THE FATE OF THE METEORITE: FAIVOVICH & GOLDBERG IN ¡SAXA LOQUUNTUR!

When Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg became legal custodians of a 41 kg meteorite thanks to the cession of an anonymous causer, they imagined its placement –logical, but also poetic– in the Sala de Bustos of the Argentine Scientific Society. A disagreement of an imprecise nature, however, prevented the parties (artists and Society) from reaching an agreement, so the donation did not materialize and the emancipating transfer of the rock between the private and public spheres did not take place.

Faced with the dilemma posed by this forced removal, the duo decided to encapsulate the piece in a custom-designed device and to leave to future generations

to future generations the arbitration of its final fate. Within Faivovich & Goldberg's archive on Campo del Cielo (possibly the largest and most complete in the world), this as-yet-unnamed meteorite occupies, as is obvious, a central place: it is the type of scarce cosmic matter that in its singularity has enabled pilgrimages, crimes, experiments and manias throughout history.

For the exhibition, a group of friends, collaborators and colleagues were invited to write a series of letters. Addressed to the Argentine Scientific Society of the year 2105, these letters were written in the present in order to paint a certain moment of human ideas and feelings, but also to accompany the reopening of the option in 2105.

of the option, in the year 2105, that would allow the rock to finally find its public abode. The letters and a few other materials were also placed in another type of hermetic artifact conceived by the artists: time capsules that could not be opened until the date indicated on their fronts, once the 22nd century had arrived.

Far from the administrative aesthetics and its recent courtship with the branch of bureaucracy oriented to classify and organize meteoric bodies, Saxa loquuntur!

finds Faivovich & Goldberg pushing the possibilities of the archive to an extreme instance of esoteric suggestiveness. This transition from a bureaucratic framework to a plastic use of time brings the exhibition space closer to a sanctuary than an office.

The zigzagging between materialities following an unfeasible pattern of media oscillation (from paper to the pixel block and, in a final and very heavy impulse, back to an obsolescence like the lithography matrix) is just one attribute of the complex transtemporal circuit triggered by the exhibition. In recursive sequence at least since the Holocene, the "infinite quarry" of Campo del Cielo generates an archive that in turn produces a new archive, as the present of the letters will become a past to which the future can refer. Thus, the active construction of history seems to take two forms: that of an anorganic layering of memories and that of a labyrinthine temple of mirrors, where each whisper guides us to the beginning and also to the end.

Saxa loquuntur! Faivovich & Goldberg exhibition.

Until February 2023. 

Barro Gallery. Achával Rodriguez 244, Buenos Aires, Argentina.