“Being True to the Event: Animating History in Buenos Aires’ City of the Dead”
Paper presented at Happening-Performance-Event
Performance Studies International, New York University, 2007
Argentine history is plagued with extreme responses to dead bodies. Corpses, from the exiled bones of dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas to the roaming body of Evita, continue to make themselves present. Throughout Argentinean history, antagonistic groups have attested to the force of the absent/present, turning to the tangible cadaver as a site of ideological confrontation and symbolic confluence.
Things have not changed. A recent installation, staged in la Recoleta, Buenos Aires’ most famous cemetery, provoked an outburst of public opinion and action. In 2005, Eduardo Molinari, a visual artist, and Nicolás Varchausky, an experimental musician, responded to a call from the municipality of the city of Buenos Aires for interdisciplinary, site-specific works to be part of the 5th International Theater Festival. Molinari and Varchausky submitted a proposal for a sound and image installation that would take place in the Recoleta cemetery, the luxurious “city of the dead” where many Argentinean historical figures have permanent residency. Performed in the cemetery, the place where history apparently stops, Varchausky’s and Molinari’s piece, Tertulia, proposed an audiovisual exploration of the relationship between history, memory, and artistic practice.
The title, Tertulia [literally, “gathering”], refers to the salon meetings that were common in colonial Buenos Aires amongst the illustrated upper class. A word associated with elementary school History lessons, tertulia evokes a space of dialogue and deliberation. In Varchausky’s and Molinari’s project, the idea was to make the dead speak, linking not only past and present but also memory and imagination.
Originally, Tertulia was supposed to take place for a total of nine hours over three nights, an unusual timeframe since the cemetery is normally open until 6 p.m. The piece involved 40 tombs that are the dwellings of some of the most famous national figures. For this nocturnal performance, Molinari placed on the site of the chosen tombs multilayered collages exhibited in banners, posters, and backlit boxes.
These visual interventions in the cemetery’s grid of narrow aisles linked disparate events and were accompanied by Varchausky’s soundtracks. Each tomb broadcast an original composition of three hours of sound bites. The resulting 120 hours of audio and the visual materials all originated from documents that are part of the artists’ personal archives which in their work occupy a central place as material source and as political practice. Molinari’s archive, the Archivo caminante [The Itinerant Archive], is composed of 40 boxes of historical images, press clippings, and the like. Varchausky’s project, P.A.I.S— an acronym that means “country” and it is spelled “In-Situ Art Project”—includes bits of political speeches, police radio dispatches, and excerpts from old movies, amongst other materials.
Molinari and Varchausky appropriated these documents, that represent an understanding of history based on set events, and they rearranged them as provocations, offering another account that is not pedagogical but performative, where, paraphrasing Homi Bhabha, people shift from being the “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy to being the “subjects” of a process of signification. According to Bhabha, while the pedagogical entails a linear temporality, the performative rehearses a repetitious and recursive strategy (Bhabha 1990: 297). In Tertulia, Varchausky and Molinari applied montage, visually and aurally, as a legitimate technique to activate history, to make history become event.
One of the cemetery’s most visited sites, the tomb of Argentina’s former First Lady, Evita, was intervened by close-ups of her hands and of her smile which had in their reverse side images of Rodrigo Ratto, director of the International Monetary Fund. 
Depending on which direction the participants came from, they could engage a completely different side of the image: either Evita’s fragments excerpted from her public appearances advocating for Argentina’s autonomy, or its reverse, Argentina’s current dependency on international lenders.
The tomb of Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of Argentina’s forefathers, famous for his book Facundo o Civilización y barbarie [Civilization and Barbarism], showcased a collage that included images of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Apart from the fact that, in Argentina, September 11 commemorates Sarmiento’s death and it has been instituted as Teacher’s Day because of Sarmiento’s commitment to formal education, the montage also alludes to the continuities between Sarmiento’s fundamentalist version of civilization that relied on the extermination of aboriginals, and the war on “civilization’s other” prompted by the events that took place on September 11 of 2001.
Tertulia proposed an open structure in which history and memory are not associated with given facts but with the activity of drifting. Taking up the cemetery with its narrow paths and its neoclassical monuments, Molinari and Varchausky invited participants to engage with a constellation of images and sounds through which remembering and forgetting are activities that take place, operations that happen only in a particular space. Molinari’s “itinerant archive” was offered to aesthetic contemplation and historical consideration in the territory of the moving spectator within what can be thought of as a “vortex of memory,” defined by Joseph Roach as “a spatially induced carnival [where] memory reveals itself as imagination” (1996: 28-9).
Treated as an scattered archive, Molinari’s black and white backlit images functioned as the negative of history, in a sort of spiritual séance that unveiled relations between past and present, high and pop culture, local and foreign events, and individual and collective scrutiny. The audiovisual documents, placed in contiguous relation with the dead, disrupted the linear stability of that which we understand to be history’s territory: the images in Tertulia unearthed the dead, and the presence of the corpses troubled the stillness of the images. The sound worked as a key element framing and grounding the participant’s experience.
