SESIÓN EXTRAORDINARIA Nº2
Audio 3h 24m
LEGISLATURA PROVINCIAL, RESISTENCIA, CHACO 29 DECEMBER 2011
ANTIGUO CONGRESO DE LA NACIÓN, BUENOS AIRES 25 MAY 2017
In an act of almost literal transcription, Sesión extraordinaria Nº2 is a piece devised for legislative precincts. It can be mounted in legislatures, congresses, chambers of representatives, or other buildings and halls used for deliberation, regardless of their scale. Visitors enter the chamber -public yet strangely foreign-, circulate inside it, and are invited to take a seat while listening to the recording of an exceptional deliberation about a cosmic-artistic event that mobilized the ideas and feelings of an entire community.
Faivovich & Goldberg reproduce the soundtrack of the legislative debate held on December 29, 2011, in the Chamber of Deputies of the Chaco Province, which aimed to determine whether the El Chaco meteorite could be loaned for its temporary exhibition at documenta 13. Passionate arguments, technicalities, and all kinds of grandiloquence unfolded over more than three hours of official discussion, which, through archival technologies, became a testament to the wide speculative spectrum that professional politics must navigate when confronted with a work of art. Themes such as the future of humanity, the protection of heritage, outer space, identity claims, loose philosophical contemplations, and the capitalization of natural resources found their place in the session, culminating in the approval of the law that enabled the specimen’s trip to Kassel.
During its first presentation, the ghostly quality of the work was expressed in threefold: on one hand, the ethereal projection of that debate, which, in the form of audio, persists as matter throughout history; on the other, the intervention took place in the old National Congress in the city of Buenos Aires. A spectral structure in itself, the old parliament resists, hidden and almost intact, within the marble building with golden doors of the State revenue agency, a fact known by very few people. Finally, both the debate and the tape that recorded it revolve around an in absentia protagonist: the meteorite. Despite being the central figure of the story, despite being over 30 tons and an inescapable physical presence, Sesión extraordinaria Nº2 suggests that the cosmic stone can end up being as elusive and immaterial as the most secret of ghosts.
Perfectly exemplifying the type of epistemic structuring that underpins all of Faivovich & Goldberg's body of work, Sesión extraordinaria Nº2 is an autonomous snippet -or a consequence- of a past action, implying that any element within their body of work can affect or influence any other.