INDEX

FAIVOVICH & GOLDBERG



THE WEIGHT 
OF UNCERTAINTY



Letters, video
Iron 3544 kg

DOCUMENTA 13, KASSEL 2012



In January 2010, commissioned by documenta, Faivovich & Goldberg proposed to temporarily move the 37-ton El Chaco meteorite from Campo del Cielo to Kassel, to be placed in front of the Fridericianum Museum during the 100 days of the exhibition. Presented as “the second largest meteorite on Earth and the heaviest extraterrestrial object ever transported,” the rhetoric surrounding the physical displacement of the specimen also evoked the immeasurable nature of its astral journey and its awe-inspiring antiquity.

What followed was a two-year process involving various institutions in Argentina and Germany under strict confidentiality, a successful demonstration of the very same "institutional engineering" mobilized by the artists which had allowed them to reunite the two halves of the El Taco meteorite in the city of Frankfurt. On December 29, 2011, an extraordinary session took place in the Chamber of Deputies of the Chaco Province, lasting over three hours and entirely dedicated to debating the artists proposal. After the Chamber approved the bill, bringing El Chaco en Kassel to a tangible horizon of realization that seemed inevitable, a multitude of voices including anthropologists, indigenous peoples, politicians, artists and journalists, engaged in a heated public debate about the temporal relocation of the specimen. With uncertainty escalating beyond any expectation, the controversy finally came to an end in January 2012 when Faivovich & Goldberg decided to withdraw their original proposal. Thus, El Chaco en Kassel ceased to exist as a project to make way for the weight of uncertainty.
Located in Friedrichsplatz during documenta, the artists installed a cubic mass of iron that reflected the difference between the only two known weighings of El Chaco -one recorded in 1980 and the other in 1990-: 3.6 tons. At the Fridericianum, they exhibited a selection of four letters which expressed divergent positions regarding the meteorite's transfer, along with a 12-minute video that documented their first encounter with the specimen in 2006.

the weight of uncertainty ended up being defined not only by the burden of the inversion contained in its "unrealized project" nature -a fact that enables the flourishing of endless speculative lines around the apparent void left by inconclusiveness- but also as a collection of conflicting discourses and interests: an archive of the political in action, arbitrated with brutal impartiality by a meteorite.

Who is better equipped to channel the voice of voiceless things? El Chaco, along with several other colossal specimens extracted from Campo del Cielo, has been undergoing a process of culturalization for thousands of years, burying its enigmatic objectual voice under layers of human interpretations. If El Chaco en Kassel aimed to erase, from a humanist approach, the political lines that compartmentalize the world, the attempt to move the meteorite ended up reinforcing the visible trace of those same lines, originally engraved by historical inheritances and traumas, but also by miraculous visions and mysterious resonances.











BIBLIOGRAPHIA