Plywood and iron structure, carpet, curtain, glass cabinet
IAB iron meteorite, 998 kg
MUSEO HISTÓRICO PROVINCIAL JULIO MARC, ROSARIO 2019-ONGOING
This 998 kg space rock, discovered by a farmhand in Southern Chaco in 1937, had been sunning itself for more than half a century on an octagonal shrine in the gardens of the museum until it was moved to the inner halls in the 1990s. There, among colonial altarpieces and historical portraits, El Mataco became intertwined with earthly culture (indigenous, colonial, mestizo, American), involuntarily collapsing the classic humanist distinction between History and Natural History, between human chronology and cosmic time.
By deciding to subtract it from this historicized and culturized habitat, the artists succeeded in setting in motion another kind of crossover. Placed in the center of a pitch-dark room, barely illuminated by a dim overhead light that shines over it, and immersed in an octagonal cavity that invites one to sit and contemplate it while evoking the ancient shrine, El Mataco seems to float in the dark night of the cosmos. The density of the device designed to exhibit the meteorite renders into, first of all, an image. But not a spatial or rational image, but something more akin to what Henri Bergson would call an "image-matter," that of a pure image that will later become a memory.
However, isolated in a kind of limbo, questioning itself within a historical museum, El Mataco shows that, after all, it is not so alien to the time of History. In the 21st century, with mankind having become a powerful geological agent competing with natural forces and capable of producing catastrophic climate change, the distance between cosmological time and deep human history has been diluted as we all, human and non-human, are equally dwarfed by the scale of the disaster. The encounter with this archaic presence, suspended in the thick blackness of the room, begets a strange premonition: if there was already a world without us, there may well be another.