Cities to come text collage. Alicia Chillida, Rogelio Lopez Cuenca

Astilhãografo /Chapping (2001-2002), is the metaphor with which Rogelio López Cuenca responds to the invitation Metropolitan Iconographies of the XXV Bienal de São Paulo; it is an imaginary artifact, a "machine célibataire" whose job is to write about the wounds of the city. In this splintered writing, the city appears as a sum of failed allusions, accidents, chaos and chance. The installation functions as a synthesis and sum of preceding works, and just as in the case of No(w)here. The work of López Cuenca, which is his closest antecedent, hosts borrowings, transfers and migrations from within the artistic language itself, which merges, in this case, with a whole set of new meanings and images that bring the poetic and political reality of Brazil. López Cuenca's work thus shows its power and vitality of theoretical and methodological renewal, by establishing an open, nomadic system, a continuous whole susceptible of endless growth.

Astilhãografo

proposes an unforeseen route
a journey
a series of passing traces
transitory passages

from the situationist drifts to the traces of
the random Duchampian proposals (Network Stoppages)
to the traces of industrialization.
The train narrates the economic history of the country:
over the paths of the slaves the railroad line is laid
for the transportation of minerals, sugar and coffee.

As, later on, the subway lines.
The same as the Equator line
(which as guita is also thread, rope and money)
separates South from North, poor from rich.
Machine
from line reta,
retilínea (sewing machines:
one of the main silos of black labor).

Astilhãografo en a poem
as Octavio Paz wanted,
for the public disorientation
... The unpredictability of the journey, the confusion and the dispersion of the roads,
the randomness of the stops, the uncertainty of the nights, the asymmetry of the
all routes.
... a parade of battlefields, past, present or future.
... a Noteentiendo,
... but this afternoon ... you may know who I am.

... travelers find in the unknown the same tedium they have left at home
(Claudio Magris)

You will find no new places, no other seas,
The town will follow you.
(Cavafis)

The viewer walks through a free-standing architecture that is located in an area of maximum flow and constant traffic, inside the Pavilion of the architect Oscar Niemeyer in Ibirapuera Park. Two differentiated fields trace, through two pre-existing visual and narrative elements, the dividing line between the two basic spaces of urban culture: the house and the street, the PUBLIC represented through the metropolitan transport line and outer space signaling systems and the PRIVATE represented by the real estate agency advertising and word-of-mouth advertising. The permeable character of the area translates into a montage in which the line of communication is assimilated to the idea of the thread. For the passerby, as happens in the city, advertising breaks into the landscape and configures the limits, the vision is fragmented and interrupted by virtue of the juxtaposition of public (interior) and private (exterior) images. Circulation materializes between these broken and open spaces, in this "continuous drift" the fact of crossing these obstacles constitutes an experience that conjugates and assimilates the opposites: inside-outside, inclusion-exclusion, house-street, roof-outside, stay-stop, stop-pass.

Astilhãografo is a work open to borrowings, transfers and migrations of language, its sources are a dense web of quotations ranging from European and American literature, philosophy, anthropology, travelers' books, historians, journalistic texts, popular music. Marx, Pound, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Pessoa or Maiakovski, Cendrars or Marinetti, Cavafis, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Virilio, De Certau, Chatwin, Augé, as well as songs by Chico César, Caetano Veloso or Noel Rosa; and the same as phrases heard or read in the media, in the street or references to the Russian avant-garde or Duchamp, elements of colloquial language, fragments of hymns, slogans, and the ideology conveyed by sayings and set phrases.

Astilhãografo seeks to use some forms to speak of others: to construct a work that incorporates its own theoretical text, a poem that is at the same time an essay on writing: a collage, a weft of quotations from texts and images that illustrate each other, that disprove each other, that are activated in a new context. Visual quotations from consumerist advertising rhetoric, Situationism, public signage, press photography, the iconography of fashion and leisure magazines.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. General Secretariat for International Cooperation and Ibero-America. Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas, Madrid, 2002).