a book collects a disconcerting artistic experience

A book structured in a series of gestures is also a corporality that tries to reconstruct an experience. If the book account for a filethis gesture functions as a synthesis and as an articulation between a urban intervention of theatrical features and an action that raises a variety of philosophical elements.

Philoctetes Archive. Living arts, public space and documentation (curated by Maricel Alvarez for Ediciones Documenta) is a book that appeals to a form of expanded theater which took place from year 2002 and until 2007 in the cities of Buenos Aires, Krakow, Berlin and Vienna. Emilio García Wehbi decided to install in the early hours of the day, in strategic areas of these cities, a number of anthropomorphic dolls (made by Norberto Laino and Julieta Potenze) that emulated the dropped from the system.

Beings in a street situation, beggars or vagrants who they were lying and that they remained in a state of abandonment close to the agony. The people who passed through that day (everything happened during working hours on a single day) could maintain a state of indifference or approach them to see if it was necessary to help and assist them.

When they discovered that it was a fictional scene, typical of the mechanics of a delegated performance, the artist teams who were in charge of each doll, they were getting closer to finish framing the nature of what happened.

This scene that remembers and dialogues with situationism was recorded by a team who observed urban behavior around each doll. Marticel Alvarez, the curator of the Philoctetes Archive which today finds its book format thanks to Ediciones Documenta, was the producer of this intervention that it had from the early days of its creation, a reflective will.

The book, which is a way of condensing the extensive work that Maricel Álvarez has been carrying out since 2020, when the pandemic offered her the appropriate time to classify the material accumulated to build the Philoctetes Archivebegins with a text by García Wehbi that has the scope of a manifesto.

In fact the production of this theater director, playwright, actor and visual artist maintains the aftertaste of the avant-garde. The device of Philoctetes Project contemplated the gaze as a structuring element. People could choose to see or not see the doll but, at the same time, they were observed by the artists.

The spectator disappeared to become the protagonist and the creators occupied the place of spectators. With the Philoctetes Archive We are spectators of the instance of expectation and here a similarity occurs between action and observation in theatrical terms and the reproduction of these manifestations as social subjects in urban life.

He Philoctetes Archive It accounts for that field of thought that becomes broader than the action itself. The data that Maricel Álvarez takes is linked to the conditions of realization. The curator understands that an archive of the performing arts must be able to get closer to the experience and not just document it. In this sense, the concept of gesture that raises Graciela Speranza It allows us to perceive that moment where the body agrees to emotionally move through an idea.

The sociologist Horacio Gonzalez He was summoned at the time by García Wehibi to write a text that is published in this book. Gonzalez approached the terrain where this form of expanded theater took place and in his essay he identifies a narrative constructed from a moral perspective, because the doll points out the line that separates the human from the non-human.

That puppet, as Gonzalez defined it, proposes a distance. Since there is no prior agreement with the public, since the performance took passersby by surpriseit could happen that certain expectations put into play (the urgency to call a medical service or provide some type of help) were frustrated, which caused conflicts, moments where the passersby involved rebuked the artistic team and also situations of complete identification when the person approaching was a person who lived on the street and wanted to complete the intervention by giving their testimony as a document to strengthen this urban dramaturgy.

Theatrical procedures were expressed in pity for the fallen which motivated actions that could not be carried out, since the fictional entity of the doll was revealed. The project avoided that calming or cathartic moment. People were faced with the paradox of having wanted to assist a doll, while those who had fallen from the system due to the crisis of 2001 (to which this experience referred) continued to occupy their agonizing place in the streets.

The mimetic instance was built from the element that indicated the fiction. In an interview by Graciela Speranza with García Wehbi that is part of this book, the critic and writer asks her if she ever thought about choosing actors instead of dolls and García Wehbi answers that she never hesitated to use the doll because In his work, the political emerges from the poetic.. We could think that the doll avoided enunciation, since it spoke for itself at the moment of being discovered in its morphology. There was nothing about the order of the performance that demanded any kind of explanatory speech.

If Gonzalez attempts an analysis of the actions that this performance provoked, the Spanish author Victoria Perez Royo write about those moments where nothing happened. The aesthetics professor identifies that the true setting of the Filoctetes Project was not the street but the bodies of passersby.

This conclusion is possible because it was a doll, otherwise the emotional burden would have been placed on the actor. The curatorial work of Álvarez and the editing of Gabriela Halac allow these different reflective levels to enter into dialogue and construct a written scene of that fact that is now revealed in the present of the book’s pages.

In it Philoctetes Project the political was in the creation of the conditions so that the anonymous could speakthe book accounts for the sociological and philosophical power of art to “reorganize the field of the sensible,” as the French philosopher Jacques Ranciére establishes, “to modify the visible, the perceived forms.”

Victoria Perez Royo takes care of that walker who doesn’t look, who does not stop to look or who directly avoids looking and asks: What happens when it seems that nothing is happening? We could respond in Chekhovian terms and tell him that the urban fabric of a society, life itself, is manufactured.

That person who does not look at the fallen is all of us, which is why his text touches on an existential dimension that reveals the determining conflict of this project. When nothing happens, the element on which social architecture is sustained is happening. and then enters the quote from the American theorist Kaja Silverman where the fear of looking means refusing to live in another’s corporality, avoiding making unity with that other body.

The notion of archive that guides Maricel Álvarez is linked not only to the safeguarding of materials but also to their interpretation. The book is a complex visual piecelike all the copies offered by Ediciones Documenta, an adventure compressed in printed format where the photos and reproductions of journalistic notes are not there to illustrate but rather function as another narrative instance.

The book contains a poster, a variety of elements that are discovered not only in reading but in the material corporality that creates its own discourse. Maricel Álvarez thinks of the archive as a hermeneuticas the formation of a system that unites varied registers that make the interpretive dimension temporal continuity with an experience that in the performing arts is always ephemeral.

The writings that Philoctetes Archive propitious, they open the field of the essay, the final text by Marcelo Persia has the phrasing of a poem. The archive is always thought of from the present and, in this way, it allows us to re-signify dissimilar temporalities. The book operates as the impulse to revive an aesthetic instanceboth around the documents and the imaginative capacity it inspires.

Philoctetes Archive, from Documenta Editions.