A SHIPWRECK

Installation | 1996

What was once the New Customs of Buenos Aires’ Switchyard –which was part of the building where the city’s beacon was located, and where the goods 

unloaded from the ships that arrived to the pier were stored- appears now as a sort of pit that arises from the underground of the Casa Rosada. Only from that place, below the city surface, is still possible to imagine a river that reached to the gates of the building with brick spans half submerged in water.

That space of the past –before the city hid the river; earlier, when the pier was still centre and hallmark of a city that started there and limit to a country that ended there-, is now the setting for an hypothetical construction - strictly speaking, of an art installation. It unchains a series of meanings and also enables a peculiar exercise of memory. A structure has been installed in the old Switchyard which seems to be, at first sight, the reconstruction of an ancient ship that, according to the title “Shipwreck”, remained under the river.

But the reconstruction immediately appears unfinished and seems aborted: the keel and frames of the alleged ship are barely outlined and the logs, surprisingly, don’t conceal their origin. Every figure is scarcely a transient sign, literally suspended, that subtracts itself from an idea of reconstruction sustained on the fidelity to the original model. These are only artificial ruins, simulated remains of a ship accidentally stranded or sunk during some distant battle that the river might have brought through time. But these remains bring us neither arguments nor reasons that can explain the way to incorporate this event called “shipwreck” in a coherent narration. Nevertheless, despite being made-up remains, they go beyond their singularity and bring to us dramatic echoes of what is presumably the infinite misfortune of castaways. They remain as a silent testimony whose only historical marks are the space in which they are found and the alluded tragedy; they testify to the hypothetical shipwreck in the public space that serves as a setting: the most public of historical places.

From that place, the ship installed by artist Leonel Luna indicates that remembrance does not only mean to pick up figures from the past to store them and articulate them to the relentless march of time. Remembrance –memory- is also the figure built upon pieces and fragments that live in the present as testimonies of the violence that forced them to be buried in the river forever.

Lucas Fragasso