martin bonadeo | texts | el pueblo closed circuit

Few people could visit this exhibition. First of all because you needed a car to get to the village that is situated at a distance of 60 km from Buenos Aires, in the middle of the countryside and walled-in by several wire fences. In second place the exhibition was only showed for 1 day and the third reason was that it was one of the first exhibitions by the artist.

In the Nineties the land close to the principal highways leading out of the city was exposed to an excessive division into lots, this development went along with the privatization of highways in Argentina and gave origin to the so called "private districts". These bubbles, isolated from the hard conditions in the Buenos Aires outskirts by wire fences and latest security technology, started to reproduce themselves and many members of the high class emigrated to inhabit those housing projects.

There were different reasons for the proposal to make a site-specific installation for the Cultural Center of one of those ambitious housing projects. It was a private village, without poverty, surrounded by other closed districts, isolated from the world by wire fences and constant guards. This utopia was represented in an enormous model sized 3x3mts which seemed as isolated from the world as one could see. The truth is that the space occupied by the housing project is quite close to poor zones. The wire fence which separates them supports the tension between neighbors with big material differences who fear themselves mutually.

A security camera was placed in a position that made it possible to see the building where the model was from outside and a closed circuit was arranged. The filmed image was projected by a multimedia tube amplifier in real time upon the 3 buildings and the square of the model - the only part which actually existed as the rest was only countryside-. This way one could see a projection of ghostly images on the model´s surface, images of the persons who actually walked on the square until they entered into the building where the installation was working. For the people who visited the installation the projection of images of persons, animals and children playing in the bubble-project caused a re-signification of both model and true space.

Pilar, June 2001

español