INDEX



LA SORPRESA
Y LOS METEORITOS
QUE YA NO ESTAN
EN CAMPO DEL CIELO



Photography

PARQUE PROVINCIAL PIGÜEN N'ONAXÁ, CHACO 2006




As Faivovich & Goldberg's first and most archetypal intervention, La Sorpresa y los meteoritos que ya no están en Campo del Cielo [La Sorpresa and the meteorites that are no longer in Campo del Cielo] presented in a simplified and immediate dimension what would later become a plot of immense conceptual and logistical complexity.

The constitutive attributes of a long-term project could already be detected in this early work: the access to the social and cultural history of Argentine meteorites through a direct approach into the community, journey as a method of prospection, the restitution of cultural property and the obstinate quest for dialogue within the institutional sphere.

During the 2006 National Meteorite Festival, held at the Pigüen N'Onaxa Provincial Park in the town of Gancedo, southern Chaco, an exhibition of collegial simplicity, similar to an austere memorial, was mounted. Six photographs portrayed the large meteorite bodies that, uprooted from their impact site, were no longer at Campo del Cielo but rested in other museums and institutions in Argentina. Each of the photos included captions that stipulated the name, weight, year of discovery and location of the specimen, also anticipating the duo's proclivity towards a scientific bias, which is usually expressed in their work through the use of technical systems of sampling, classification and census. One last photograph completed the set and played the role of a curious talisman: that of a meteorite, recently baptized by the artists as La Sorpresa. Discovered only a few months earlier, it enjoyed the privilege of being located in the immediate vicinity of its original crater, where it rests to this day.
Gancedo, a frontier rural town, has around 12,000 inhabitants, a number that doubles fleetingly and magically every year during a weekend in September, when the National Festival takes place. In this context of popular fervor, where everyone puts their talents at the service of collective enjoyment, the glacial rhetoric of contemporary art could be out of place; however, the code proposed by the exhibition was interpreted as an unequivocally affective expression, not so different from a poem or a song.

The Provincial Park was founded on a parcel of expropriated land, with the aim of safeguarding the El Chaco meteorite and some other specimens that arrived over the years. In the gesture of printing, on the site designed to treasure and culturally amplify them, an image of those meteorite bodies scattered throughout the country, hid a desire to promote a symbolic reparation in the local imagination.

As in a propaedeutic of their own artistic future, this original action ended up including, in portrait form, several of the meteorites with which the duo would end up being linked later on, specimens that would undergo other transformations, examinations and displacements. It is then the figure of the self-fulfilling prophecy that best describes La Sorpresa y los meteoritos que ya no están en Campo del Cielo: the premonition of the -territorial, methodological- path to follow and the initial sighting of the furrow that the meteorites would leave in the lives of the artists, the same mark they left in thousands of other lives.

                                                                                                                                                      


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