to a labyrinthian route through carrousels and roundabouts of Buenos Aires.
Digital work intervened on canvass – 160 x 200 cm.
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The creation of maps.
Fifteen thousand years ago, as on every ordinary day, the males went out hunting. Fifteen thousand years ago, lofty in their rudeness. With their clubs and hairs. Clumsy but determined, whatever it may come, they went for food. All but one. Someone, that day, decided to remain in the cave. Someone decided on solitude, on the hazard of quietness. He had already prepared his blends and small tools of bone and bristles. That day, someone stayed to paint. From that trembling hand, the first drawing was born. From his hallucinated heart, the colors. From his few certainties, the first maps. When all went out hunting. He remained in the cave. Why did he do so?
Maps of the neighborhoods – Using the graphism of a petroglyph (Bedolina) as a model, on each board was engraved a map of one of the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, with only those paths essential to our quest.
Mixed media on wood – 16 pieces - 50x 50 cm. each – in metallic colors – Aggregate dimension: 220 x 220 cm.
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Getaways
Este último tiempo estuvimos muy ocupados, sin tiempo para escribir
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