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Urban graphics in Latin American cities
is one of the main lines of my "Pop Latino" works.
The typography used on cheap signs:
"Everything 2 Pesos," "Everything 1 Peso."
"1 Peso Hamburger."
"We Change Dollars and Euros."
I'm greatly inspired by this low-end typography.
Actually, for my latest show, I hired typographers,
poster-makers in Lima, to create my poster.
The term Pop Latino...
I don't know if I invented it
or if it was the idea of journalists or art critics
to define the type of photos I started taking in the '90s.
I'd gotten tired of black-and-white photography
so I started working in colour,
using bright colours,
influenced by advertising,
like a sort of Warhol of underdevelopment.
The Inca Kola bottle was the first piece I did
characteristic of Pop Latino.
It was the equivalent of the Campbell's soup can
of underdevelopment.
What interested me were the colours...
and what could be called the "texture of underdevelopment."
The "plastic tablecloth",
as the Argentinean filmmaker Leonardo Favio called it,
when you eat in one of those truck-stops
and your forearms get stuck to the plastic tablecloth.
This texture, this colour, is a sort of poetry
that I'd like to develop.
This stuff isn't well made.
Why bother if there's no market for it,
it won't be preserved,
and no one really cares about it?
From Rio Grande southwards,
people do what they want.
There are no more borders.
In Argentina, you find the same sort of graphics
as in a market in Sonora, Mexico.
In the discos in the Peruvian jungle, in Iquitos,
all the patrons wear FC Barcelona shirts.
The real Barcelona team shirt
is the counterfeit one,
the one worn in Latin America, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia.
It's the one that costs ¤5.
The typography of FC Barcelona
can be seen in the bars of Constitución,
my neighbourhood in Buenos Aires,
in the markets of Paraguay,
in the Ver-o-peso market hall in Belém.
The plastic goods in Latin-American markets,
the colours of plastic sold in Latin-American markets
is the texture...
which defines my work.
After 4 days in Paris, I get bored.
I can't wait to go home.
Recently, I said to...
I think it was Marcos López...
"To me, taking photos is almost like breathing."
My photographs from the '80s
were mostly black-and-white,
almost all of them.
But I liked working in colour.
I had two Nikons,
one loaded with black-and-white,
the other with colour film that I used less often.
I saved the colour film for really special things.
I really loved colour.
Perhaps because it was a rarity for me
and colour film was expensive.
The Siesta Argentina series
came to me, as an idea,
as a concept, in 2002.
It was... Yes, in 2002,
right after the terrible economic crisis
of December 2001.
Actually, we were still in the economic crisis.
People were desperate.
Times were hard.
My personal "antidote" was to go out and take photos
of what I saw every day in various neighbourhoods:
shops going out of business.
The little neighbourhood shops
with 8m66 storefronts,
composed of a shop window, a door, and another shop window.
They were all similar, all symmetrical, but all different,
and all had their shutters down.
The lowered shutters meant they'd closed.
The closing of a bakery,
a clothing boutique,
of all these little shops,
like the closure of the middle class.
So that is what I did:
I photographed what I could.
I tried to find such places
and to record them.
I had no idea where it would lead,
but I did it quite obsessively.
I continued until mid-2003.
That's when I decided to present them
in a gallery, and especially, in a book.
I wanted them to be a book.
I particularly like
when there appears a sort of dynamic,
or geometry of the image,
when you first perceive the photo as a shape
before seeing its content.
"Siesta" because many thought it'd soon be over.
The economy would improve and it'd be over.
Thus, the title Siesta Argentina refers to
the afternoon nap, a short interlude.
It's not an eternal dream, nor death.
The crisis was terrible, but we'd get through it.
It was a metaphor of that crisis.
I was the union representative in a telephone company.
I'd worked as a phone technician for many years.
Our union was very small.
We made our posters ourselves.
We designed them and posted them.
For these posters, what mattered most
was to define a typographical identity.
Our printing methods weren't very modern,
they were traditional, like in the 19th century.
We created a typographical poster
for the exhibition at the Centro de Arte y Communicación
entitled Violencia.
We printed it 70x100cm, the largest size we could make,
"Violence" was written in huge letters on the installation.
My artistic work was varied: I did video, performance,
and most of all, posters.
The graphic arts always fascinated me.
The history of the revolution...
almost disappeared forever.
In 1976, our dream died.
Rather, part of our dream: revolution was no longer possible.
I still think the revolution should have happened.
I used graphic art to express the dream that I had,
the dream of revolution.
Whenever I can, I create a work connected to this idea of revolution,
whenever I have an opportunity to show work.
This is my class photo
taken when I was 13.
This was the first photograph taken of my middle school classmates.
That's me.
It was during music class,
at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.
We were all students there in 1967.
I was 13. It was the first year, during 6th period,
the first afternoon class.
It's a photo I had in my albums,
my personal photo albums.
When I returned to Argentina after many years in exile,
14 years,
I wanted to get in touch with my old classmates.
We met, we talked about our lives
and what had happened to the others.
There were two, my friend Martin,
and Claudio, who are circled in red,
faces barred...
who'd been "disappeared" under the military dictatorship.
So I took out this photo
I'd saved and enlarged it to have the portrait of my classmates.
On the 20th anniversary of the coup, in 1996,
we went to the high school to talk about the "disappeared."
I took out this photo and added these notes
in which we tell about our lives.
"Eric is an actor. He lives in Madrid."
"I'm a photographer, and I miss Martín."
"Martín was the first to disappear. He never knew his son,
Pablo, who is 30. He was my best friend."
"She married a boy from the school and their children go here too."
It's this little personal history
that we told to the current students of the school,
the ones there today,
or who studied there a few years ago because we've gone several times.
It was a way for us to speak in a rather personal manner
as alumni,
to this new generation about what happened in our time.
There are two holes, two holes in the group.
Those two holes have marked us all for life.
My brother Fernando,
in a certain way, was at the origin of the project Buena memoria
for in order to speak of these "disappeared,"
I had to talk about the one in my family.
My brother was "disappeared" in August 1979,
many years ago.
Recently, at a trial, my mother bore witness
and it lightened her burden.
His "disappearance" has always been very painful.
In 1973,
when I created Perón vence
the "P" and the "V" were the most famous symbols
of the city of La Plata.
There wasn't a wall, nor a building...
Even on the edge of the sidewalks,
you could see the "P" and the "V"
which had various meanings.
For some it was "Perón Vuelve" or "Perón will return",
for the general was in exile at that time.
For others, it meant: "Viva Perón".
