Marcela Cabutti · 16.07.2021 - 22.09.2021

Balcarce, topographic memories of a landscape

curatorial text

José Jeremías Castro

From the tectonic Barroso, towards an imaginary geography

When one begins to walk can almost always observe how the stones map the paths, like traces in dispositions that by dint of traffic take their place. These scene evokes countless metaphors – of the walker, of the walk, of the stones there. But let’s take one that doubles the imagination in its quest for an object: the thrown stone. There, the wild ludism intersects the aggressive gesture in an act and exercise of historical constancy.

Taken stone

Thrown stone

Hurt stone

Fallen stone

We can say that the stones – stone-tracet, stone-signal – assault space, arranging, pointing, mapping forces and powers in a rather curious way: through a metaphorical spell that solidifies in images and gestures the rudimentary unleashing of the object. Thus, the cataclysmic act transfigures the crack and passage from rock to stone, into landscape.

There are those who ever wondered how stones are reproduced. Well, we can think that the countless figures that they arouse also make them transport of images. They are leaving and putting scenes in series. These are imagos that persist in their weight and that transfigure a memory of tectonic folds. Where its material solidifies and there is a rough cooperation between time, distances – which terrify human scales – and the mineral grain: petrification.

Cut stone

Ground stone

Blown stone

Painted stone

The imago insists. The myth of turning into stone and the only imaginable and horrifying geological eternalization. It returns, its weight returns but with another gravity. It gravitates our idea on a fantasy rocky dermal surface, which we can almost feel. Time and memory in the sensitivity of touch, in stones and minerals, in the use of their lost jargon. Tectonic memory insists, in its folds of time, from fossil pages. But finally, in them the emptiness and the excess of meanings.

The rocks that fall, that continue to fall, and that in their slow crumbling create figures, are the fruits of the desert covered by the steep and rustic veil of appearing. The stone is taken again, but now from its unbearable presence, the poetic power. Like this it is thrown into unthinkable distances like an aerial stone. A lapidary gesture: the weight screaming and threatening its target.

Carved stone

Sharpened stone

Thrown stone

Hurt stone

A stone-figure, a stone-sign. A lapidary thought we said: think through thrown stones. Projected, thrown, through the air. As an arrow it resists time and sculpts an imaginary face: that of death, and also its stony sound continues to inhabit and enchant the desert. That is the hard seduction of it for an impossible physics, the fiery presence of the border and the hidden in a sigh of the soul. The stony breath of sounding stones, hissing stones, inhaling stones. Thus the pneuma of return, fossil breath and vital breath, restores the inorganic.

The marked stone and which marks is the image multiplier metaphor. Poetic stone, encourages and insists, makes worlds. Perhaps the gesture of intervention meditates on how to make that stone understandable; or also, in the way of its secret alchemy. And maybe that’s the thought. The weight yielding to the hands of the one who makes a stone by vice. Of the one who takes it, of the one who throws it away. Of who throws it and with it launches an unpronounceable grammar.

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