Magnets

Returning had the smell of peaches and the feel of oranges in a grocery store in San Juan Boulevard. It was like noticing something familiar about every person crossing the street. It was like being on the verge of saying 'hello' and not doing it. It was like a reunion. It was like recovering a certain kind of architecture, a certain kind of temporality. It was like feeling old when I had just turned twenty-seven. It was about lawfulness. It was like kissing in lifts, corridors, parks. It was like becoming solemn. Like missing something without knowing what it was.
Returning was like revisiting some photographers. Realising that Grete had always been there.
It was like moving towards what was pulling me. It was like not resisting the tension. It was like looking the monster in the face. Visiting Devoto.
It was like coming across an archaeological site strewn with rubbish. It was like looking for signs in stones, among the weeds, on walls, on the floor.
It was like dusting off books.
It was like rediscovering love and eroticism. It was about the cactus and the succulent.
Magnets consists of a series of photographs about a return that could not be helped, almost a folly, like an attempt to find a definitive explanation for magnetism.

I simultaneously produced the ¿Dónde están? series [Where are They?], which I have decided to fuse with the previous group of pictures for, in hindsight, I realise that taking these pictures was also inevitable and that, as with the other series, they are a result of my return. The title is derived from the catchphrase used by human rights organisations in the 1980's. It is comprised of a group of images taken at night in the area adjoining a section of the motorway extending from Paseo Colón to Roca Railway Station in Constitución -the names speak for themselves.
The exposure time was long enough for me to be registered in the images as a ghostly presence. In ¿Dónde están? [Where Are They?] I stand staring at the camera, holding the photograph of the tapir foetus which is present in many other pictures in this series.
Many years later, I learnt that a clandestine detention centre called El Atlético had once operated on the spot where I had been standing.

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