To me, it was "Perón Vence" ("Perón will conquer").
It was obvious...
that he would win,
that he'd have the courage to do it like many people said at that time.
Transformaciones de masas en vivo
is a group of 8 photos
which includes Perón Vence.
The project was conceived
at the beginning as an aesthetic work.
I never considered it political.
Its aim was purely aesthetic: Using the body as an artistic medium
and forming various shapes.
The story of Transformaciones de masas en vivo,
of this series of photos,
is very particular.
When I look at it today,
I can't help but feel sad,
guilty, even.
But...
It began as a collective work.
When we started, it was a game.
The young people had fun, they laughed.
It became a work of art in the form of photos.
First they were shown at the CAyC,
then they were exhibited around the world.
At the same time, the reality
of the young people who participated,
art history students at the national college,
these 18-year-olds,
took another path.
Me, I had my work of art,
shown around the world.
They, or at least, most of them,
had turned to activism.
They joined the Peronist Youth movement.
Consequently, while I...
profited from my work of art, they'd become militants.
At the cycle's end, the work had been forgotten,
and they'd disappeared.
Some of them, according to the director of the national college,
were murdered, or rather, "disappeared".
I see this as a cycle:
It started as a work of art, then became a game.
After that, it really became a work of art.
And the participants... the "material" of this artwork,
were, in part, exterminated.
And finally, the work entered the art market.
In the end, there are people
who buy what cost the lives of so many.
I believe that to describe the art scene of Rosario
without thinking of Buenos Aires is absolutely impossible.
What we produce here is legitimised in Buenos Aires.
Bocanada is a difficult word to translate.
It's when there's nothing in your mouth
but it's also a puff of air.
It's a gesture
so that afterwards something can happen.
We feel something, or we scream,
or we eat, but we do something.
That open mouth is a call, it's a demand
which can't be ignored.
That's how Bocanada started, with an everyday gesture.
I had a spoon and I saw my mouth reflected in it.
And I thought: "Who's eating who?"
Does the mouth eat me?
Or the opposite?
Which is the worst?
Which is the strongest?
It's the constant power struggle of daily life.
The first version of Bocanada
consisted of a series of photos
of people with their mouths wide open.
I printed them. At the time, I used the process
of heliography.
For example, with heliography,
the image develops
when put in contact with ammonia fumes.
I'd made myself this little device,
an object that gave off
little "bocanadas," puffs of ammonia,
and the image appeared like smoke.
You really felt like you were making it appear...
that I made the image of the object appear.
And I like that. I like to make a piece that way.
To speak of Tucumán arde, for me,
is to speak of a group and a process.
You can't take Tucumán arde
on its own, as if it were an action
that came out of nowhere. It is inseparable
from a group, from a context,
and from a specific moment in history,
which is the late '60s, and 1968.
And most of all, it concerns
Argentina, with what happened
due to the military government
which caused
ceaseless contestation
by the entire population
faced with a system
of censorship and repression.
Tucumán arde was conceived
as an action with 4 phases.
First, an investigative phase,
to inform ourselves
about the situation in Tucumán,
especially the situation in the sugar factories
and sugar plantations,
the monoculture of the Tucumán province.
The region had become an industrial pole,
one of the most important in the country
and it employed lots of workers.
Consequently, it had a major effect, on the social level,
when the government decided to close these factories.
From the start,
the idea was to create a work or an action to denounce
in the media what was happening in Tucumán.
The media reported sugar factories being closed
but never spoke of the consequences
of these closures on the social level.
So the plan was to denounce this,
but to denounce it here,
not in Tucumán, but here where we lived,
in order to make it known.
This incited us
to produce work which expressed the situation of these people.
Then there was an advertising campaign.
After that, the exhibition.
And then the voyage to Tucumán
to document the situation there.
I consider working with the Tucumán arde collective
as one of the most important moments
for me, in terms of my education.
I'd say that
my artistic and political training
came from that group.
I also made my best friends there
and it's where I met my husband.
I didn't want to get rid of these documents
and this material
which, at the time, had no value
except for its sentimental value.
I think people began to take interest
when some historians or researchers
like Ana Longoni or Guillermo Fantoni...
Ana is from Buenos Aires and Guillermo is from Rosario.
They started to investigate these events.
All the other members of the group
had destroyed the material in their possession:
Photos, documents, manifestos, and so on.
Apparently,
this is the sole remaining archive
of all those actions or those productions.
I believe this is why it's so important.
These are the only documents that bear testimony
of all those actions.
When I...
left, or rather, when we left Germany,
I was 1 year old.
It's not part of my experience.
They told me about it, but I don't remember it.
I opened my eyes, nose, and ears
in Uruguay.
I have no contact with Germany.
It was in Uruguay that I learned to think.
My childhood memories, the smells,
the street names,
everything that defines a personality,
all came from Uruguay.
I left when I was about 20.
I had a Guggenheim scholarship
and I went to study in the United States.
I had no intention of leaving,
I simply wanted to study and learn.
In Uruguay, I was a student militant at art school.
The general attitude there was anti-Imperialist
and anti-American.
What was interesting
was to observe the situation from inside "the boot"
instead of underneath it. That's the metaphor
I had in mind.
In this context of economic crisis, oppression and repression,
photography, before the arrival of Photoshop,
photography's credibility carried a lot of weight.
Credibility was the bridge
where we experimented or created situations
in which we revealed something true,
but in a skewed way, in order open viewers' minds.
This process combining
of reality, credibility, and documentation,
even if they were hypothetical documents,
was very useful in the process of raising awareness.
This was very particular in Latin America
where this process was separated
from photography and notably, socially engaged photography,
in the hegemonic centres.
Socially engaged photography in hegemonic centres
aims at documenting reality.
"This is poverty, this is misery,
"this is hunger. Here is its documentation."
With conceptual strategies,
sometimes it's nothing more than superimposing a phrase
upon a reality.
Neither of them is true, but mixing them
creates a documentary evocation
which is new, which didn't exist.
And that...
is much more characteristic
of the culture of that decade
than the image of a peasant hauling water.
It was another option of identity
that was badly misunderstood
at the same period.
The Christmas Series
came out at the same time as the publication of the photo
of Che's corpse,
as the deaths of Marighella, and Camilo Torres,
and the myth Nixon was trying to promote.
What really interested me
was to see what would happen if I also privileged content,
meaning to present certain information
as content
and do it in such way
that it'd suffice for the whole without my intervention.
The reference to Christmas in the title
is ironic. I wanted to express
a sort of terrifying martyrdom
and oppression
in a festive context,
but a holiday that is also a symbol of colonisation.
