Recoleta
2006-­2010
40 pencil on paper frottage drawings, cloth-covered clamshell box with ribbon
10.25 x 13.25 inches, each drawing, 12.75 x 15.75 x 1.25 inches, box
Unique


We often preserve the memory of an indefinable charm from these towns we’ve merely brushed against. The memory indeed of our own indecision, our hesitant footsteps, our gaze which didn’t know what to turn towards and that found almost anything affecting... — George Perec

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. — Jorge Luis Borges

“The cemetery’s giant vaults, stacked along avenues inside the high walls, resemble the rooftops of a fanciful utopian town from above," read my guidebook. I packed a pad of 11 x 14 inch paper and black pencils. And after we arrived back to Buenos Aires from the northern Patagonian Pampa I visited the cemetery. I then spent several days making grave rubbings of the mausoleums—avoiding any text or overly decorative textures.

The walk from the hotel to the Cementerio de la Recoleta took me past a small bakery, then the Israeli Embassy Memorial (bombed in 1992), across Avenida 9 de Julio—the iconic wide street that bears the white obelisk. Then past an ornate fountain near the Brazilian and French embassies, fancy retail spaces, a grand hotel, and finally, a family of huge Banyan trees. Along the way, international modernist apartment buildings—so plentiful in downtown Buenos Aires—lent a decidedly cosmopolitan tone. Coming home from those days of rubbing graves, I tried to grasp the relationship between the built space around me and the unknowable.

The next time I went back to BA was to make a series of large grave rubbing drawings (84 x 48 inches each). An effort to capture the scale of the mausoleums, impressive monochromes, imbued with weight and aura. It took the better part of a day to make one. But when the suite of drawings arrived back to my studio in New York, I had to reckon with how they failed to hold resonance. The small drawings from my first trip were still convincing though. They could be inventoried in a single stack. I could hold and flip through them. One structure after another.


Made with the support of Eloisa Haudenschild, and also to Hernán Reig.