The Latest at Goethe

Anyone who has flown through half the universe can only smirk over the route between Argentina and Germany. Yet, for the meteorite El Chaco, a planned trip to Kassel turned into a political issue. The Argentinean artists Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg tell why.

Tell me, what would a meteorite be doing at an art exhibition?

Goldberg: The idea behind sending the El Chaco meteorite to Kassel is related to a research project on Campo del Cieolo that Guillermo and I have been working on for the last six years. Even though it has been said that the presentation of the meteorite would be the artwork itself, it is also the complex process involved that we are interested in.

What is special about Campo del Cielo, the “field of sky”, that you have been dealing with for a long while?

Faivovich: Campo del Cielo is located over 1,200 kilometres from Buenos Aires. The natives gave the region the name because they knew that the stones they found there had fallen to earth from space. Today, the meteorites from Campo del Cielo are all over Argentina – in museums and research institutes. That is where the idea for our project originated: we visited the meteorites while we travelled to Campo del Cielo.

That’s not all.

Faivovich: Back in Buenos Aires, we went to the planetarium and learned: they had two and a half meteorites. Two and a half! That’s the beginning of the story of the meteorite El Taco, which also came from Campo del Cielo. No one in the planetarium knew why half of a precisely sectioned meteorite was lying there.

Goldberg: Stones don’t talk, but this one seemed to be reaching out to us. As the meteorite is amorphous, it was evident that something had happened to this one; some form of human intervention.

Then the search for the other half began?

Goldberg: There was no information about “El Taco.” We asked, but the staff at the planetarium looked at us as if we were mad. Or perhaps they were afraid we could say, “You let half of a meteorite be stolen!”

Faivovich: It was as if the meteorite said to us, “Search for my other half!” And we found it, in a storeroom at the Smithsonian Institution near Washington.

Goldberg: And we knew we would have to unite the two halves.

And you actually did.

Faivovich: Yes, the two stone halves met again in 2010 at an exhibition in Frankfurt at the Portikus.

Bringing the two halves of El Taco together is only part of the project. The story of another meteorite, of El Chaco, is more complicated.

Faivovich: It seemed it would be impossible to unite El Taco – but it worked. Bringing the meteorite El Chaco to Germany for the documenta seemed simple – and did not work.

Why?

Faivovich: Because shortly before the meteorite’s planned journey, after two years of work, our project became a suitable stage for political power games. It was clear to us that the project was incorrectly interpreted, and so we withdrew our proposal of moving the meteorite temporarily.

The project failed?

Goldberg: No. For the project everything became important that was happening around the meteorite, also the members of congress. What was especially enlightening to us was the appearance of the indigenous Moqoit people and the stance of the provincial governor of acknowledging the Moqoit as the traditional custodians of Campo del Cielo. And allowing them to decide in a meeting whether the meteorite would be permitted to travel or not.

Faivovich: Suddenly, Campo del Cielo was on the front pages of the regional newspapers.

And you were “the bad guys”?

Goldberg: We would never have proposed the project if we had any idea someone could be against it.

Faivovich: It was fascinating. In the minds of many people it was as if the meteorite were already long underway: they talked about how the plane carrying the meteorite might crash – although the meteorite would not have even been transported by air. Others were concerned that the ship might sink.

The artistic director of Documenta, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, suggested asking the stone.

Faivovich: The perspective that Carolyn proposes is interesting. There were so many different opinions – why not listen to the meteorite’s, too?

What did you end up showing in Kassel in place of the meteorite?

Goldberg: On Friedrichsplatz, one of the most prominent exhibition places of the documenta, an iron block.

Karen Naundorf held the interview.