Fuga · 2023

Ursula Pokorny, Folleto
February 15, 2023

Fuga
Proyecto Deatres

Torres-García es una figura muy conocida en Argentina y Uruguay, cuyo lenguaje formal se ha popularizado en la región. Dentro del marco curatorial de Fuga, fue importante observar esta memoria común y responder a su legado desde un punto de vista contemporáneo. Esta tarea debía también investigar los experimentos musicales de Barradas, quien frecuentaba los mismos círculos montevideanos que Torres-García.
La colectiva Proyecto Deatres llevó a cabo este proyecto. Ellos son educadores y artistas que organizan regularmente intervenciones en espacios públicos y domésticos de su ciudad, Santa Fe, en Argentina. Estos eventos se enfocan en cuestiones de lo doméstico, pero su naturaleza varía considerablemente: en una oportunidad, llevaron al cielo barriletes hechos por ellos mismos, otra vez organizaron un intercambio de plantas locales, hicieron performances en la vereda o proyecciones en un club de bochas en desuso, de la misma manera que conciben muestras en sus museos locales.
Figuras similares a los “juguetes transformables” de Torres-García pueden ser encontradas en sus casas. Para Fuga, Proyecto Deatres construyó tales juguetes, utilizando materiales de fácil acceso e imágenes de la fauna local litoraleña. De las composiciones de Barradas, hay una única grabación. El colectivo interpretó sus notaciones musicales abstractas y se aprendió las melodías para poder tararearleas a diario. En la grabación hecha para esta exposición, pusieron particular énfasis en la cualidad rítmica del zumbido/tarareo, que eventualmente se convierte en una lectura de la historia de Cortina sobre el topo y sus siete casas.

Ursula Pokorny, Project Description, CCS Bard
Fall 2022

Two Faces of a Stone

This project stems out of my research on the architecture of private exhibition spaces and toys made by artists of the historic avant-garde. Yet, my core ambition for this project is not to shapen a theoretical or historical argument but to create a sort of stage in the gallery space.

This project will be shown alongside fifteen other proposals at the Hessel Museum from April 1 – May 28, 2023. You, as the visitor might get lost in the labyrinth of the museum and encounter gallery three or seven. There the lightning seems a bit off. The walls are see-through, opening the space, and music’s playing.
It’s a futuristic composition by Carmen Barradas, whose exceptional pieces are still performed in Uruguayan primary schools but otherwise her work has been completely overlooked. The music, an avant-gardist piece, is somewhat overwhelming. The melody catches you and a voice sets in.
Slowly, that voice becomes a rhythm until it’s a story read out loud. It might be a tale by Gabriel Sierra. An artist, who is known for his architectural manipulations in museum spaces and has a deep interest in modernist, everyday design, trying to understand the social codes it produces. The book presented here is called El Topo y la Tetera. It is the story of a mole that loses his sense of time and starts building houses, one for each day of the week.  By now, you’ve either already left the space or you’ll sit down on one of the benches. Their dimensions are peculiar and overall it is unclear what kind of objects they are. They don’t seem to be made for a regular use at the museum, nor do they require the distance of an artwork. In this space they are seating and display in one. The interdisciplinary design studio of Manuel Raeder created the benches (and also the graphic design) for this exhibition. In a way they tie this project back to my initial research of art in lived spaces. In such spaces, you encounter objects, like a chair, that fulfill a specific and expected function and transcend it at the same time.

On a higher level of the benches, there are some painted wooden forms. They suggest a certain movement; when put together, they become a figure. You imagine them to be a man, a pelican, whatsoever. They are inventive toys, open-ended in their character, with no set instructions to them. Joaquín Torres-García, the famous artist and educator, ran a small business manufacturing them in France and New York in the 1920s.The advertisement The Best American Toys next to them speaks to their object’ status as a product. In the exhibition this drawing will be shown together with Barradas’ music scores. Her annotations are not mere means to remember and share compositions. She much rather treated them as graphic pieces on their own terms. Their graphic, formal quality suddenly appears in a place you did not expect it to. If you notice it at all, it strikes you and you will look very closely.

For this exhibition, I chose works by artists from the southern cone that have an affinity to the historic avant-garde movements. Not all of them lived in 1910 or 1928, but their work is still greatly influenced by the cultural experiments of early modernism. In their multifaceted practice as educators, artists, designers, all at once, they push forward the transgression of art and life. Particularly noticeable is also that by having children in mind as their audience, they were able to realize works with an exceptional openness.
Those works speak to an experience of art that is entangled with everyday life and not restricted to an institutional museum space. My hope is, that this project will generate a situation, where you encounter an object unexpectedly and look with a lot of attention, maybe so much that you lose your sense of time and start to imagine a place around you.

Preliminary checklist

Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Hombres Blancos, c. 1928/2022

Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Tres Pájaros, c. 1922/2022

Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Pelícano y Compañía, c. 1924-25/2022

Joaquín Torres-Garcia, The Best American Toys, c. 1922

Carmen Barradas, Fabricación, 1922

Studio Manuel Raeder (Egle Petraskaite, Lucie Ducrey, Manuel Raeder) Commission for Seating/Exhibition Display/Sculpture based on Marcel Breuer «Slatted Chair», 1924

Gabriel Sierra, El Topo y la Tetera, Mexico City: Zolo Press, 2019

Instalación Museo

Fuga Santa Fe