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2022
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realización video / Sebastian Cappiello

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El cuerpo humano, como un organismo compuesto mayormente por agua, es un sistema hidráulico. Una serie de mecanismos precisos y complejos regulan los fluidos de nuestro interior. Hay órganos que son válvulas y otros cámaras; algunos están ahí para absorber, bombear y purificar, y otros más para drenar, secretar, lagrimear y desechar. En este equilibrio frágil y dinámico, para una mirada médica, la aparición de la falla o de un desvío —la enfermedad— demanda una intervención. Con el fin de restituir la salud y el bienestar, aliviar el dolor o aplicar un tratamiento, los cuerpos se conectan a una red de mangueras, conductos, catéteres y agujas que suministran medicamentos, sueros y líquidos para mejorar su condición mortal.

Cerca de la zona de hospitales del barrio de Almagro, suspendidas en el umbral simbólico de lo vivo y lo inerte, fotografías de mujeres penden conectadas de dispositivos de goteo. Una composición sonora binaural acompaña su presencia. Las vibraciones, semejantes a zumbidos industriales, se expanden por el espacio y lo proclaman territorio de temblores, en donde la única palabra que se sostiene es el azar.

El líquido que se les suministra a las fotografías es tinta negra, como la de las oficinas, hospitales, escuelas y otras instituciones, la cual corre, se escurre y se deja absorber por el papel en el que están impresas y que las constituye. Por las corvas de rodilla, la cintura y los brazos, se infiltra y las altera. Aquellos atisbos de intimidades descontextualizadas se oscurecen y se hinchan de un fluido que no es el propio, pero que engrosa su materia y a la vez la vuelve frágil. Estos cuerpos que fueron de carne y ahora son superficie de imagen desafían su existencia para exponerse verticales y flotantes. Abiertos a la intervención dinámica y agresiva, no pierden la atención frente a los cambios que estos sistemas maquínicos causan, absorbiendo la tinta para retraerla como el vaivén de las olas y revelando lo que yace en esa orilla de contacto, en ese roce lubricante. Esta tecnología simple, sujeta a las leyes de la física, revela una imagen cyborg, instantánea y perenne, siempre en proceso.

Motivada por la intuición, el cuidado y la memoria, Carolina Magnin recupera imágenes de un archivo médico para intervenirlas e insertarlas en rutas de circulación donde la utilidad queda eclipsada por un fin sensible. A estas pacientes las sitúa en una fuga de sentido lejos del dominio tecnocientífico hasta convertirlas en agentes desobedientes y escurridizas del lugar asignado por la mirada clínica y su registro. Dejan de ser síntomas y retornan a ser cuerpos dinámicos, aleatorios y deseantes. Una vida nueva las infunde, palpita y reacciona. La tinta negra que alguna vez las ató a trámites, documentos, pagos y evaluaciones, ahora se derrama y encharca el suelo. Sin la asepsia del hospital y sin el rígido orden del archivo, estas imágenes y sus nuevas máquinas —máquinas de dibujo y de huellas— se desvían y proponen juegos de persecución. Por más que tratemos de fijarlas, se escapan. Y cuando pensamos que hay una imagen completa, esta evade la sujeción para construir constantemente la distancia del deseo. Como fantasmas, se dejan ocultar para después volver a aparecer.

Tania Puente




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 The human body, as an organism composed mostly of water, is a hydraulic system. A series of precise and complex mechanisms regulate the fluids inside us. Some organs are valves and others chambers; some are there to absorb, pump and purify, while others are there to drain, secrete, tear and discard. In this fragile and dynamic balance, from a medical point of view, the appearance of failure or a deviation - disease - calls for intervention. In order to restore health and well-being, alleviate pain or apply treatment, bodies are connected to a network of hoses, conduits, catheters and needles that deliver drugs, serums and fluids to improve their mortal condition.

Near the hospital area of the Almagro neighborhood, suspended on the symbolic threshold of the living and the inert, photographs of women hang connected to drip devices. A binaural sound composition accompanies their presence. The vibrations, similar to industrial hums, expand through the space and proclaim it a territory of tremors, where the only word that holds is chance.

The liquid supplied to the photographs is black ink, like that of offices, hospitals, schools and other institutions, which runs, drips and is absorbed by the paper on which they are printed and which constitutes them. Through the knees, waist and arms, it infiltrates and alters them. Those glimpses of decontextualized intimacies darken and swell with a fluid that is not their own, but that thickens their matter and at the same time makes it fragile. These bodies that were once flesh and are now image surfaces defy their existence to expose themselves as vertical and floating. Open to dynamic and aggressive intervention, they do not lose their attention to the changes that these machinic systems cause, absorbing the ink to retract it like the swaying of the waves and revealing what lies on that shore of contact, in that lubricating friction. This simple technology, subject to the laws of physics, reveals a cyborg image, instantaneous and perennial, always in process.

Motivated by intuition, care and memory, Carolina Magnin recovers images from a medical archive to intervene and insert them into circulation routes where utility is eclipsed by a sensitive end. She places these patients in a flight of meaning far from the techno-scientific domain until they become disobedient and elusive agents of the place assigned by the clinical gaze and its registration. They cease to be symptoms and return to being dynamic, random and desiring bodies. A new life infuses them, palpitates and reacts. The black ink that once bound them to paperwork, documents, payments and evaluations, now spills and puddles the floor. Without the asepsis of the hospital and without the rigid order of the archive, these images and their new machines - drawing and tracing machines - stray and propose games of persecution. No matter how hard we try to fix them, they escape. And when we think there is a complete image, it evades subjection to constantly construct the distance of desire. Like ghosts, they allow themselves to be hidden and then reappear.

The classroom where the class is being taught is almost dark, except for the focused light of the slide projector. The students, seated in silence, are concentrating on the day's lesson on skin lesions. Click. An image of a back, with an outbreak of pustules on the lower left side, appears at the front of the room. Clack. A pair of legs, whose capillaries weave an inflamed and painful network of dilatations under the skin. Clack. A cutout to a clavicle with a whitish irritation. On the right side of the photograph, a firm but cautious, neatly manicured finger reaches down the collar of the woman's gown to her shoulder to uncover the abnormality. Although in the image the outbreak is barely distinguishable, it is there. "It's nothing," was the first thing she said to herself as she detected that milky bump on her skin that morning when she looked in the mirror. But the symptoms began to manifest themselves over the next few days. She felt a kind of burning sensation when she touched the area, and she could not tolerate the sensation of rubbing, either from others or from herself, including clothing. When she went to the clinic twelve days after her discovery, the attending physician, who also worked as a lecturer at the university hospital, asked her permission to photograph her. Click. Mounted on a tripod, the camera captured the symptom of her skin, that prominent and annoying manifestation that distressed her, as well as the revealing finger that uncovered them. A piece of her would go with that image, bound to spin incessantly on the slide carousel and manifest itself as light and shadows in front of hundreds of gazes, year after year. She, anonymous, faceless and without sensations, would be exemplary, didactic material that would merge with an archive of other skins, and her wordless sufferings, until the wear and tear of the slide and the weight of oblivion erased her.

Tania Puente