Survival

Bone, El Bolson

Gaucho en el Bosque, El Bolson 

Si uno aguanta, es gaucho bruto;                                   

si no aguanta, es gaucho malo,

Dele azote, dele palo,
porque es lo que el necesita!
De todo el que nacio gaucho
esta es la suerte


Vamos, suerte, vamos juntos
dende que juntos nacimos,
y ya que juntos vivimos
sin podernos dividir,
yo abrire con mi cuchillo
el camino pa seguir 

If you put up with it, you're an ignorant fool---
if you don't, you're a hard case.
Go on---beat him, lash him!
that's all he's good for . . .
For anyone born a gaucho
this is his cursed fate.

So come on fate---let's go together
since together we were born;
and as we live together
and can never separate,
I'll use my knife to clear
the path we have to take

--The Gaucho Martin Fierro, Jose Hernandez

Pen and Knife

Martin Fierro, the infamous gaucho written into reality by Jose Hernandez, speaks of a life of loneliness, hardship, and danger through his story. His identity evokes an image that I saw still alive today in the Argentine consciousness, both in the city and the country. From what I have seen of las pampas, the plains of Argentina, there is a quality of the austere landscape that has imprinted itself into the figure of the gaucho--- rugged, untamed, mysterious, harsh.

The symbol of the knife that Martin Fierro refers back to over and over throughout the text stimulated my own imagination. What does it mean to hold a knife, for personal survival? Dependence only on ones' self--- fear of others. Fierro builds himself upon the ideals of self-reliance, leaving Hernandez himself, the writer of this fiction, with his own air of mystery. Did Hernandez see himself as a gaucho in his own right, using his pen, instead of his knife to lament the trials of life--- was there defense, against threats in his own world, that his pen provided?

These ponderings brought me back to classic assertions of power--- in the past, it seems some have chosen the power of words to resolve conflict , while others have found actions of physical violence necessary to survive the complexities of humanity. Simplistically, I have represented these forces as a wooden, ink pen     (carved by a knife) and a knife ( drawn by the ink pen). These two, seemingly opposing instruments, often work with, rather than against each other.

In Between

Half of a roof
El Bolson, Argentina

It seems easiest to start backwards when introducing yourself. Where you are from. Where you have been. Who you have been---up until the point that you begin introducing yourself. It almost creates a strange liminal space between you and your audience. Between them not knowing you at all and a beginning, as they start to see you as a person with a past.

For me, meeting places is much like meeting a person. Reacting to what can be seen, physical, tangible features, is often the most powerful part of being in a new place. But once you are acquainted with a landscape, these physicalities, once simply described, only add to the complexity of the place. Nuances begin to develop as familiarity with a place grows, and meanings are attached to landmarks, street signs, and paths up a hill. My walk back home, a well-trudged route, has its own melody. The chatter as I pass Brewed Awakening Cafe is the background noise, the pull on the back of my calves walking up the steep incline is the sigh that intermittently escapes my mouth, and the creak of the big, wooden door as I enter is the resounding tone left in my ears as I tromp up the stairs, signaling my return home. If I take the same walk up Euclid years from now, memories of this routine may rush back into my head.

The imagined journey we have started through Argentina lies somewhere in the liminal ' in between' space of an introduction. We have been introduced, yet we haven't gotten a chance to really get to know each other. The work that follows is my contemplation of this place and its music, often started as I sit looking out my window.

Between Fog and Snow

Lluvia: Buenos Aires to El Bolson

Bell and latch, El Bolson

Walk through mist, El Bolson

Frosty waters, El Bolson

With the lluvia of Argentina on my mind, I walked out of class into the tickling mist of Berkeley rain. As I went down the hill, I watched the rain water collect in the gutters on the side of the street and rush past.

Rain seems to be a blurry thing, creeping in with the fog, hardening into hail, then softening to snow again. The time I spent in Argentina was during the late hours of autumn and the beginnings of early winter. It never rained while I was there, rather the weather changed disguises from cold nights in the city to heavy cloaks of fog in the countryside to snow on the mountaintops. Looking back at my photographs, I was overcome with the power of rain, the rain that never came, yet loomed in the clouds and the frost and turned to snow. This promise of rain, or of weather, had a weight, which I felt differently in the city and the country.

As I put this work together, I had this weight in mind, the ability of rain to allow for a pause, whether that means a retreat from the usual sidewalk traffic, or a meditation about the transformation of a barren plain into a city, or of water freezing into snow.