It was like a culture shock
between a foreign element
and the demand to respect that element.
Christmas symbolises all this.
Anyway, as a Jew, I never got presents,
which made it even worse.
All this cultural significance
is in the title of the series.
It's something personal. It's just my own opinion,
but that doesn't matter.
Regularly, I...
I've nothing else to say.
I was never interested in being a professional artist,
being obliged to make art every single day.
I only make art if I want to,
and that suits me.
In addition... How to say it?
I don't like making art.
For me, it's not a pleasure,
it's a necessity. I have no other choice.
But if I don't feel this need,
this imperious need to create,
I prefer not to.
I don't like the art system.
I have a big problem with art as a...
cultural industry.
It's a wide-ranging debate.
But this "cultural industry,"
I don't want to be part of it.
So...
I make art when...
I'm like a drug addict who gets clean
and then relapses.
That's how I work.
Regularly, I get clean.
I stay off art.
The Escena de Avanzada was already over.
It was named that
by Nelly Richard to describe what had happened
years before.
I worked in association with Carlos Leppe and Nelly Richard
for 4 or 5 years.
We became friends. We worked and lived together.
Around 1975 or 1976,
the atmosphere changed. We saw things
in a new manner.
A sort of avant-garde appeared.
It was us.
We wanted to attack the dictatorship
using its usual means of action and communication.
Between 1976 and 1980,
when I created these landscapes,
was a very intense period.
The years flew by.
I believe a large part of the artist that I am,
that I was,
or that I had been, was defined during those 3 years.
Its title wasn't always
Ocho paisajes. I don't remember the original title.
I learned so much
during these discussions on art, on language.
It allowed me to refine
my references and my "tools,"
my linguistic tools.
I began integrating things: Photos with painting,
and even other materials,
like tar,
which I put on the photos.
I layered photos.
Then there was text, which I'd never used before.
The idea of text was...
to treat it like an image.
When I speak of "still life,"
it's the concept of the still life
as compared to photography
and the resulting tension is what interests me.
Working with this tension between elements
which aren't only linked, they are in conflict with one another.
One interpretation could be: it's the tension in the air.
That's what life was like in Chile. Tense.
The origin of these paintings is completely accidental.
I was doing tests with paper.
I'd put paint on one part, then fold the paper
so the paint pressed on another part.
But I'd thrown them away.
It didn't interest me,
until I was visited
by two directors of the Museum of Modern Art in Cali
who wanted to organize a show.
They asked me about my work
and suddenly, I had a brainwave:
I could fold these sheets of paper
and mail them.
I'd already made postal art.
They thought it was a great idea.
They asked me to mail them 17 works.
So I finished the paintings and went to the post office, in 1983,
or 1984, I don't remember.
The envelopes were very simple. I wrote a few things on them
and mailed them.
When I went to hang the works,
as soon as I got off the plane, I ran to the museum.
I asked to see the 17 paintings.
I was afraid they'd been ruined.
But the 17 Airmail Paintings were intact,
spread out on a table.
And at that precise moment,
what happened is that...
I realized I could exhibit anywhere in the world
for free,
that my work... It was a real split
from all my previous work,
and it was an accident.
I'd never thought about the problem.
That's how it happened.
It was like a revelation.
I'd never dreamed of doing such a thing.
If I hadn't done it, I'd probably be in the hospital.
The project for the show
indicated that...
the works should be "historical".
So I wondered,
"What does that have to do with me?"
What was the relationship between me,
my airmail paintings,
and the fact that they ask me
for works I created in 1979,
not Airmail Paintings,
but ones composed of text and images
and which were historical?
So...
returning to what I said earlier,
what is an historical work?
An historical work
is one that was dated when it was made.
Thus, it becomes "historical."
Conversely, a work without a set date of completion
is not historical.
It wanders like a lost soul.
What do lost souls do?
Where do they begin? Where do they end?
They move from place to place. You know why?
For a reason that is essential to Airmail Paintings:
this painting has no home.
Metaphorically, it wanders
constantly searching for a home.
When it finds one,
it's only temporary.
It must leave it to seek another one.
This movement
is the time, or the path, of the Airmail Paintings.
You could call it
"the unsuccessful quest
for a home."
Which means, the character...
The best comparison
it that of lost souls.
The newspapers are works
created as an experiment
that started in 1966, unless I'm mistaken.
First, they were works
executed with a certain freedom of expression
and movement.
They were done in pencil
directly on a sheet of newspaper.
The idea was to transform
this printed reality
into something more creative,
something more poetic,
something which allowed immediate communication
like a newspaper.
I had certain...
I was influenced by
the political situation in which we lived
in Brazil and the world during that period.
At the time, these newspapers were printed
in the same shop as the newspaper,
on Fabriano paper,
which we then reworked with Indian ink
or acrylic paint.
While pursuing these experiments,
we became aware of a material that we call "flan".
"Flan" is the French word
for this material.
This material was a necessary step
in printing a newspaper.
It's almost an artisanal process.
To be sold in the streets and newsstands,
a newspaper had to pass through this "flan" stage.
I'd go to the print shop at dawn
to salvage these "flans"
and bring them back to my studio where, for my work,
I also inked these "flans".
This was decisive for an entire series of works
which today are considered historical,
but which held for me, at the time,
the importance of
a true political act,
and most of all, an existential act:
The creation of something
that I thought was able
to contribute...
...to the tribe.
It was a period that was very...
It wasn't just politics, truthfully,
it was a whole dream of progress, an avant-garde
that was emerging, for everyone.
Rock festivals.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin...
Bob Dylan! And all the others.
This thing that was happening, this flow, all the good, positive energy.
Long-haired young people.
All this stuff, it really attracted us,
it inspired us,
we were passionate about it.
So the avant-garde and all these works
moved forward on the same paths.
A Hendrix guitar solo could be a huge influence.
All this incited us to stay here,
in Brazil, to fight against
this state of exception,
this state of violence, imposed on us for 40 years,
which is the military dictatorship.
As you probably imagine,
I've had a long career path,
at the end of which, in my work, I'm starting to...
Probably influenced by my husband, a geographer,
but it's not geography
that is geological, nor regional.
I'm starting to realize
that in order for my messages
to transform themselves into art,
they need...
not a form, like an abstract form,
but for me to fall into a different situation,
which is geography. I will take a system
that I didn't invent myself.
O pão nosso de cada dia
I know that's a New Testament expression.
If I refer to it,
it's like giving thanks for having bread,
but it is not by bread alone
that Man may live.
