Back from Bs As

One month ago, 19^th and 20^th december ‘Muziek als…’ had it’s maiden voyage: it’s premiere in Buenos Aires. It felt also like a maiden voyage to me. I’d never been in the Americas before. Then, not speaking Spanish and finding one’s way in Buenos Aires is an adventure… A friend of mine asked me, after my enthousiastic descriptions of –according to Dutch standards- the rough everyday life in Bs As, what I’d got out of this journey. No emigration plans or concrete plans of coming back. But then what? I stopped to think and I got the answer: an experience, a broader vision. There’s nothing that compares to doing a project in such a different environment with all the unexpected surprises that go with it, (and there were quite a few).

It was a crazy three weeks before the concerts and then I was only in charge of my own piece… Ceci and Flor were working non-stop in organizing the whole project, 17 different compositions on 2 different concerts, each piece requiring it’s own set-up… Logistically a nightmare. It was a miracle the concerts went pretty smooth, apart from a technical problem with my piece (I will get on to that later). Yes, the concert were very succesfull with an enthousiastic audience! (more on that and the great experience of the whole project also later).

Let's continue with the unexpected surprises, for instance the changuito story (changuito=shopping trolley). It took Ceci and Flor a disproportional effort to get two changuito’s for my piece. Ceci made an interesting remark about it, telling the changuito problem in Argentina is a reflection of the economical situation. In Holland shopping trolleys are close to junk, you can find them easily on the streets, abandoned. But in Argentina it’s almost impossible to get one from a supermarket. You need to leave your passport at the supermarket even to get to the car with a changuito. It’s because of the cartonneros: people who collect card-board from the streets. Everywhere you see them, most of them pulling heavy wagons full of card-board. Some of them even with horse and wagon (children on it as well, collecting carboard along with mother). But you also can see some of them with a changuito. That gives the piece, which was partly intended as a kind of recycling performance, a very different meaning.

The title of my piece is “Nostalgic overdrive”. That was a happy choice: I didn’t realize how big nostalgia is in Argentina until I was there. Of course nostalgia is an industry everywhere, (since when?) but in Argentina it’s very much part of everyday live. The nostalgia is as much a physical part of the city of Buenos Aires, with its faded cinema’s, worn-out night clubs and old cars (lots of Peugeot’s and Renaults from the seventies, kept together with wire and tape) as it is of the Argentinian psyche, (which is reflected by the many nostalgic TV-channels recycling old TV series (Argentinian and American) from the seventies. The summit of nostalgia is a channel devoted solely to the peaks of Argentinian football history). Maybe this nostalgia is the reason why old fashioned rock music is so popular in Argentina and the Beatles so astonishingly present.

Freud compares somewhere the unconscious to a city like Rome where century-old ruins are standing next to brand-new buildings: an archeological site, where there is no logic to the emerging pattern; no city planning. Such an associative city, full of poetic wonders, is Buenos Aires. As a matter of fact Freud is very much alive in Buenos Aires. That can’t be a coincidence. There is some hidden connection between the world around us and our psychic life. It’s these kind of correspondences Benjamin writes about in his Passagen. I’m sorry to mention these intimidating names, but since I’ve seen so many Argentinian bookcases full of classics proudly inside living-rooms I’m only too glad to display here some of my painstakingly acquired erudition.

Yes the whole idea of an intellectual education, an idea that is almost extinct in the Netherlands (if it ever existed), of being an intellectual, (of course together with some snobbery), is still alive in Argentina. In that sense I felt much at home in Argentina. You enter a bookshop (there are a remarkably lot of them in Bs As) and all the classics (unfortunately in Spanish) stare you in the face. You can even buy literature in a kiosco! Argentina seems much less of an experience economy than Holland, where everything is more pre-digested. How is this possible? Is this a stage Argentina has yet to come, or will Argentina develop in a different way? That is probably wishful thinking. But who knows? Left is dead for many years in Europe and still very much alive and kicking in Latin America.