Roberto Fontanarrosa, one year later

Last Saturday was the first anniversary of the death of Roberto Fontanarrosa, writer, cartoonist and an icon of Rosario. There was a series of homages around last weekend, including an exhibition of drawings and cartoons by several well-known artists, such as Caloi, Quino and Sábat. The grand opening was Saturday at 7:30 PM on the underground floor of Pasaje Pam, a quaint gallery that goes through a whole block in the downtown. I had no idea there was so much room down there; I'd only been to the ground floor and above.

Fontanarrosa was a superb storyteller and cartoonist, or so they say; I was never a fan of his work. But like everyone in Rosario, I knew Fontanarrosa was more than a celebrity. He was someone you could meet down the same streets you walk every day. He had lots of friends here, which is why he rejected the main temptation of fame for an Argentinian of the "interior" provinces — leaving for the blazing lights of Buenos Aires. Most of our artists, writers, composers and singers tend to do that (our football players do it too, and then proceed to Europe). Fontanarrosa stayed with us and remained a simple guy, making it a point to gather with his friends, until he became too ill for that.

You can read a slightly different and longer version of this article (in Spanish) on Sin calma: Homenaje a Roberto Fontanarrosa.

My pictures of Rosario

Eight months ago (in November 2007) I had the good luck to sign up for a photography workshop organized by the Firma & Odilo Estévez Decorative Art Museum (I mentioned it in passing back then). The goal was twofold: to observe and discuss pictures of old-time downtown Rosario, and to do guided photo tours and take pictures of our own. Then you had the option of submitting pictures for selection, to be part of a joint exhibition. It was planned for April. It was delayed, of course, but the guys at the museum let us all know that they were working on it, and a few days ago I received an e-mail announcing that the exhibition will be held in August at the Center Municipal District Center (the name looks like a joke, but it's the District Center building for the Center District). My pictures are the ones above (click to enlarge).

That workshop and those pictures hold a special meaning to me. It's not just the first time somebody else selects some my pictures to be displayed somewhere. It's that, while on this workshop and while walking down those streets, I met Marisa and talked to her for the first time. Three of her own pictures will share the exhibition room with mine. And to think that we didn't know each other at all when we took them...

May Day and around

Like I said yesterday, May Day is like a Sunday over here, or it felt like that to me. So maybe it was appropriate for me to post pictures of churches! Of course, I only take pictures of churches from the outside, or else get inside only to snap a few shots.

Labour Day being like Sunday, it was only logical that it and the days before felt like weekend. I don't really have an entertainment schedule on weekdays, because I have to wake up very early to get to work in time, so I can't have a late dinner or stay up after, say, midnight. And I need siesta — a nap, sometimes an hour, an hour and a half, to fill in my daily 8-hour sleep quota.

Last Tuesday, however, I left the office and, feeling that going home would be a waste of a precious sunny afternoon, I went downtown to the Centre Català to visit a model ship exhibition (it was the last day). The lady in charge told me that I had to come after 5 PM. It was 1:30, so I crossed it off. In the meantime, though, I'd passed by a library and bought a book about the evolution of human food habits by Juan Luis Arsuaga, short, at a discounted price. Interesting reading, not dense at all. I have another one of Arsuaga's books, El collar del neandertal, a longer study of the Neandertals he and others studied in Atapuerca, a massive fossil reservoir in Spain. He writes simply, for the general public, yet showing no signs of struggling to popularize (or dumb down) the technical subjects.

After that I proceeded to the local seat of the government of Santa Fe, a massive building that takes up a whole block. In the past it served as a jail, as the police headquarters, and as an illegal detention center during the last dictatorship. Then the government took most of it, a part was set aside as a memorial museum, another section was turned into municipal offices, another one was turned into the new seat of the Natural Sciences Museum (the previous one burned down), and the huge central courtyard was turned into a public square (Plaza Cívica). There's a lot of space still unoccupied, or mostly unused.

I went there to visit a photojournalism exhibition — journalistic pictures taken in Argentina (and around) in 2006. It wasn't the last day to see them, but Wednesday was, and the visiting hours were really inconvenient. That's why Marisa missed it, and I went by myself at 2 PM, when everybody else was either having lunch or already taking a nap or working. It was a fairly large sample. It opened with a very significant picture of the recent past, the infamous shot of Alfredo Yabrán taken on the beach by José Luis Cabezas which probably cost the latter his life. The opening photograph for 2006 was a shot of Julio López facing a policeman, somewhere in court, during the trial of Miguel Etchecolatz. López disappeared, probably kidnapped by (former?) members of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, the same organization that Etchecolatz used to command and that abducted and tortured López and hundreds of others back in the late 1970s.

The rest of the pictures were varied: a visual document of the ecological disaster that is the basin of the Riachuelo; scenes from the re-burial of Juan Domingo Perón when gangs of members of different unions attacked each other; candid pictures of famous idols/characters (Diego Maradona, Mirtha Legrand, Charly García); poor children washing car windows in Buenos Aires; people who make a living scavenging for food in a trash dump on a daily basis; Evo Morales taking office as president of Bolivia in traditional indigenous garb; Jorge Telerman celebrating something; a woman threatening to kill herself with a knife; penguins in Antarctica; a picture of the Payún Matru volcano in Malargüe, Mendoza, composed exactly the same as one I took last January... I must have been one hour in there. Then I walked around, went up to the third floor, and took more pictures.