Our ideas, during the period
of the exceptional military regime,
were truly censured
in every domain of the cultural world.
So in the title, there is really...
It's irony, but irony...
that criticises.
The hollowed-out bread represents
the hollowed-out world in which we live.
When I began making these works,
how to reach
with an image,
what is central, what is peripheral?
This referred,
in a more obvious way, to the way we are
considered peripheral, in the hegemonic sense,
to the art world.
I made the image
go from darkness to light,
then I placed the word "periphery" on the light side,
and "centre" on the other side,
the dark side.
For I thought:
"If I place, on a surface,
"an image of the lunar surface,
"I formulate a certain critical conception on the political situation.
"I behave like someone on the surface of the moon
"who can say whatever they please."
When we're no longer on Earth...
It's a bit like the people who climb on a soapbox in Hyde Park
and who can express all their opinions.
They'll never be arrested.
I think that what always fascinated me about photography
is precisely its capacity
to aim the viewfinder at what existed
physically, in the world:
an event, an instant,
that has been captured and frozen.
That image contains a parcel of truth
which Barthes emphasised as:
"This was."
We cannot challenge the fact that it happened,
because of the primary relation
between the image and what was captured,
visually, through photography.
I'm talking about analog photography.
And yet, in that image, what attracts me in photos
is everything we can't say about them,
everything the photos don't say.
It's so magical how they talk about that instant,
but they say much more about all the rest,
everything that isn't present in it.
Photography
is incomplete by nature,
because it is part of a story, or in any case,
it could be part of one,
it demands that we finish a story
it has left untold.
This frozen instant is almost...
For me, a photo is everything except what we see in the image.
I think this is where
my fascination
and interest in images lies.
To talk about everything not present in that instant,
and everything not in that instant
depends on the viewer's involvement with the image.
It's what the viewer, the person seeing this image,
an image that, most often, isn't even mine,
it's what they do with it, which is similar to my work.
They'll wonder about everything that is not in the image
in the same way I wonder about everything that is not in the image
at that moment I have the desire,
the impulse, to work with that image,
to use that image.
I actually count on the viewer having a story
to project on the image I'm offering.
For Cicatriz, everything started in 1995.
I heard about a supposed penitentiary museum
in São Paulo,
in what used to be Carandiru Penitentiary.
I got authorization and went to visit it.
I realized it wasn't a museum at all,
just a heap of crates,
abandoned
to spiders and roaches,
filled with negatives
dating from the 1910s until the 1950s, I suppose.
They'd been stored for purposes of
identification,
or perhaps for scientific use.
I offered to organize the material,
to archive it and to create the idea of a penitentiary museum,
and in exchange, I could use this material, these photos,
mostly photos of tattoos,
for my own work, because that's what interested me then.
In 1969, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro
presents, at the "Salon de la Boussole",
Trouxas ensangüentadas.
Of course, the work caused a certain stir,
but was accepted by the commission
and the jury as well.
The show exposed chunks of wrapped meat,
and later, after the exhibition,
I put this material, these bundles of meat,
in the garden of the Modern Art Museum,
in a setting that was both inside and outside the museum.
Belo Horizonte hosted this work in 1970,
which was included, with Registro, in the show Information,
at MoMA in New York,
and then in Paris, when I decided
to send myself into exile
to follow someone I was in love with. Such is life!
After that, when I returned, I joined the Cairn group,
a group of artists
working in their studios,
and I made Livro de carne,
based on the first work,
the Trouxas ensangüentadas of 1969,
but with a passage that's in the notebook
Rodapés de carne,
that I also made in Paris before Livro de carne
but in a sort of "anonymous" way
because I never showed it,
although I'd done Registro.
Back then and even today, despite my numerous shows,
it's very hard to find places that will show a work like this.
I'm the son of a diplomat,
so I've always been,
in a certain way, an outsider.
Not an outsider without roots,
but the countries in which I lived,
Argentina, Portugal,
Switzerland, New York...
I lived in those places with my parents.
This taught me that
first of all,
the concept of nationality
and this chauvinism which drives one to fight for their country,
is ***. It's ridiculous.
What made me change...
I feel like I belong to something
much bigger.
There are no nationalities.
There are only personalities.
Each individual has a personality
determined by his birth, by his parents,
his grandparents.
This is importance.
It should be,
but it must not become
an excuse to fight with others,
because "we're better than them,"
like a soccer game, Brazil vs. Argentina.
"We're better than them."
It's idiotic.
The question of violence in Brazil
is a bit like in American Westerns.
At one time, I worked...
It was in the style of John Ford.
It was difficult. Immediate.
Even today, it's exceptional work.
My work, in Bahia,
dealt with people hunting for emeralds.
Visually, it was totally a Western,
hats and all.
The question of sexuality
in Brazilian prostitution
was already addressed in 1972.
It was a kind of prostitution
that wasn't perverse.
It was a kind of prostitution
that almost seemed family-style.
See what I mean?
When I made Pelourinho in 1979,
I'd just finished an assignment for GEO magazine
on street children
and I saw
that in Recife, it was very rough, also in São Paulo,
as well as in Rio,
while in Bahia, it was different
because the question of prostitution was handled differently.
It was almost like a family business.
It was something...
In Bahia, sexuality
is very important.
It can't really be considered prostitution,
even if it is prostitution
and causes serious health problems
for the women.
I took photos in the daytime,
during moments of downtime.
The series included several types of work:
the female nude,
art history,
Woman as a symbol
of the supreme power of good
in the history of humanity.
I am someone
who believes that Woman
is earth,
the basis of survival
in this world,
and that Man is destruction.
I don't know who the audience is.
Who is it? I don't know.
People who come from various places,
who open their minds. Certain identify with it.
Others hate it. While still others
are like friends, female
or male.
The audience doesn't exist.
The audience must not exist.
You should create a work
as it were a rocket destined to the moon.
Then people
will open themselves.
I don't deal with the public.
I don't take them into account.
I do what I have to do.
Afterward, people do what they want with it.
No one confronts their audience.
Except perhaps...
American filmmakers.
I'll be very sincere:
When I made this work,
I never thought of showing it as an artwork.
It never crossed my mind.
As I already said,
it all goes back to my childhood.
In Hungary, in 1944,
the Germans, the Nazis,
created ghettos.
My father was Jewish.
Later, he was deported,
and like the rest of my family, he died
in the concentration camps.
And they all
were tattooed with numbers:
On the chest
and on the arm.
And so...
conceptually, this work
also shows people
marked by numbers.
