the awkward phase of argentinizing
reflections on art and "sol y dar y dad"
Two weeks ago marked half a year living in Buenos Aires. When I first arrived, I had been considering the six-month mark as a checkpoint at which I’d consider returning to the United States. As I write this, though, it feels as though I got here just last week. It hasn’t been nearly enough time. Although I feel that I’ve accomplished a lot, much of what I’ve done is set foundations, seeds sown but not yet reaped.
I’m proud to say that the Argentine accent has thoroughly infiltrated my speech. This results in the following interaction occurring almost every time I meet someone and speak some Spanish, usually after telling them my name (Casey is decidedly not Argentine):
“Pero vos de dónde sos?”
“De New York.”
“Posta? Pero hablás re bien!”
“Gracias!”
I say proud, even though to outsiders (read: me, before getting here) the accent sounds a bit frenetic and silly, and many native Spanish speakers may read the above conversation and not recognize half of the words. Aside from the voseo and the way that Argentines shush their ll/y sounds and gesticulate wildly, there’s also a vocabulary of hundreds of words called lunfardo that largely derive from Neapolitan Italian (which is where my ancestors on my mom’s side are from). It’s also just fun.1
Of course, I’m not Argentine, and although my Spanish has improved un montón, I’m not fully accustomed. Yesterday the cashier told me my coffee and pastries would be $7.580 and I drew a total blank (numbers are hard). There’s a bulk health food store with jars of powders and legumes lining the walls two blocks from my apartment that I still haven’t entered because it gives me anxiety. I’ve had to turn back home several times, tail between my legs, after forgetting yet again that many places are closed on Mondays for some reason.
Similarly, when I go out to boliches, the parties that kick off at around 1:30 a.m. and don’t end until the sun has fully risen, I often find myself smiling self-consciously and fake-singing along to songs to which my friends know all the words. So many years of pop culture to catch up on!
It is partially this sense of insecurity, knowing that I don’t totally belong yet (though I’m working on it!), that brings me, sheepishly, to the museum.
I could say that I have always loved museums, but that would be a lie. My mom used to drag me and my brother to MoMA as kids when we would’ve rather gone to the Museum of Natural History. I first confessed, begrudgingly, that I liked some modern art when I was around 12. The Barnett Newman art book that she triumphantly bought then still sits on the coffee table.
I’m only a tiny bit ashamed to admit that I take pleasure in the snobbery of museum-going-as-performance, even if I’m going to the museum alone.2 You can’t deny that it is satisfying to approach a painting and be able to recognize who painted it based on a distinct style that you’ve seen before. Or whispering with my mom about how this piece reminds me of x, at which other museum did we see this artist?
It’s not as if I lose this brace completely going to the museums here in Buenos Aires, since many art movements are transnational and, at the end of the day, art is art, just as food is food and music is music. How we experience them sensorily is a baseline commonality that we share as human beings, just as sharing and exchanging those facets of our cultures that we hold dear enriches our collective spirit.
At the same time, though, we exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us.3 Latin American art, like any art, is a product of its time and its history. Purely attending to this art from a universal (or, god forbid, a gringo) perspective risks missing out on much of what it has to say. Into the museum with me, along with museum visits and art history knowledge I’ve accumulated since age 12, I carry the conversations I’ve had with porteños over the last several months, or articles I’ve consumed over the course of my foray into local journalism and my ongoing cultural education.
My twin brother visited me here in Buenos Aires a few weeks ago. Naturally, I dragged him to various spots across the city that I like, which included the Centro Cultural Recoleta, situated directly next to the Recoleta Cemetery where we saw the tomb of Eva Perón among other important Argentines. The Centro Cultural, one of many located in various neighborhoods across Buenos Aires, is a perfect example of a third place, a space distinct from the home or workplace where people can enter freely to join an informal atmosphere that encourages conversation and community participation. I’ve visited several times to find people — often younger than me, based on looks — dancing, playing ping pong, reading poetry, or just hanging out.
Centro Cultural Recoleta regularly hosts concerts and art exhibitions, and when I brought Luc along, they were showing an exhibition of art from the 1950s movement Grupo Joven (“Young Group”), an association of young artists who, following WWII, distanced themselves from the Argentine artistic orthodoxy of the time period (its founder, Víctor Magariños D., dropped out of art school).
