Arrival/Departure, Entry/Exit, Inside/Outside. Polar opposites, these concepts refer, tersely, to one of the conditions of vital contemporary experience: the displacements created by different kinds of journeys, migrations and exile. Displacements which are very current, and also engraved on the memory of humanity whose history can be told within the logic of these movements, whether of people, ideas, works or actions...
An abandoned chimney, vestige of the industrial architecture of modernity in a port stripped of its original functions, in a city founded on rich cultural exchange, as was Buenos Aires. The riverside facade of the old Immigrants Hotel. Both are the catalyst for this work by Pablo Reinoso, which presents an installation which we only see “from the other side.” The paradox of this condition, which is both limit and frontier, arises from a place that here takes on a poetic and metaphorical cast. An assembly of trunks from different origins are intertwined, in an uncertain attempt to reach a destination.
The work involves two materials, metal and wood. Wood, its unmistakable presence, clearly a tree trunk, metal a potent link, connection, and support. The wood from the tree recalls the tension of life in danger, nature under threat, and embodies the identities of past and present migrants whose histories were imbued with the urgency to find somewhere. Forced into displacement, seeking themselves elsewhere, they ended up constituting themselves in the otherness of what was not theirs.
Pablo Reinoso’s work is built within the framework of tensions stretched taut by the ambiguity of meaning, and reveals itself in the confines of a real space, one of the abandoned warehouses on the esplanade of Puerto Madero. It beckons to an unusual audience of varied origin, inviting them to stop and take note of the suspended movement that reorganizes the landscape around them, to recognize how it impedes passage and acknowledge the questions it raises about the conditions of a present founded on mobility and uncertainty.
The project thus becomes a poetic element of the quest to include other points of view, opening up the gaze exchanged between people, and fostering progress towards the establishment of a contemporary humanism.