Except that
my father's family
died with those marks,
murdered by the Germans.
Whereas this work
of marking the Yanomami
was to save them.
It was so they could live.
Thus, it was fundamental
for me.
I arrived in Brazil in 1955
after growing up in Transylvania, in Hungary.
When I arrived in Brazil,
I fell in love with the country.
I started travelling
through Brazil, here and there.
My first visit to a group of indigenous people
was to the Carajá Indians in central Brazil.
After various experiences visiting indigenous peoples,
I started taking photos. It was during this period.
I'd never photographed before that.
I used the language of photography
as a way to communicate
for I didn't speak Portuguese
and obviously, didn't speak
the indigenous languages either.
After staying for over a month
in the Amazon and in various places,
I arrived in Manaus,
where I heard about
the mysterious death of a priest
who worked with the Yanomami Indians.
To tell the truth, I only stayed there a week.
I never did find out how that man died.
I left, but not before getting to know the Yanomami a bit.
That's what really mattered
because that's when I decided that I'd come back
to stay with the Yanomami,
for as long as necessary
to understand and get to know those people.
At that time, in 1974,
construction was starting on a road
that passed through Yanomami territory.
It turned out to be a tragedy for the Yanomami,
putting them in contact with totally unknown things,
especially diseases.
Hundreds and hundreds of Indians died at that time.
That's when I was there.
So we organized, a small group of three,
a trip to Yanomami territory
to start a public health project.
It was in this period,
in order to work efficiently,
we started to identify the Indians.
We managed to photograph
and establish a medical record for each person.
One of the advantages of being an artist who wasn't trained
academically, with its dogmas,
its writings, and so on,
is that, in my case,
I can make use of any language that pleases me:
Theatre, music, literature.
I'm most interested in imagery and after that,
language.
I'm fascinated by philology.
I speak 6 languages and I'm a keen reader.
Over 25 years ago, I had the luck to marry
a great cook who also has a literature degree.
We published a magazine
which for years was the only one of its kind.
Lourdes, the perfect dictator and intrepid cook,
and Marco, thought we should include a comic book in the center spread.
It took me a year to make it.
It was a sort of fotonovela. They'd fallen out of fashion.
It was the ideal medium for El Hospital del Horror.
The script was by Armando Vega-Gil,
one of the founders of a Mexican rock band
which recently broke up: Botellita de Jerez. It was directed by
Lourdes Hernández Fuentes.
And the photography was done by the great Tim Ross.
And we were the actors, the team at the magazine.
We called ourselves "Los commensales del crimen", ("partners in crime").
It's full of humour. It's a 2-page fotonovela,
the two centre pages.
Since I was small,
I've confronted
the Latin aspect of America.
I managed to develop, and continue to do so,
strong Latin-American sympathies.
I'm against putting capital letters
on "Latin America".
"Latin" should not be capitalized
because it is simply an adjective,
like beautiful America, green America,
prosperous America, sad America,
poor America, rich America,
latin America, anglo-saxon America.
If we say "Latin America," we should also say
Anglo-saxon America,
French America, African America,
and all the Americas.
Although we can't say Indian America.
It's practically a pleonasm. We have no connection with India
here on this continent.
It's also a huge linguistic error.
In Mexico, it's politically incorrect
to use the word "Indian" to speak of First Nations, as Canadians say,
or Native Peoples who are absolutely
as native as the Scots in Europe, the Basques,
the Irish, the Sicilians.
They are the native peoples of the continent.
I could add something:
The term "Latin America,"
don't forget, was coined by France,
Bonapartist France. The French wanted
to draw this continent into their political and economic sphere.
They gave it this name.
North Americans had no problem adopting it.
It's the only continent that is plural.
We don't say "Asias" "Europes" or "Africas"
so why say "Americas"?
It's a mystery.
I received my artistic training at the national school of Fine Arts
in the '90s.
It was a very particular time.
It was during the most bloody moment of the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori
at the end of the '90s.
The place, too,
for the school is located in Lima's historic centre,
two blocks from the Government Palace and one block from the Legislative Palace.
Thanks to this school, I was confronted with
the reality of my country. There were often
people: miners, peasants,
who came to camp in Lima for several days.
It was during this time that the La Cantuta massacre occurred,
an affair that caused quite a stir.
The story managed to get out...
From inside the Army, the information was leaked
to the media. It allowed us
to identify the ones who did it.
Things went much further than ever before.
This affair
really grabbed the media's attention.
Every day, in the morning papers,
we discovered a new visual element: A key,
or a scrap of charred notebook.
Ten people had been held prisoner
then clandestinely executed by a paramilitary group.
The Army's involvement wasn't revealed until later.
Following a government investigation,
the personal effects were returned to the families, but in a manner
that expressed a certain negligence,
even a sort of provocation.
They had placed the objects in evaporated milk boxes.
At the time, these boxes were often used
to store stuff,
for transporting things,
they were used as bassinets, or wastebaskets.
When I noticed this detail,
and many others,
I thought it was the perfect raw material for a series of works.
Evaporation evokes disappearance.
Also, the brand name "Gloria"
had religious overtones.
I transformed "milk" into "people".
A slight modification full of meaning.
I used these boxes as raw material in my work for 2 years.
They're the ones on display here.
One of them consisted of...
recuperating several
to cut holes in them.
The original exhibition, entitled Historia,
had 5 parts, if I remember correctly.
One of them was a series of photographs
taken in classrooms
in Peru, Lima or Cuzco,
in old schools,
during classes on Peruvian history.
I snuck into classrooms
and photographed from the back,
trying to capture the moments where the professor
teaching the class
wrote something, then erased it,
while lecturing on a chapter of history.
I wanted to capture these moments. I find them important.
It's important to be aware that Peru
was the main viceroyalty of South America.
It was extremely repressive with a powerful government.
It was here
that the whole structure of the region was formed.
And it's this social structure that...
To me, it's one of the themes,
fundamental even today,
and it's linked to the colonial heritage
and the post-colonial experience of our lives today.
The photos in the Historia show
were photos that had originally
been developed using traditional processes.
They were developed in a lab,
black-and-white negatives with gelatin silver prints.
In the Historia del Perú series, the images
underwent fairly extensive treatment
at my hands. I had to decide
how I wanted to present these images.
It drew on my personal photography experience.
I did a Masters in Photography in the United States.
For me, it was heaven: I had access to a photo lab
and that was quite exceptional.
This is visible in Historia
because I went to the lab
and I decided that these images
should convey a sort of simulation
and seduction, like a blackboard.
