Christian Catafago

I was eager for a new life in Buenos Aires: when there settling in Recoleta, I refrained from visiting all the touristic traps; after all, I considered myself part of the local scene now.

It is thanks to Ines’s insistence that I entered Recoleta’s cemetery some blocks away. As I walked the cemetry’s alleys, the urbanist in me resurfaced, this cemetery is a small city in itself, neighborhoods define the social strata one belongs to and adornments to facades are the icing on the cake, but that’s not what drew me to study each and every one of these tombs.

Most, if not all these small scale buildings interiors are open to the view; framed family pictures, candlesticks, paraphernalia, flags, apartment plants, chairs cohabit con coffins in these interiors.

I started to know all the family names present in each neighborhoods of the cemetery and I even found myself, while meeting persons in Buenos Aires, already knowing where their family tomb is and who their neighbors are: all this seemed very much alive for a final resting place. I even discovered tombs there were to pay property taxes as if they were living villas.

Would I stay here, it would not be a final resting place for me: having passed away, I’d never be able to afford such living standards. Yet my spirit was lifted; or the first of many times in South America, I would be looking at a place as if seeing through the eyes of Lee Friedlander in “American Monuments” (1976), yet, instead of taking these images with the Leica, as would be convenient, I chose to use my old square format Bronica with its extra wide angle lens as I wanted to record the inside of all these tombs. It is there oddly that I started making self-portraits using my own shadow as an imprint on the tombs: both an acceptance of my own temporality and at the same time an attempt to transcend it.