In the end I got back home after 4 PM, ravenously hungry and terribly tired. It was too late for a nap. I had to wait till Wednesday for that, and then I could only lie down for an hour; then I met Marisa to go and see another photo exhibition, this time at the Bernardino Rivadavia Cultural Center. It was a very nice sample of black-and-white pictures by Peruvian photographers: study takes of young ladies, a few nudes, pictures of miners, a bishop, a nun, families in their homes, Machu Picchu, doctors, acrobats, funerals, carnival celebrations, indigenous women and men in the Andes, very young drafted soldiers.

I would've liked to see and work with the cameras of those times. The pictures were large but had a definition that digital cameras are attaining only now, and then only if you have the luck to find a good photography shop to print your pictures as they're supposed to be printed.

We topped off the "weekend" with a "Back to the Eighties" party in a disco that used to be in fashion for young teenagers when I was one. It was fun for me to hear all those international hits again, but we discovered we're not made for this. I've always been bothered by the overcrowded, smoke-filled, noise-saturated environment of popular discos, but this time Marisa and I felt it was too much, and our adventure ended soon... True, we'd had no suitable rest, but at 3:30 AM we were so tired we had to leave. A couple of years ago I would've been ashamed of myself if I left a party before it closed down, and furious if someone dared close it down before 5 AM. Sic transit...

Culture weekend

I always more-or-less supposed there were tons of culture-related events and culture thingies to do in Rosario at any given time, but then the propaganda machine of the Municipal Culture Secretariat is well-oiled and sometimes they do blow things out of proportion. However, this is not the case right now.

You'll remember the vernissage I attended last Tuesday — well, that exhibition was held in the very lobby of the seat of the Culture Secretariat, in Rosario Norte Station. (On a side note, I asked my artist friend how she'd managed to get that space. She said she had no idea; it was a deal with her university. And I was already fantasizing about a photo exhibition there...)

Then last Friday I went to see this display of old and new photos, drawings and blueprints of buildings by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. I had no idea who he was, but then I read that he was a pioneer of Catalan Art Nouveau (a.k.a. Modernisme) on par with Antoni Gaudí, so I went to the Parque España to check out the exhibition. Domènech designed buildings mostly in Barcelona, but I knew the style because other Catalan architects worked here in Argentina and particularly in Rosario (see my post with the picture of the Palacio Cabanellas).

Very impressive, enough for 45 minutes of admiration, and it only cost me one peso. I took as many pictures as I could, mostly not very good (pictures of pictures, under museum-type lighting, come out usually rather bad), but enough to document it. I don't know if it was allowed to take them, but nobody protested.

Then on Saturday I was scanning the cultural schedule again, and I found a Japan-themed event at the Museo Estévez, including a display of Japanese art pieces and ornaments, a short lecture on Japan's history, and kamishibai (paper theatre). I decided to check it out as well, but I made the mistake of taking a detour to enjoy the sunny view along the river (camera in hand, of course). It turned out that the view was extremely rewarding and I arrived at the museum when the lecture had already started, and after all the tickets for the kamishibai were reserved. It was all free of charge, but the space was limited, so I was told to come back for another show later. I couldn't do that, but I'm going to try it tonight if I can.

The lecture was fine enough — a brief surview of the relations between Japan and the West, showing how the myth of an enclosed, self-sufficient, almost xenophobic "millenary" culture is just a myth, as many of the things we associate distinctly with Japan were imported or adapted from the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the British or the Americans. The lecturer wandered into another kind of myth herself a couple of times, unnecessarily, for example speaking of the "unconfirmed" etymology of arigato from Portuguese obrigado, which has long been known to be absolutely bogus, and also relating a supposed graphical similarity between the Japanese kanji for "snow" and "blood" and samurai's concepts of purity and death. Maybe she meant "white" and "blood", which have somewhat similar characters, but then why not "white" and "red"?

Walking to and from the museum, I also noticed a lot of tourists. And I mean a lot. The riverside parks and the Flag Memorial were packed, and adding to the usual locals with mate and thermos and kids and dogs you couldn't stop noticing a large number of people with curious looks, camera in hand, taking pictures of themselves in front of absolutely unremarkable spots, or map in hand wandering the streets.

I found a young couple from some place in Greater Buenos Aires who actually asked me, not how they could get to a certain place, but where they could go, because they were not sure which direction to take. The girl seemed not to know that Rosario had a river, or that it was a large city, and somehow they'd both been able to walk down Córdoba St. without asking for (or finding by themselves) the 70-meter-tall Flag Memorial at the end of it. I also found a couple from Bánfield (Buenos Aires) who asked me to take a picture of them, and commented that Rosario's very nice but has almost no touristic infrastructure. I took another picture of a middle-aged couple from Córdoba. And on my way back I had to explain to two elderly ladies (one of them with a city map she was holding upside down) how to get back to the Bus Terminal.

The weekend is just half over, so there's still much to do...