The old ones have a certain velvety texture
which makes you want to touch them. That's what I sought.
I printed them on matte paper to simulate that texture.
I darkened them using a very complex process.
I dodged, I darkened, I burnt,
I raised the contrast.
I finally managed to simulate white chalk
appearing, or even emerging from,
a blackboard.
The people that we see
are the professors and students who suffered from that darkness.
We're not sure if they are sinking into or emerging from the image.
I like that from a distance, they look like black frames
which remind us of slates. As we draw nearer,
the image reveals information.
I was born in a town
called Talara in the Piura region
on the northern coast of Peru.
I happened to be born there
because my parents were there for work.
I only lived there
for the first 10 months of my life,
but I know that we travelled a lot
on the Pan-American Highway to visit family in Lima.
I don't remember these trips
but I guess that explains my fascination
for travelling,
for speeding down the highway,
but also for the great open spaces,
arid and flat, that characterized those trips.
For my work,
in 1996,
I drove all the way to Tumbes,
the last town before Ecuador.
When I arrived in Lima after this trip,
I realized I had images
I'd never thought of before,
something was starting to take shape.
These works were finally entitled Punto ciego.
A few months after finishing
the Punto ciego project,
I took the Pan-American southward.
During this trip, in 1998,
I noticed little piles
of stones over a stretch of several kilometres.
There were spaced about 200 or 300 meters apart.
These piles of stones were grouped into strange shapes.
Sometimes, there was only one stone.
They all bore inscriptions,
numbers and letters which probably indicated,
I suppose,
topographical data or property limits.
Literally translated, the Quechua word "pirca" means "wall".
I believe that this idea that the wall, the "pirca",
defines something
also implies that the word serves
to indicate a sign, in a larger sense.
What I found by the highway during this trip south
were pircas with signs that were impossible to translate.
I created a series with water-filled cubes
in which images, formed of charcoal powder, floated.
The images that floated,
formed with charcoal powder, were
or more aptly, are, during the shows...
They are very...
inclined
to become damaged or altered
for they have no stable support.
The images are instable.
The concept of Lacrimarios
is a water-filled cube, completely enclosed,
in which the endless cycle
of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation takes place.
The water that evaporates through the charcoal powder
doesn't alter the image
but when water condenses at the top of the container,
the drops fall,
so with time, the image is damaged.
It deteriorates until becoming unrecognisable.
What motivated these works
where those articles
that appear in newspapers,
generally a small photo accompanied by a few words.
These articles relate terrible tragedies.
These are extremely sad stories
presented so that they are visible, yet at the same time, invisible.
What interested me was the idea of memory,
of forgetting, and the absence of memory.
I tried to approach this subject from the viewpoint of the instant.
Walter Benjamin said the instant
we capture an image, it becomes historical.
It is this instant
which can be transformed into a memory or not,
which can become part of history or not.
This really sums up my ideas
on the question of memory.
In this work,
the charcoal powder, which is the dye,
the pigment, produces the image
on an unstable support, water, which is calm
but very susceptible
to a change,
a movement, due to the drops,
the falling drops.
I created another work. It is an image
that floats, and as the water evaporates,
as time passes, the water level diminishes.
The image, once the water is totally gone,
the image appears on the bottom of the container.
At that instant,
when the image isn't on a fixed support,
it is not a documentation,
it is not a memory. It is simply there,
in a latent state.
The instant has not yet been formed.
What first caught my attention was the visual phenomena of the streets:
walls covered with letters and writing,
sometimes legible, sometimes not.
I had the impression...
it was already the past, it'd be gone tomorrow.
Curiously, whether it be here, in another town, or another country,
it is the same everywhere.
There were
pre-established frameworks.
I realized Latin Fire at the end of the '70s.
I made that series here, in Cali,
and later elsewhere, on the walls of Mexico City.
But that series of posters, printed on cheap paper,
like crepe paper, that was here.
What I liked
was the disorder among the letters
and also the contribution
of those who glued the posters in neat lines,
and those who later torn them down, or the wind.
It switches from collage to décollage.
I found all that extraordinary,
that tangle of strange shapes.
I didn't understand why
this disturbed law and order.
"Post no bills" "Posting forbidden."
I find it much more beautiful,
all these letters mixed together,
these incomprehensible phrases, than dirty walls.
I came to Caracas in January 1955.
I worked as an architectural photographer
with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva.
I also travelled through Venezuela,
especially the interior.
Today people say there are two Venezuelas.
It's true, especially in terms
of politics and ideology.
But this wasn't always the case. I noticed it the day I arrived.
I arrived by ship and the first thing you see
is the port of La Guaira.
On one side, there are cranes, ocean liners,
cargo ships filled with goods.
The homes facing them
were shacks that looked like nativity scenes.
They looked just like the little stable
in a nativity scene, lambs sheltering under a palm tree.
Then there was the highway to Caracas.
For the time, it was an impressive infrastructure,
very modern.
But 3 km after that, in Baruta,
which is now part of the district of Caracas,
you came face-to-face with extreme poverty.
In Cuba, I abandoned photographing contemporary architecture
to start a major work on Havana
and popular architecture in Cuba.
After Cuba, I went to Italy, then I returned to Venezuela.
Through a contact I'd made in Cuba,
I was commissioned to do a study on Latin American architecture:
Pre-Columbian, Colonial and Contemporary.
So I started working,
mostly in the capital cities.
Armed with my medium format camera,
a 6x9 or a 6x6,
I did my best to photograph buildings
with the idea of capturing
beautiful and modern architecture in Latin America.
But the reality that always surrounded me
was not modern at all.
So, in parallel with these architectural photos
of buildings and so on,
I began photographing what went on
around these buildings.
This gave birth to another book,
Para verte mejor, América latina.
From there, I believe it was the first edition
which presented an overview of the continent.
That impressed me.
It was my first contact
with the cultural and social world of the big cities
of Latin America.
At the start of the '70s,
I had a better mastery
of the camera and the darkroom.
We got together, a bunch of photographers,
when we were all starting
to put together our first projects.
There was Ricardo Armas, Luis Brito, Jorge Vall,
Alexis Perez-Luna, and myself.
Our "eye"
was what we had in common. We were interested in the same subjects.
In 1976, we organized
an exhibition called A gozar la realidad.
The title was ironic,
it meant "Enjoy Reality" when our reality
was that of poverty, street people,
the poor and so on.
With this exhibition,
we toured the entire country. It started in Barcelona,
then went to Mérida, and many other cities.
For two years, it moved from city to city,
from high schools to cultural centres,
to museums...
