Garage Talk: Crime Came to the Garage with Eloisa Cartonera

On October 15, 2009 the haudenschildGarage held a Garage Talk on the Spare Parts project, A Crime Has Many Stories which took place in Buenos Aires, ARgentina on November 29, 2008. The participants included Teddy Cruz (Architect, estudio teddy cruz), Juli Carson (Director, University Art Gallery, UCI), Jennifer Flores-Sternad (Curator & Critic), Maria Gomez (Eloisa Cartonera, Literary Collective, Buenos Aires), Washington Cucurto (Author and member of Eloisa Cartonera), Eloisa Haudenschild, Steve Fagin, and Monica Jovanovich. Steve Fagin and Juli Carson were moderators and respondents.

From October 16 - 18, Eloisa Cartonera traveled to Tijuana to participate in a lecture and two-day workshop in conjunction with inSite, Nortestacion, Epicentrico and the Escuela de Artes de la Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (photo by Felipe Zuniga).

A Crime Has Many Stories, is an exquisite corpse project conceptualized and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin, based on Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s short story, La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (Madwoman and the Story of a Crime, 1975). The November 29, 2008 multidisciplinary, one-day traverse of the city of Buenos Aires was plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce, Monica Jovanovich and Alejandro Ruiz.  In response to Piglia’s short story, the project generated two site-specific pieces by Argentine artists Rosalba Mirabella, Roberto Jacoby and Fernanda Laguna, and a commissioned story, El Hijo, by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto. The literary collective Eloisa Cartonera produced a limited edition Survival Kit and a catalog of the entire project.

The goal of this project was to generate a dynamic event that would work across literature, art and the city. Our hope, by joining artists from the 60s with young artists of the present and crossing the boundary of literature and fine art, was to “perform” the continuity and range of Argentine cultures at its strongest.

PARTICIPANTS

TEDDY CRUZ
Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. He obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on affordable housing in relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 1991 he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and he is currently a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego.

JULI CARSON
Juli Carson is Associate Professor in the Studio Art Department at UCI where she teaches Critical and Curatorial practice in Contemporary Art and directs the University Art Gallery. She was curator of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007). She also curated the archival exhibition accompanying Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998). Her essays on conceptualism and psychoanalysis have been published in Art Journal, Documents, October, Texte Zur Kunst and X-Tra, as well as in numerous critical anthologies. She is currently completing her forthcoming book, The Conceptual Unconscious: A Poetics of Critique.

JENNIFER FLORES STERNAD
Jennifer Flores Sternad is a critic, curator, and researcher whose work focuses on militant and public art practices, performance, and art making as a mode of research. She has done extensive research in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico with fellowships and grants from Harvard University and UCLA. She was the South American Coordinator for the international public art project The School of Panamerican Unrest and the organizer and producer of Público Transitorio, a traveling event series in L.A. that featured artists from throughout the Americas. Jennifer is currently a research fellow at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), where she is organizing an exhibition and publication on performance art in Southern California in the 1970s.

ELOISA CARTONERA
Eloísa Cartonera (www.eloisacartonera.com.ar) is a social and community-related artistic project in Buenos Aries, Argentina. The central office is a cardboard store – a place where cardboard and paper is sold – named “No hay cuchillo sin Rosas” (“There’s no knife without Roses”). There, cardboard collectors, cartoneros, exchange ideas with artists and writers. The cardboard collector is a South American phenomenon and many times there are entire families working as cartoneros. Eloísa Cartonera invents its own aesthetic; open minded and unbiased, wishing to produce reciprocal learning, fueled by creativity. Books with cardboard covers are edited on the street; these covers, painted by hand with temperas and paintbrush, are made of the cardboard that was collected in the streets. Eloisa Cartonera publishes unknown, border and vanguard texts of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru. They have a roster of world-renowned authors including Ricardo Piglia, Cesar Aira, Gonzalo Milan (Chile), and Luis Chavez (Costa Rica).

Click here for more information on A Crime Has Many Stories and to watch the commissioned video by Ricardo Piglia reading La Loca y el Relato del Crimen