In the crude, geometric abstractions that these young artists produced and even used as a code language to communicate with one another, I saw the mathematical grids of De Stijl.4 I later learned that Magariños D. spent years in Paris (as many artists during that period were wont to do), where he developed a close relationship with Georges Vantongerloo, a contemporary of the much-better-known Piet Mondrian, who epitomized that style.
After checking out this exhibition and grabbing coffee from the café inside the cultural center, we walked to the Museo de Bella Artes, also in Recoleta. I had gone once before, in November, when I was still relatively new to the city and seeing Argentine modern art for one of the first times. During that first visit, I saw one of the most fascinating and chilling exhibitions I’d ever seen, an immersive panorama presenting a bleak, dystopian landscape alluding to both past and future. The artwork and its accompanying handmade books by Daniel Santoro, which further laid out his cosmovisión and philosophy, paid homage to the Borges stories that I had read and translated in high school Spanish class.
This time around, that exhibition was no longer on display, but we perused the permanent collection, which ranges from expressionism to contemporary art. As we walked through each of the familiar rooms, I noticed — in the paintings that I recognized from my first visit — some of the names and styles that we had just seen in the Grupo Joven exhibition. It gave me some satisfaction to revisit those paintings with a bit more understanding and context, fitting together some of the scattered puzzle pieces in my mind.
Whether it was Mondrian or Borges or the exhibition I had seen earlier that same day, I could find some foothold to anchor my perception of what I was seeing, each of which felt like a small victory whether my interpretation was even “correct” or not. As I consider these experiences, though, I wonder if my approach is sound — if my instinct to find a heuristic for these new inputs, processing them in terms that are familiar to me, is helping me or holding me back.5 Or is it inevitable?
A recent museum visit that impacted me profoundly was at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA) in mid-January.6 Their featured exhibition at the time was called Soñar el agua: una retrospectiva del futuro (“Dreaming water: a retrospective of the future”) by Cecilia Vicuña, a Chilean artist who has been active since the late 1960s to the present. Vicuña lived in exile during the Pinochet regime and put down roots in Buenos Aires following the return of democracy to Argentina in 1984.
I was originally going to dedicate this entire post to Vicuña and her work, but it got away from me a bit. In 1967, she wrote the No Manifesto and advocated for no-hacer (“not-doing”) as an action, an act of resistance. At the same time, she toyed with what she called “the precarious,” small sculptures made of natural materials that she would place on the Chilean beaches to be swept away by the rising tide. If you read my essay from October, you know that these themes — directing my attention toward dialogue with nature, maintenance and deconstruction (Odell’s dismantling) as active practices, life-assemblages existing precariously at the margins of capitalism — are part of my consciousness.7 My mind was a basin, already holding Odell and Tsing and birds and trees and mushrooms, but eager for more.
Vicuña’s work in the late 1970s, when both Chile and Argentina were under the rule of military dictatorships, took on an expressly political nature. Her Palabrarmas series, combining the words palabra (“word”) and arma (weapon), included collages, films, and drawings that examined the role of poetry and speech in the face of fascist political repression and forced disappearance of perceived dissidents. By deconstructing and reconstructing words using different media, Vicuña examines how our words shape and are shaped by the sociopolitical landscape, especially regarding the language of resistance. Vicuña also wrote poetry during this time, and the exhibition featured her poems and letters alongside collages and drawings.
One example of a palabrarma, pictured above, is sol y dar y dad, an expanded form of solidaridad, or solidarity. Vicuña translates this as “To Give and Give Sun.” More directly, it links three words with y (“and”). Sol is Sun — our existence on this Earth, nourished directly and indirectly by the Sun, unites humans with all other life forms. Dar is “to give,” the infinitive form of the verb, whereas dad is its second-person plural command form. Solidarity is not just a static state of mind or attitude, but an iterative process of giving and receiving, and then giving again, of participating in mutual aid and community support not as an alienated individual but as a member of something bigger.
