2023
Bilingual Spanish-English edition
Texts: Gonzalo Córdova, Flavia Costa, Cynthia Edul, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Gamerro, Pablo Maurette, Leila Sucari, Diana Szeinblum and Graciela Speranza
Translations: Ian Barnett
Graphic Design: Job Salorio
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232 pages
Formato: 23x16cm
ISBN 978-987-1358-95-3
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This book aims to capture the intense visual and symbolic narrative of Eduardo Basualdo’s exhibition, Pupila [Pupil]. Through a series of drawings, a sculpture and several architectural structures, the artist produced a complex narrative which, while tracing his career as an artist, also revealed a universal account of human consciousness: that internal struggle to balance the constraints of social convention with one’s irrepressible subjective impulses. Renowned figures such as Gonzalo Córdova, Flavia Costa, Cynthia Edul, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Gamerro, Pablo Maurette, Leila Sucari , Diana Szeinblum and Graciela Speranza explore the multifaceted power of this work from the perspectives of criticism, literature, philosophy, dance and theatre. Additionally, in an expansive interview, Basualdo himself delves into the creative details of the work and discusses the personal and aesthetic journey that led him to discover a crucial moment in his artistic development.
“What is there behind the eyes. Inside the houses. In the darkness. When the light is cut and we reach out into the blackness groping for a rudimentary light, is there someone waiting to take our hand? And if they do, why escape? Why not accept the invitation?”
Mariana Enriquez
“In his drawings and installations, Basualdo reinvents the genre of the fantastic and updates what is at issue: what is the present of the spectre, what language emerges when the human is fractured? The opening of the unconscious is at once a political and a poetic gesture. In the formless matter which he creates by joining the familiar and the strange, enormity and the smallest detail, he offers a chance to inhabit two worlds, to be in-between. Any advance based on our own contradiction entails breaking the norm, observing the fragility of what is supposed to be rigid and so, perhaps, writing something different. Something that looks into the kind of truth proposed by fiction, a truth that is pure mystery”.
Leila Sucari
“In the mid-twentieth century, Robert Smithson conceived his ‘ruins in reverse’, monumentalising unfinished constructions in an industrial suburb corroded by the whirlwind of ‘progress’. One dark night on a new New Jersey highway, Tony Smith was mugged by a ‘suburban sublime’. In the twenty-first century, Basualdo has created a posthuman sublime, a foretaste of a future even grimmer than the one envisioned by his Pupila: the Earth completely scorched in ‘a world without us’.”
Graciela Speranza
