WHAT DO THE PAPERS THROWN INTO THE STREET TELL US? JORGE MACCHI EXHIBITS AT MUSEO SÍVORI

Like an archivist, a notary, or a Buenos Aires storyteller, Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1963) spent five years collecting handwritten papers discarded on the street — addresses, instructions, measurements, confessions, letters — and presented them at Museo Sívori, displayed behind glass cases in an exhibition he titled RETOUR. The artist built a cartography of the city from texts that were never meant to be read. He lays bare the intimacies of strangers and uses them to construct maps, scenes, novels, billboards, furniture. Finding a written piece of paper on the ground opens onto thousands of possible stories, and Macchi tells some of them.

The artist's approach brings to mind works from the last century, such as Following Piece (1969), in which Vito Acconci followed a stranger through the streets of New York each day until losing sight of them; or Helio Oiticica, who gathered materials from the margins of the city and turned them into art. In the use of the everyday object as an artistic piece, the privacy of whoever once held it seeps through; here, the characters move through the kilometers surrounding the artist's studio. Macchi draws inspiration from discards, from stories that happened and were left written on slips of paper — in one sentence, three, or across an entire page. He assembles different chapters of stories that lived on only in the memories of anonymous protagonists, and in doing so becomes the author of new fictions. He constructs a parallel version of events that took place. He fills the void left by words left hanging: each paper triggers an instruction. From a note listing film titles he creates a large billboard; from lumber measurements he builds a sculpture; pages from different books compose a novel; various maps found throughout the city form a sculpture that joins points across the world.

Macchi also presents a series of photographs taken throughout his search. The artist thus becomes a chronicler of the ephemeral. He gives material form to the ghosts of what once happened in Buenos Aires. He puts the city on display through fictions — the very fictions that make it up.

RETOUR is on view through August 9, 2026, at Museo Sívori, Av. Infanta Isabel 555, Buenos Aires, Argentina.