[eerie music begins]
Male narrator These images feature banks in Buenos Aires — but with some notable interventions. Graphite disrupts the otherwise smooth and coherent presentation of reality that is the photograph. Curatorial Assistant, Fabian Leyva-Barragan.
[music ends]
Fabian Leyva-Barragan Nuna Mangiante uses geometric and irregular shapes created by the graphite to cover the entrances of many of these different Argentine financial institutions. By doing so, she denies the viewer the visual access to these institutions, in the same manner that the Argentine citizens faced during the corralito.
Male narrator The corralito was part of a catastrophic economic collapse in 2001. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Argentine government froze all bank accounts and cut the value of the peso. People’s savings immediately lost two thirds of their value.
[music resumes]
Fabian Leyva-Barragan What I’m interested is in the frozen depiction of time; the absence of a public, the absence of people in the photographs, and how the flags are frozen in the same way that the banks were frozen, not available to the citizens.
Male narrator The banks installed metal fences to protect their facades from protesters. This is exactly the part of the photograph that Mangiante attacks with her graphite.
For the artist, this was a personal response to the crisis.
Fabian Leyva-Barragan This is a form of social violence that she experienced at the time, and the marking of the graphite was the only way that she was able to express this idea.
[music ends]
