Travel, movements, landscapes
A travel experience involves estrangement. Traveling means inscribing the body in a geographical and symbolic movement where the coordinates that organize and serve as reference to the everyday landscape are affected and disoriented in the stability of their meaning frameworks. Every trip involves loss and discontinuity, but also the possibility of amazement and the risk of the unknown. It is a practice that decenters the routines settled in the bodies to turn them into the transit territory where the signs of the culture of origin clash with those of the place of destination.
Leopoldo Maler’s production is permeated by the circumstances surrounding his trip to London in the 1960s. His work was produced in the London context but, in turn, it cannot be dissociated from the clashes of meaning derived from the fact that the Argentine artist had settled in that city. In 1971 Maler exhibited Crane Ballet at the Camden Festival of Music, in which three performers lifted by cranes made a series of movements in the air on the basis of a choreography created by him.
In 1970 Norberto Puzzolo started working as a photojournalist and documented the convulsed political scenario of those years. He photographed the Ezeiza series on June 20, 1973, amidst a massacre triggered by groups of right-wing Peronists who opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd gathering near the airport to welcome Perón after eighteen years of exile.
His interest in ancient cultures, historical research and archaeology led Leandro Katz to a long trip around Latin America, which ended in 1965 in New York, where he settled. In 1972 he traveled to Samarkand, Central Asia, where he photographed the Ulugh Beg Observatory, built in the 15th century. As a continuation of his project entitled 21 Columnas del Lenguaje (21 Columns of Language), Katz established a virtual connection between the observatory and the tomb of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal (Pakal “the Great”), located at Palenque, Mexico.
Between 1972 and 1982, Carlos Ginzburg traveled through the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa as a “traveling artist”. The series of photographs taken in Penang and Borobudur are part of the material from his trip to Southeast Asia during 1979. In each of his trips, Ginzburg photographed himself next to historic monuments and sites, appropriating the tourist picture device for himself to turn mock or staged poses into an artistic operation.
Fernando Davis