INDEX


Limestone, iron shelving units, tube lights
GALERÍA BARRO, BUENOS AIRES 2019, 2022-23
MUSEO MODERNO, BUENOS AIRES 2023-24




The acquisition, in 2019, of the remnant limestones that made up an old Buenos Aires commercial lithography workshop (shelves included) was a fortuitous event. According to the artists, as it had already occurred to them on other occasions, the encounter with this lot  belonged in the order of a spontaneous manifestation, something akin to a mysterious concurrence with destiny. If the starting point of many of their projects has an extraordinary quota of unpredictability, it seems impossible to measure a priori the potential volume of questions -and answers- that the work itself is capable of withholding.

When the perplexity produced by the thing itself dissipated, a movement of transduction began to take place, commanded by the very nature of the medium: if there was a time when the lithographic method was considered the most reliable standard for the recording and reproduction of images, why not replicate on this mineral surface of this archive the most outstanding entries of another one? The information stored in the stones had already reached our days, so it could be inferred that any new information recorded in them would last until the days of the future.

Thus, it was decided to engrave in stone some of the elements that comprise Faivovich & Goldberg's vast compilation on Campo del Cielo, an archive nurtured for almost two decades and possibly one of the largest on the subject. As a semantic calque rather than a metaphor, not only were new visual and historical meanings inscribed onto the stones, but the lithoteque, as a collection of lithic canvases, assimilated another collection within itself in a recursive manner.

The work addresses questions around the nature, visibility and persistence of archival media, regarding the inertia of information and which data acquires enough stance in order to be preserved.
The passage between materialities follows an oscillating pattern that goes from paper to digitalization and, in a final and very decisive impulse, back to the apparent obsolescence of the lithographic matrix. Each of these stones, in turn, embodies a trajectory and a material history that begins in the German quarry from which they were extracted almost two centuries ago and continues in the Argentine printing presses through which they circulated, providing their services.

The transtemporal circuit triggered by Litoteca enables an interweaving of datasets that covers a wide spectrum of time periods, meanings and territories. The materials comprising the Campo del Cielo archive found their place among the residual visual substance present in the lithographic limestones. Flamboyant and mysterious, these new inscriptions positively engraved (and not mirrored as the technique dictates) do not displace the preceding marks but accumulate alongside them in layers, generating subsets of historical improvisation. In this way, the operative reflection would seem to point to the capacity of the stone itself as a medium for carrying information.

Preserving its nominal character as a modular repository, different initiatives, different arguments and different individual pieces can emerge from the lithographic library, as illustrated recently in ¡Saxa Loquuntur! (Barro, Buenos Aires, 2022) and Otumpa (Museo Moderno, Buenos Aires, 2023) exhibitions, instances where the object was exhibited to a greater or lesser degree of completeness.

If the meaning of a language depends on its texture, the topological space contained in the surface of these stones reflects the particular syntax of the Campo del Cielo's archive: a granite language designed to tell stories about time and matter.





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