I also thought of how soldado means soldier in Spanish, and one word that I learned earlier on when I arrived here is militante. While “militant” in English has an expressly violent or aggressive connotation, militante simply means activist or protester, and does not imply violent methods or beliefs. In Argentina, Chile, and likely other Latin American countries in which resistance against state repression is within living memory, there exists a robust tradition of political protest that is colored and informed by life under military rule. Nowadays, climate change or women’s rights or labor (etc., etc.) activism is known as militancia in Argentina, even though it lacks violent or militaristic means and ends.
I’ve had the privilege of attending a number of marches and protests since I’ve been here in Buenos Aires. Especially since Javier Milei, a right-wing economist with sociopathic tendencies and authoritarian sympathies, assumed the presidency in December, it seems like there’s a planned protest every week. Given the incredible scope and breadth of Milei’s intended reforms to the Argentine economy and society, there has been no shortage of reasons to mobilize.
Most recently, March 24 marked the public holiday in Argentina known as the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, commemorating the victims of the military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and forcibly “disappeared” 30,000 people during that time.8 The motto and rallying cry of the event is nunca más — “never again” — reflecting a desire to nurture democracy in Argentina, merely decades old and still at risk of authoritarian incursion. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets between the Casa Rosada (the Argentine White House, but pink) and Congress, including labor groups, political organizations, and individuals like myself and the few friends I attended with.
Sol y dar y dad. I weave through the throngs of people in Plaza de Mayo, where the world’s largest Argentine flag flies, proudly displaying the country’s symbol: the Sol de Mayo. Both suns warm my soul. Every few minutes, someone begins to clap and chant and hundreds of people take up the spontaneous song for a few rounds, beaming.9 A young girl stands with her family, wearing a placard with a black-and-white image of a woman and holding a sign: “I march for my grandmother, whom I never got to hug.”
Years of living amid economic uncertainty have made Argentines comfortable in chaos, or at least able to live and carve out space within it. I’ve noticed that they regularly exhibit simultaneously what seem like opposite feelings or expressions, somber yet joyful, resigned yet hopeful. Even though the election left many feeling dejected, they still have the strongest of desires to make things better, hand in hand. It’s something I deeply admire about the people here.
There exists a similar dualism in my insecurity about not fully fitting in or understanding everything: it holds me back, but also pushes me to learn and experience more. I’ve beat myself up a lot recently about gravitating toward my comfort zone, hanging out with expats and speaking English (or choosing solitude) instead of really putting myself out there. Maybe through writing this post, I’m trying to tell myself that I haven’t been completely slacking, and there are many different ways to develop cultural awareness and a sense of belonging.
As another example of how I’ve been challenging myself, I’ve been doing some more reading in Spanish. It’s difficult. I had never read a book purely for leisure in Spanish until the beginning of this year — I received one as a Christmas gift, and it took a while to finish. The novel took some compelling stylistic liberties, and I couldn’t help wondering if I would feel more than just neutral about it if I had read it in English. I also subscribed to a bimonthly political magazine based here in Buenos Aires. From unfamiliar words to unfamiliar names and acronyms, the magazine is even more difficult to trudge through.
I admittedly don’t read in Spanish every day, and maybe I should. Sometimes I think that this inability to fully immerse is withholding me from completely reaching native fluency. At the same time, though, the reality is that so many of my interests, writers and publications I admire, political and social issues I care deeply about, are in English and based in the United States, and that likely will never change. My struggle now has more to do with finding balance and still staying true to what I want to achieve, even if an achievement is going to a museum or finishing an article.
I quit Twitter before leaving the United States, and then put some effort into creating a "professional" account, which I now use almost-daily. I don’t consider this a relapse, though. My feed is totally bilingual, and I get a lot of Argentine news and pop culture that I may not otherwise see. I don’t always know what’s going on — but then again, I often don’t know what’s going on in the United States either.
Even though it might seem silly, when I recognize a political reference or some Argentine slang in a tweet, it makes me feel pretty good, like I’m at least somewhat in the know. In the same way, I may not know most of the reggaeton or cumbia at the late-night parties, but I get joy out of the occasions when I can sing along with my friends to a song that I learned here.
I’m excited about the months to come. I’ve already identified some communities and groups that I want to try out, especially related to arts and culture, to keep learning and hopefully meet some more local friends. I can also stand to be a bit more gentle with myself and resist the tendency to define my experience in terms of success or failure. All I can do is continue building upon the foundation I’ve set for myself, poco a poco.
