Associação Cultural Videobrasil

At thirty-four years of age, Nicolás Testoni will not stop thinking of a story that took place almost two centuries before his birth: that of the city of Bahía Blanca. A former port and resort, currently a petrochemical hub and one of the main outlets for Argentine production, the municipality was founded in 1828 as a fort and, two decades later, it was crossed by a railway that linked it to the interior, in a hint of the industrial future to which it was destined. Progress forged with iron, oil, and smoke leaves a bittersweet mark in the memories of inhabitants of the vicinities of the port of Ingeniero White, the epicenter of economic activity and the fast-paced changes that took place there. 

Raised amidst stories directly linked to that reality, of people who built their lives to the motion of the tides—in a place where, nowadays, according to the artist, “the expression ‘going to the sea’ means visiting farther beaches”—, Testoni chose, as his matter of investigation, the ability of Bahía Blanca’s natives for reelaborating existence based on the effects of fast, unplanned progress. 

After living in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, where he studied communication at the School of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and worked as a trainee at the Cinema and Audio Department of the General Archive of the Nation, in 1997, and as assistant professor at the Workshop of Expression in video at the UBA, in 1999, he decided to return to his native land in order to create and live. For many artists from his city, “being a poet, a painter, an artist entails leaving Bahía Blanca and going to Buenos Aires,” he says. “I attempted the same, but achieved the opposite result.” 

Once at home, he made videos for the Museo del Puerto de Ingeniero White up until 2004. Arriving at the Ferrowhite museum and studio seemed as natural as it was obligatory: the guidelines of the institution, which aims to retrieve the history of the local population and turn it into art, were similar to what he was seeking in his artwork, upon incorporating elements ranging from documentary film to video art. 

One of Testoni’s first works is a good example of this practice. Rodolfo René Boiardini carga un bidón con agua (1999) shows a middle-aged man in a trivial moment of his daily routine. As he carries a gallon of water, Boiardini comments on episodes, ranging from fantastic to supposedly fantasized, that he witnessed from the post-World War II era to the Argentine dictatorship period; he also describes how he saw a comet cross the sky, survived epidemics, and personally met singers that fascinated him. 

The same living contact, guided by the interviewee’s spontaneity, is featured in the El puerto series, initiated in 2003. This collection of audiovisual portraits reveals the routine of those who comprise the workforce at the port’s companies, a day-to-day ridden with obstacles stemming from generally unsatisfactory working conditions. 

Canto de aves pampeanas, one of Testoni’s most recent pieces, was awarded at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_ Videobrasil last year, and presents a melancholic and critical reflection on human intervention in the rhythm of nature. 

The video combines audio from an old documentary film, comprised of typical Argentine bird sounds, and present-day recordings of the Bahía Blanca landscape, made by Testoni. The award won him an artistic residency from the Videobrasil Residency Programme, at the Instituto Sacatar, in Ilha de Itaparica, Bahia, in 2008.