Curator: María Alejandra Gatti
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Assaig / Essay: Between Barcelona and Buenos Aires

“Whenever we are before the image, we are before time”, this is the first line of Didi Huberman’s famous essay that brings up the question about the meaning imposed by images on the relation between history and time. Images outlast people and, before them, the present reconfigures itself continuously, unfolding meanings that update their own frame. The anachronistic is the intrusion of a time inside another, the chronological and lineal irruption of facts, as a way of establishing non-continuous and heterogeneous paths that enable new readings.

One hundreds years after the Semana Trágica de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires’ Tragic Week), we present in Parque de la Memoria “Assaig S.T. 1909-1919” by Gonzalo Elvira, an Argentine artist based in Barcelona. The exhibition collects a group of works that intertwine, as an anachronistic exercise, the events during the “tragic weeks” that took place in Barcelona (1909) and Buenos Aires (1919), and brings to the present (2019) the possibility of questioning the political representation, social and economic crises experienced over these 100 years of history. 

The events known as Semana Trágica de Barcelona (Barcelona’s Tragic Week) took place between 26th July and 2nd August, 1909. The decree of Antonio Maura’s government, aimed to send reserve troops to the Spanish colonies in Morocco, generated a series of protests against the war and the deployment of reservist soldiers, who mainly belong to the working class. After the protests were intensified, the unions called for a general strike that was followed by riots and a popular insurrection which resulted in fierce repression in the hands of Maura’s government, who declared a state of war and sent the army to the streets, leaving thousands of wounded and murder victims as well as prisoners.

During the week of 7th-14th January 1919, the also called Samana Trágica took place in Buenos Aires. After a long strike claiming for better labor conditions at Talleres Vasena, and after the murder of a worker in hands of strike-breakers groups, thousands of metallurgical workers declared a general strike. During thas week, the police, the army, and ultra-nationalist parapolice groups chased, incarcerated and tortured strikers and protesting residents.

Despite the geographical and temporal distance, both experiences were an organized rejection of a system that has historically imposed unequal conditions, always unfavorable to the working class.

Based on a heap of documentary images, records of crowds on the streets, barricades, confrontations, street and corner postcards of both cities, Gonzalo Elvira intervenes the material sense of the images in an exercise that twists the logic of archives: photography, in this case, turns drawings and paintings into record material, and the oil paintings are displayed in glass cabinets as if they were documents. 

In this operation that articulates the physical and conceptual planes, a series of portraits pierced by hammers and pins restores the ideological sense behind the historical overview. A technique that condenses one of the workers’ bond symbols, the puncture as a metaphor of the shooting and the violence and maybe the crisis of a system that outside its time repeats a pattern: the rejection of the legitimacy of liberal and neoliberal politics settled in each context.

Elvira presents an essay in which the image allows us to reflect about its state of atemporality, about its capacity of establishing meanings outside its time, and mostly about the possibility of universalizing the incompetence of a system that throughout history replicates the same logic.

María Alejandra Gatti
Curadora