Often,
when we started working,
we vied between us to capture
the most interesting signs.
Everywhere we went, we were constantly alert,
on the look-out for something.
In Mérida, for example, there was an ad campaign
which said, "Mérida is yours, come visit"
and students had graffitied, "Mérida is cool, everyone screws,"
like another slogan to attract tourists.
This one was taken
at a military base in La Guaira.
I don't know who Rosita was,
probably a woman the entire regiment screwed.
We realized that most of us
had photos of signs
among the photos we'd taken.
It was 1977.
That's what struck us,
the creativity and humour of the Venezuelans.
They knew how to make themselves heard.
I got into photography in 1964.
I was 17.
Thanks to my family, I got a job at Korda studios.
They needed
an assistant, like all studios do.
That's where Alberto Korda worked. A great photographer,
renowned in Cuba as one of the best.
Thus, I had a chance to learn from an excellent master.
In 1968, the Cuban government closed the studio
because it was a private business
and all private businesses had to close.
So I lost my job
and got a new one in printing,
at Cuba Internacional magazine
which was like Paris Match
or Life or O Cruzeiro, in Brazil.
That's how I learned the ropes
of Cuban press and started travelling throughout the country.
I always noticed
the propaganda billboards
whose messages were sometimes in contradiction with reality.
At other times, I found them interesting
because they reflected a certain moment in history.
Lots of these images were conserved
for years because we didn't have enough hindsight.
But 30 or 40 years later,
they tell a story.
They illustrate my country's historic moments,
moments that were sometimes tragic, sometimes amusing,
even a bit absurd, depending on the case.
What I liked was the way individuals appropriated
certain official recommendations.
The result was sometimes absurd, like at the psychiatric hospital of Havana
where there was a mural, fashionable at the time,
which celebrated the "Patient of the Month".
It was an absurd application of the current policy
which consisted of electing an employee of the month.
They hijacked what could be
considered propaganda,
or a way of promoting an idea.
Since the start of the revolution,
one fundamental approach,
especially since Fidel Castro's "History Will Absolve Me" speech,
consisted of reclaiming or rehabilitating
agricultural regions, the country, and not only the cities,
which were more developed.
The philosophy of that period was absurd.
At the time, I wasn't aware of it
but I knew there was something
which didn't seem quite right.
For example, there's the photo
in which a humble old gentleman
proudly displays a Gramma
with the headline "A Cuban in Space!" It made the front page
that day. It was huge news
that a Cuban citizen was a cosmonaut.
This was a great paradox
of Cuban society at the time.
People lacked many basic necessities,
and yet, there was a Cuban in space.
I found that very interesting.
I have an intense relationship with writing.
In fact, before I fully consecrated myself
to painting and art, I wrote.
I lived with other poets
and writers.
I think that's the basis of the intense relationship
that links my work with words. Since I started painting,
even in my first pictorial works,
words have always been very present.
I mix images and words. I love comics,
that interaction between the textual image
and the visual image.
I started studying art quite late.
In Cuba, the academic path
to study art starts at a young age.
I only started at university,
after a very intense period of self-education.
When I started my education,
I integrated subjects that already interested me
in terms of image and writing.
It wasn't until I started art school
at the age of 18,
with the handicaps of being self-taught,
and the educational problems
of arriving from the underground scene
with no real references,
that I became interested in photography.
I thought that photography was a good substitute
for many things that interested me in painting.
I started thinking about how to modify photos
by using text
or a space in which the image is placed.
I integrated reflections on the theme of representation,
omnipresent in Conceptualism
since the '60s and '70s.
I launched a huge research project
on this. Not only on photography,
but about the nature of the image itself
and the nature of the object to be represented.
Fin de silencio is an ensemble of works
grouped under this title, dated around 2006.
Much of my work comes from walking around the city.
I have a strong relationship with cities.
I send a lot of time walking around cities.
For me, Havana is like an open book.
It's my principal workspace
and I understand most of its references.
These are places I've known since I was a child,
shops which have been abandoned,
which were destroyed, or have disappeared.
But, as often in Havana,
something remains, fragments that still live,
or are heading towards extinction.
It's a city which always lives with its past,
which reinvents and recycles itself.
What caught my attention
was the typographic style of these places.
It's very fanciful. At that moment,
I realized that throughout the streets of Havana,
writing was almost everywhere.
I wondered why.
Why la general, el volcán or la lucha?
These are incredible titles.
There are 3 stages: The string drawing
on the building facades, the granite slabs,
and what is exposed at Fondation Cartier,
a series of photo engravings
of words inscribed on these blocks.
The series they chose...
It was 4 photos
that are part of the same series.
The series is called Pyramid. I worked on it for 2 years.
What I found interesting
as I worked on the project,
was that sometimes it is a direct reference,
in the attempt to create
a revalorisation of the pre-Hispanic past,
but most of the time, when you go to places
that are typically pre-Hispanic, like the Mayan Route,
regions like Yucatán or Quintana Roo,
the pre-Hispanic architecture is much more present
and often, in the form
of a "show" for tourists.
Hotels, for example, are often decorated in pre-Hispanic style.
In the series presented in the exhibition,
there are metal gates which are reminiscent
of pre-Hispanic designs, or pre-Hispanic gates.
I found these gates in the places
where rich people live.
Most of the people
who lived in houses with these gates
that resembled pre-Hispanic designs
surely never realized it.
The reference wasn't voluntary.
For the project,
the photos are 50x60 cm.
Certain photos are larger
but I wanted to return to the classic photo format,
viewed from nearer.
Details should be sought out instead of leaving it to the format.
As I worked on other projects,
I keep pulling closer and closer in.
I explain it in various ways,
but I think it's due to the classical education
I received for numerous years.
"The starting point of the series of photographs entitled Holbox
was a tourist visit to this island in the Mexican Caribbean.
The idea was to create
an archive in which the photos decipher a future,
a series of documents of what is to come.
A shift in time, in which the equation of the present
multiplied in the direction of the future
represents the predominant use of space:
the buying and selling of land.
The condition of the market and its permeability and involvement in an island.
Time in function and at the disposal of added value.
Speculation and the specialization of space
in an out-of-place place.
A paroxysm in a mirror,
a tourist on a flooded island."
Paula and I went
on vacation, like tourists.
The trip was to celebrate our 5-year anniversary.
What we saw and experienced
in this place, actually consisted
of seeing... the evolution,
or rather, the regression of the island
in the course of the last 6 or 8 years.
While walking on the island,
we discovered all these "For Sale" signs.
We realized that the island
was up for sale,
with all the paradoxes that this implied.
