Christian Catafago

I was accompanying her on a work trip to Tucuman, 1600 km up north from Buenos Aires. Despite many expectations about the architecture of the place and long lasting interest about “Tucuman Arde”, the artistic movement that blossomed during my birth year, I wasn’t very impressed by the place. It all seemed as if the city “wanted to be” without taking the means to it.

One manifestation of this inclination was the very large park at the foot of the hotel where we were staying; scattered with statues and odd monuments per example to “Discovery”, the first spaceship of 1984, it really seemed that quantity took precedence to logic or that there was an attempt to put it all in one bag.

Then, after a while, I found the part where visibly the allotted budget wasn’t sufficient: almost one quarter of the park was dotted with pedestals of statues. All were complete with name plaque and adornments but there was a strangeness with having a pedestal without a figure on it. This was especially true considering I was not familiar with any of the missing names to the point almost felt as in the presence of a beheaded corpse as I couldn’t even put in my mind a face on these pedestals. Across the frontier, I would encounter in Montevideo a series of pedestals that also made me think of guillotines and revolutions….