We weren't made for the same road...

RECOLECTIVO

An urban intervention performed by the artists of Córdoba, Argentina: Alejandra Bredeston; Sara Carpio; Azul Ceballos; the late Jorge Díaz; Graciela Rasgido; Grupo Urbomaquia: Guillermo Alessio, Liliana Di Negro, Magui Lucero, Sandra Mutual; the Swiss-Brazilian duo: Maurício Días and Walter Riedweg; and the Brazilian Marcillo Braz. These artists came together as the group RECOLECTIVO to create the work "No estábamos hechos para los mismos caminos..." ("We weren't made for the same road..."), staged in a public space in the city of Córdoba, Argentina during the month of August 2003.

At the beginning of 2002, the Goethe Institute invited artists Mauricio Días (Brazil) and Walter Riedweg (Switzerland) to the city of Córdoba for a series of activities related to their work. While there, they came up with the idea of creating a project in the city and put a call out to local artists. There were meetings for over a year, where participants engaged in debates and reflected on the crisis that was taking place in Argentina at that time. It was a particular socio-political context - the end of 2000 - with a president - De La Rúa - who had stepped down, producing a chaotic panorama, with disintegrating institutional systems, and a lack of both credibility and sufficient political representation.

That is how we developed this project, at the intersection between the colectivo - the bus - and the collective. We worked on the idea of the "colectivo" as a reality and a metaphor, as a space of traffic/transition and coordination, through which to reexamine the concepts of interior and exterior, of exclusion and inclusion, thus re-signifying the perception of our own reality. Then we addressed those citizens who travel on the "colectivo" daily along with vertiginous and vague images of the everyday routine of their journey, which became equivalent to the recent history of contradictions and the inertia of repetitious policies; people who at certain moments discover that things do not just happen to others, but to each one of us; that the city, and life itself, do not occur outside the colectivo/collective, but right there, within it, through the efforts of everyone journeying from one place to another, filled with desires, urgencies, dreams, and disappointments.

Therefore this work reflects what RECOLECTIVO and the inhabitants of the city themselves propose, joining together experiences and diverse narratives, either fictional or real. By incorporating private situations into public space in an unexpected way, those that were banal and quotidian became unheard-of and absurd. The passenger-spectators were invited to reflect more deeply and more freely on the limits of the individual and the public; on the social - that which is constituted by the general norm and which implies a certain collective responsibility toward things; and on the poetic - that which is born as though destined for anarchy, in the sense of an order that is governed by no other orders than those of its own aesthetic possibility.

We laid out three stages:
1. Traveling posters attached to the colectivos,
2. "performances" inside the colectivos and
3. finally, posters that speak to us from both sides of the central thoroughfare, the main street along which public transportation passes.

Passivity is what we call resignation and waiting. Resistance is what we call the sustained desire to confront diverse obstacles and to interrogate the world in which we live.