Alerted by the Buenos Aires’ International Festival’s media release, that announced Tertulia as “a sonic and visual intervention that will transform the necropolis into a polyphonic labyrinth of sound, voices, images, and veils” [una intervención sonora y visual que transformará a la necrópolis en un laberinto polifónico de sonidos, voces, imágenes y velos...”], the families of some of Recoleta’s illustrious inhabitants, grouped in the Association of Friends of the Cemetery [Asociación Amigos del Cementerio], resorted to the Court of Law to ban Tertulia from taking place. The aristocratic families claimed that the municipal cemetery was a sacred space, and they argued that Tertulia, or any other artistic event for that matter, was not only out of place in the cemetery but it was also sacrilegious and disrespectful to the dead. The legal petition emphasized the fact that the installation involved setting sound and light equipment and props during the cemetery’s regular hours, and that that activity would disturb the normal routine of the cemetery and also jeopardize its invaluable patrimony. But, amongst all the different aspects presented in their argument against Tertulia, the sound part of the piece was at the core of the protestors’ indignation. Carlos Ortiz de Rosas—a relative of 19th Century dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, and former ambassador of Argentina in the US—stated that the cemetery was an inappropriate space for the installation because “ningún ruido tolera un muerto” [The dead do not tolerate any noise].
Revolving around issues of public and private memory, and, more importantly, around the question of the contested authoritativeness of experimental art to embark on the task of nation narration, the debate that the piece installed in the media brought a new dimension to the importance of the artists’ contribution to Argentinean society: that of becoming a catalyst for a diagnosis of the force of the performative within contemporary Argentina. It was precisely the artists’ dynamic and anti-dogmatic approach to history that irritated the country’s conservative sector. For many opponents, Varchausky’s and Molinari’s project was dangerous because it was cryptic and opaque. Some even claimed that, if certain relationships did not happen historically, they were not supposed to happen artistically, through the visual and sonic montage that the protestors took as another sacrilege, now towards national history.
After the legal battle was over, and the judge determined that the alleged offense to the memory of the dead was not sufficient cause to ban the event, one thousand people took part in Tertulia on Saturday September 24, from 9 to 12 p.m. In order to ensure that property would not be damaged, the festival’s organizers only allowed the public to circulate within the perimeter of the participating graves (the cemetery has a total of 350,000 tombs.) Spectators had to show IDs and leave their personal belongings in an improvised coat check. Hundreds remained outside, hoping to get in so that they could witness the “sacrilege” that had turned an artistic gesture into a media scandal.
That night, while Tertulia was in progress, and people lined up trying to access the cemetery, family representatives stood outside, holding candles and banners reading “El cementerio es un lugar sagrado” [The cemetery is a sacred space.] They also prayed and sang the national anthem in a united harmonic voice. They constituted another performance, one that all those who could not entre the cemetery to see Tertulia were able to enjoy. The outside space was clearly divided: lined up by the cemetery’s walls, supporters and voyeurs, and parallel to them, the row of protestors. Between these two lines, as a sort of connecting tissue, young journalists with cameras registered the oppositional act and interviewed opponents in what ended up being another tertulia, about religion, and due respect for the dead, and about history as still life. Some protestors suggested that the event should have taken place in another cemetery, and, they even mentioned the fact that Varchausky’s Jewish heritage made Tertulia more suitable for a Jewish cemetery.
The performative nature of Tertulia, an engagement of nation narration that sets historical documents in space, in proximity to their protagonists’ last dwelling and opened to public scrutiny, brings up the question of memory as a practice of fixation. History lessons learned by heart are in this case restaged from a different place that challenges the idea of repetition without change. Against the backdrop of the many practices that enact a “true” national being by fixing the nation to a series of events located in the past, Tertulia reclaimed in/famous corpses to offer a new fiction in which participants shifted from being the docile listeners of national grand narratives, to being authors of other kinds of narratives, imagined, shared, and confrontational. Through an aesthetic engagement with the documentary and the fictive, participants carried out a performance of storytelling and meaning-making that was facilitated by the elusive nature of many of the installation’s images and juxtapositions. Showing that historical claims do not prescribe, Varchausky’s and Molinari’s site-specific piece, restored a sense of history from below, a shared history in which “to remember” meant “to imagine.”
References:
Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.
Roach. Joseph. Cities of the Dead. Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996.
Reseñas en español:
Proyecto Cruce – “‘Tertulia’: La memoria como organismo vivo” por Diego Braude
“Tertulia” por Alejandro Rozitchner
Coda: Tertulia in Zagreb. In 2009, Molinari and Varchausky installed a version of Tertulia in the City Cemetry Mirogoj.
