We watched it for a long time from the outside
And pondered its form.
The altered grid represented a promise that had cracked
or was mere fiction. And that revealed on its surface
the tussle between abstract and figurative art.
We tried to get in several times, but the rainy season started
and the tide, as always, became turbulent. It collapsed as well,
of course, like many others across the country.
We went round and round its base, trying to understand
its magnitude and to establish a common language
with this giant that had run aground. We surrounded it.
We climbed the slopes of a decadent paradise where the lower
levels and the top levels evoked different and separate eras:
From the horizontal, with its patio and the sun filtering
in from above, to the vertical, with the central atrium
and the sun that was dominated by a suffocated cage
of now broken mirrors.
We finally arrived at a dilapidated red door that led us
into its body, throughout which we journeyed.
The starting point was a concrete desert, an impressively open
and clean structure, symmetrical and substantial,
that connects several of the animal’s organs, perforated by
repeated holes that shrink in perspective toward the sky
like an emptied out or inverted column.
Towards the innards the battle between shapes and shadows,
between reality and fiction emerges again,
with vehicles and objects that come from different decades,
in different states of disrepair.
The beast’s stomach is broad, much larger than the rest,
guarded by sharp teeth, as if it were a jail,
a church or army barracks.
There are many things on show and others that are hidden.
The brutal disproportions increased as we climbed higher this
punctured cathedral that reveals juxtaposed layers of meaning.
At several moments we beheld a sense of the “eternally
unfinished” which concerned Simón Rodríguez when he
noted: “things should be half made while they are being made”.
For therein breathes the beast-cathedral of the sunny climes
of American Societies.
We found signs of a certain tropical “perseverance”, as always
occurs beneath the highways of our South American life,
where stubborn and twisted plants and trees emerge
from the gaps and joints, like “in the heart of darkness”
but in the concrete jungle, greenness finds its way
in and hangs down like some surprising
and ensnared presence, seeking out the light.
Worryingly precarious spaces appear, like the end of a story
or “shoa”. Endemic symptoms that have not shifted for decades
And things that “should be half made while they are
being made” are left that way forever.
We walk through cultural prehistory, and it is shocking,
in a voyage in space and an even longer trip back
to a remote time.
History that is built and that comes falling down again
represented in an almost young enormous and robust body
whose skeleton is entirely broken.
Organic and pathological, bearing the marks of interventions
and cuts, the big white whale, aggrieved in its local
translation, the big white elephant, steadfast and devastating:
a backdrop for battles.
And still, the romantic, exotic gaze enchanted by the magic
religious system, with the distant and untamable animal
from society’s prehistory, with tribal spatial constructions
inside the beast, with the hierarchical heart of a crowned chief
and subjects of nothingness.
With a state of unfinished, unnamed things.
And still there is a certain gaze through the binoculars of
civilization that applauds far-off stories of murders and rapes,
that here can only give rise to power disguised asthe dogma
of faith, to the stomach that does not chew but ingurgitates,
to the eyes of those who give orders and make categories.
Inside: social classes, hierarchies, exclusion, false missions
And hundreds and thousands who need a roof over their head.
The beast disguises itself as horizontal terrain,
clad in participatory camouflage. But the truth is,
there is only one head that decides what it tolerates
or desecrates and that regiments—as it does in the whole
country—the side it controls.
What’s left in the organism is repelled or confined to an “other”
state. To a state of exception that could last a thousand years.
To a space-cum-nation where the beast becomes home
and where the raving plans of the shepherd-captain of souls
become law.
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