This island, a sort of refuge,
but which had been sucked into
the reality of the world economy.
These island plots
were selling like hotcakes.
When you live in a city of 25 million, like here,
seeing these sorts of signs, "House for Sale" or "For Rent"
is completely normal.
But when you are
on an island with 500 inhabitants,
it becomes shocking
as I show...
in this photo inventory.
I like to think of it as an inventory, a succession of places,
with this idea of the advance of time.
It'd be interesting to return in 10 or 15 years
to photograph the places where the signs were,
and have been replaced by houses or hotels.
I always worked in black and white.
I had the luck to be Álvarez Bravo's assistant.
When I was little, I took a few photos
because my father was an amateur photographer.
I studied cinematography.
I wanted to be a writer but I married very young,
and had 3 children. At 26, I began my film studies at CUEC.
That's where I met Álvarez Bravo, who gave a class on photography.
Since I had one of his books,
on an exhibition he'd done during the Olympics,
I asked him to sign it.
I was married with children.
I asked if I could take his class and I learned by his side.
Later on, he asked me to be his achichincle.
The achichincle in Nahualt is the one who assists the mason,
who brings the trays of cement.
I accepted, of course!
So I accompanied him
and watched how he worked in black and white.
I'd always adored black and white, but then, even more so.
I became accustomed to it.
I fell in love with black and white.
I've never liked colour.
As for Frida Kahlo, I don't know why,
I took a roll of colour film
and I shot in colour.
I'll tell you the story of Frida Kahlo's bathroom.
When Frida Kahlo died, in 1954...
She'd been very sick.
Certain people claim she took a lot of Demerol,
which is like ***,
due to the unbearable pain.
That's what they say, but no one knows.
She had to take a lot to withstand the pain.
So, Frida died in 1954.
Next to her room, stairs led to a bathroom.
When Frida died, Diego Rivera ordered
the museum directors to close the bathroom
because it contained Frida's belongings.
Personal things like her corset, her prosthetic leg,
her earrings, her huipiles,
which are the outfits she wore,
typically Mexican.
Although at one time, she'd also worn French capes.
She also had a lot of shoes for her prosthetic leg.
They decided to close it for 15 years.
Dolores Olmedo,
the head of the foundation, a very wealthy woman,
refused to open the bathroom.
When Dolores Olmedo died,
it was 50 years after Frida's death. The bathroom was reopened.
The only rooms that had been shut in the house
were the two bathrooms, for 50 years.
One bathroom held the secrets of her letters and loves,
and the one I photographed was the bathroom of pain.
It was very impressive. They'd called me to shoot some of her clothes.
I said, "No, I don't do studio photography."
But I felt something.
It had been closed. The smell was very strong.
In it was her corset, her prosthetic leg.
There were also a lot of political posters,
of Lenin and Stalin.
There was a small cabinet containing personal belongings.
When I saw all these things,
it really impressed me. In addition, the smell was very strong.
I had the impression I could feel that woman's pain.
When I entered the bathroom,
I analysed
all the objects present in the bathroom.
Certain were in the bathtub,
others hadn't been moved.
But after that series,
I made a small book on Frida Kahlo,
as well as another in Italy,
with short texts,
to reclaim what I had done
when I entered Frida's room, which no one has entered since.
The book is an ancient support
which has been recuperated by the language of images,
allowing us to create a rhetoric.
I worked with a small 35mm camera
with only one lens.
This was still analog photography.
But back then, they always said,
"Vertical always works. If it's horizontal, it needs a double page."
This encouraged a certain style of composition.
And the classic image that resulted...
I'll show it to you.
It's called Volando Bajo.
I found myself face-to-face with this guy,
standing in front of a wall. The guy is skinny.
The mural is magnificent: "Sex Pistols,"
with the pistol.
This guy, to see what was going on...
We were about 1 m apart.
He leapt in the air to provoke me
and at that instant...
La Última Ciudad is a project I developed
over a decade.
At that time, all the photographers
were interested in indigenous communities,
the rural situation,
and it was only journalists
who covered the cities.
There existed a tradition in Mexico,
notably Nacho López in the '50s,
with Yo, el ciudadano,
who over several years,
compiled his reporting in a book.
I had that as reference.
As an admirer of Nacho López's work,
I decided to begin a work on the city.
I lived there, I didn't need to move.
I wanted to confront this big city
which is really horrible
and gigantic.
It took me years to understand
that it wasn't a description of the city,
it was an evocation of the experience
of walking through the streets of Mexico City.
Actually,
I was able to discover, through photography,
and through my interest
in photography, Latin America.
Since the '70s, Latin-American photographers have emerged
and they have
made a name for themselves
in New York, in Europe, in Spain.
We weren't in direct contact.
I discovered Brazilian photographers
in the cities, without meeting them.
We decided to end all that
and establish direct communication,
so we created the Colloquium of Latin American Photography.
We realized we had bonds
we were unaware of, that united us.
Paris is nearer to Mexico City than Buenos Aires.
Geographically, the distances are enormous.
But from a cultural point of view,
and especially linguistic,
the connections are so powerful
that they inevitably appear
between the photographers.
An issue with Uruguayan, Chilean, Mexican, or Cuban photographers,
is that we have more in common with each other than the cities
with which we are trying to be in contact.
This opened very interesting vistas for us.
We wondered, "How is it was possible
we'd never founded a Latin-American unit?"
We're far from Buenos Aires, but there are countries in between.
We could create a chain
and set up mechanisms to allow us
to have closer communication.
It remains an enigma.
It's been more than 30 years and we continue
to mostly be in contact with the metropoles.
I travel a lot. I'm invited to give conferences
or organize exhibitions
in New York, Madrid, or Milan,
while in Buenos Aires, it's been years
we've been negotiating to organize a studio.
It's much more complicated.
It's a very paradoxical situation.
Latin America, culturally, is very united
but there is a sort of vacuum in terms of relations.
Since the arrival of social and digital networks,
opening new possibilities for us. Yes, things have changed
in the last decade,
yet once again, we're faced with this marvel...
Even with Brazilians, I speak to them in Spanish,
I write to them in Spanish, and they answer in "Span-guese."
If they think I won't understand,
they'll find another way to express it.
I don't know what language we speak anymore.
Our communication is fluid,
and this comes from our common roots
which date from the 16th century,
when Europe discovered America.
These 4 centuries created a connection between us.
And today, thanks to these tools, we notice a change
which is undeniable.
It's phenomenal, amusing and stimulating.
Okay. Shall we get a coffee?