Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The subject matter and setting of your work are life near the port of Bahía Blanca. How did you realize that you were interested in approaching this realm?

I am not certain that the boundaries of that realm are so well defined, but if I were to try and define them, I would have to start by saying that Bahía Blanca is one thing and its port, Ingeniero White, is another. Bahía is a Mediterranean city by the sea. The port belongs to the city, and yet the city finds a way for it to stay out of the imagery and the daily routine of most its inhabitants. Finding the sea in Bahía Blanca is difficult. You might spend your entire life and still not be able to. When I was little, the expression “going to the sea” meant visiting farther beaches. Years later, going past a few blocks to find the port of Ingeniero White ended up being a considerably more complex task, of which these videos are certainly a part. That which the unique relation between Bahía and its port denies, or hides, is not just the possibility of gazing at a landscape, but also that of understanding a history through it. Bahía Blanca is a key component of the mythic image of Argentina as the “world's barn.” Founded in 1828 as a military fort, Bahía developed in a close connection to the genesis, in the country, of what we now know as the “agricultural exporter model.” The process included the driving away and extermination of native people by the State, the installing of railways, ports, and plants owned by European companies (particularly British), and the arrival of a huge mass of impoverished migrants coming from Italy, Spain, or the Balkans. 
Thus, we could say that, through its port, Bahía Blanca becomes connected with the history of the country and of the world, and that this is not a phenomenon typical of the more-or-less recent “globalization,” but rather of a process that has been going on for a long time. My work, just as those of other artists from the city, aims to trace the footprints back to that history. As you see, each item in this small realm seems to possess a secret connection to distant places and remote times.

You studied and worked in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then you returned to Bahía Blanca. In which way did your experience in the capital alter or deepen your views on the reality of your hometown? 

I suppose that living in Buenos Aires was a needed introduction for me to start taking interest in my own place of origin. As you know, the often conflicting relation between Buenos Aires and the other regions of the country—that which natives of Buenos Aires call “the interior”—is at the core of a large share of our history as a nation. Buenos Aires is, or presents itself as if it were, the country's great city and great port. In other words, it is, on the one hand, the obligatory reference to other cities and, on the other hand, it monopolizes our relation with foreign countries. That is why many people from Bahía Blanca feel imaginarily closer to that port (Buenos Aires) than they do to their own. To them, being “a poet,” “a painter,” “an artist” entails leaving Bahía Blanca and going to the “capital.” I attempted the same, but achieved the opposite result. 

Your videos always touch upon the relation between environmental preservation, economic development, and social progress. In one of them, an interviewee says something to the effect of: “I wish that there were both (industrial progress and the beach), but that would be impossible.” Is it possible to preserve natural wealth and tap into its economic possibilities, or are the two incompatible?
 

The person that you mentioned is Atilio Miglianelli, who worked all his life as a diver at the former plant of General San Martín and passed away last year. He bore witness to a time when work and life could walk hand in hand in Ingeniero White. He used to work at the port and, at the same time, he was a “Mr. Blue Coast” type; he would spend hours and hours under the sun at local resorts. As he used to say, those were places you could take a snack or a thermal bottle and your chimarrão [typical Argentine beverage] to, and spend your entire day there. For reasons that would take too long to explain, things have now changed to the point in which it is ridiculous, near impossible to think of a worker at the railway, the port, or the petrochemical hub spending summer with his family a few meters away from the place he works at.
Atilio might have answered your question by saying that wealth is never “natural,” that it always entails the existence of workers like him; and that not only the relation between economic production and the environment has changed, and not for the best, but also the relation between capital and work and, along with it, the resources of a community for inhabiting its place without destroying it. 
Atilio misses the old resorts, but what he misses the most is the free time and the relative economic well-being that used to allow an entire population to spend their day in such places. Each new enterprise that settles in Ingeniero White these days employs less people than the previous one. When faced with a precarious, uncertain labor perspective, people need to work more. 
On the other hand, a major aspect of that impoverishment has to do with the ability of inhabitants to organize their community life, which has been decimated. Atilio used to work at the plant, but at the same time he used to manage, free of charge, the pool at Club Puerto Comercial, which was filled up on a weekly basis with water from the Bahía Blanca river mouth. In other words: the relation between economic production and environmental preservation here is based on the unsolved relation between production and distribution of wealth, or between economic and social development. Despite what the discourse of politicians and businessmen tries to convince us of, those terms are not necessarily synonymous with one another. 

The El puerto series displays in a very dynamic, brief, and blunt manner the reality of different characters linked to industrial activity in Bahía Blanca. How did you approach those people?

El puerto has a lot to do with my work at Ferrowhite, a museum dedicated to recording and disseminating the memory of local workers. The videos are part of a lengthy process; the interview is usually the starting point for a relationship that lasts long, in some cases. People such as Atilio or Pedro Marto went from interviewees to being part of everyday life in our museum. We interviewed Pedro three or four years ago. Now, he is the protagonist of Marto concejal [Councilor Marto], a theater play that tells the story of his life. What started out as a video ended up as theater. Theater to me resulted in a radical mode of collaborative documentary, in which the editing work is done along with the interviewee, on his own memory and body.
Ferrowhite is a very unique space in which history, as a field of knowledge, meets practices and reflections from the field of arts. To that extent, I believe that the El puerto series explores the unlikely connection between museum and television, i.e., between an institution that seeks to expand our experience of time, and a medium that, by means of its instantaneous quality, reduces that experience to the point where it becomes almost null. Each episode of the El puerto series toys with being television—and the television rhetoric is useful, as it enables for a broader, nonspecialist audience to be attracted. This, however, is a slower type of television, one that has no channels or broadcasting, that propagates from hand to hand, and has dozens of hours of recordings behind each minute edited. 

There is a strong documentary character to these works, which focus on people who live in precarious social conditions, yet solve their problems with disposition and, at times, good humor. Documentary, social portrait, and video art: Is this the mixture at the core of your work?

That is true, things do get mixed. And yet I do not think that the mix leads to some type of essence. At least, that is not the intention. If the mix stabilizes, then it gets converted into a recipe, a means for imposing a fair proportion across the heterogeneity of the elements at play. The aim, on the contrary, is to stir up, at least a little, the predictabilities typical of a given genre or field, by transposing them or crossing them with others. A video like Canto de aves pampeanas can be understood as an ecological discourse of sorts, typical of a certain documentary tradition, but it can also be approached from the specificity of video as art, if we pay attention, for example, to the coexistence of distinct temporalities within a single plan. On Canto de aves... each image is comprised of fragments from different scenes, fragments that are spatially adjacent to each other, but far apart in terms of time. To me, these approaches have to do with a seemingly distant genre, landscape painting. It is in the picturesque landscape that the tale of nature’s transformation by capitalism and the quest for new modes of representation for time and space intermingle. Perhaps Canto de aves pampeanas could be thought of as a modest attempt at revisiting, using different means, tasks and concerns that once pertained to painters. 
Those videos are but attempts at making a place inhabitable. Therefore, what they want to learn from the “survivors” that they portray is more than just a plot: it is logic, a way of doing things. It is said that in the older constructions in the port of Ingeniero White, one can still find material brought in by Ferrocarril del Sud. Surplus metal sheets and wood from packaging used for building improvised houses that would last for over a century. This is not as odd as it seems to be. From the perspective of industrial engineers nowadays, Ingeniero White would be a residue that the present stage of development of logistical science is able to suppress. Nevertheless, it is difficult to precise how much of the lives of the port’s inhabitants still depends on that same stealthy ability, the faculty of operating with scraps so as to establish unexpected combinations among them.