An Argentine friend from Mendoza, in response to my love for the Argentine national bird, called me the “most Argentine gringo ever” and shared a quote: “Los argentinos nacen donde quieren.” Argentines are born wherever they want. I’ve met a lot of expats who originally arrived in Buenos Aires temporarily but now consider it their home, so it’s not an isolated phenomenon.
On the first date with my now-novio in November, we went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which has an extensive collection featuring both Argentine and international art. I resisted my more pretentious impulses. I didn’t want to scare him off.
IYKYK.
One of the earliest memories that I have of feeling like I was “getting it” at a museum exhibition was seeing Kasimir Malevich at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam on a family vacation just over a decade ago. Or, at the very least, I was seeing abstract art and enjoying it — and perhaps seeing the elusive threads tying together artists like Malevich and Mondrian and Newman, linking them to the past (and future). In the case of Malevich, his abstractions formed his philosophy of suprematism, seeking to separate art from the portrayal of objective surroundings by isolating geometric form. I’m no art historian, but poke around Google Images and you’ll see what I mean.
In the case of Borges, whose work I was lucky enough to read under the tutelage of Lana Craig at Ithaca High School, it helps to have a footing in one of the most influential Argentine writers of all time. Even then, it’s been a long time, and I hope to revisit his work soon with a more decidedly Argentinized lens.
For the language nerds who may have caught this, “arte” is the only word (or one of a handful, depending on how you look at it) in Spanish that takes both genders. All words beginning with a stressed “a” take the masculine definite article “el” in Spanish, even if they are otherwise strictly feminine, like el águila or el hacha. However, this is purely because “la águila” is awkward to say — “las águilas” is fine, though — and Spanish didn’t evolve the l’ definite article of Italian, French, and Catalan that would otherwise solve the problem. As in “bellas artes,” arte is feminine in the plural. Even so, as in “el arte latinoamericano” or “el arte contemporáneo argentino,” the gendered adjectives betray that it is masculine in the singular form, whereas one would say “el águila coronada” (notice the feminine adjective ending).
Shortly after publishing that piece in October, I visited Museo Moderno with some friends. It was my first big museum visit in Buenos Aires. They were exhibiting Manifiesto Verde, whose name comes from a 1971 manifesto by the Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu, vibrant landscapes with indulgent greens and blues. The artwork sometimes invokes indigenous stewardship of the land and relationships with nature, and sometimes portrays animals and algae thriving in abandoned, underwater metropolises in a hypothetical, post-Anthropocene future. (I use the present tense because the exhibition ends in about a month, and I hope to make it back before it closes.)
There’s too much context here to explain concisely, so a few notes: The number 30,000 is the estimate by human rights groups given that there was no official tally (reporting a disappearance could make you a target); The number is sometimes presented as 30,400 by LGBTQ groups to highlight the queer victims of the dictatorship; Javier Milei, on the campaign trail, said “it wasn’t 30,000” and downplayed the atrocities of the dictatorship; His vice president, Victoria Villarruel, is the daughter of a military general from that era and has made a career of mainstreaming apologism; The dictatorship adopted many of its most brutal techniques from the United States intelligence and national security apparatus, which provided covert operational support and coordination to promote and streamline state terrorism in South America under Operation Condor (on which I wrote a major research paper in college).
One of the most popular chants was familiar but I had to look up the words because it was difficult to understand in the moment. Here’s what I found: Olé, olé, olé olá / como a los nazis / les va a pasar / adonde vayan / los iremos a buscar (“Olé, olé, olé olá, what happened to the Nazis is what’s going to happen to you. No matter where you hide, we’ll find you”). This chant was popularized during the dictatorship.
Casey, I have no words…bravo!!
Although I have never met you, I feel like I have!
Your Dad and I were great friends during our time in New York City. He is phenomenal and you seem to be too.
I have son, Owen. He is 17 years old and wants to go to college in Greece.
I hope does and can have a similar experience as yours.
Be well, gringo!! Keep up the beautiful work! Nicoletta ❤️
Loved everything about this piece! Museum-going-as-performance was so relatable – your self-awareness knows no bounds.