Enter the pages of the book Fiction from a horizon corner (1979-1994)of the Argentine photographer and teacher based in Ecuador Jorge Massucco Corti, It’s like entering a theater room. Black pages look like a thick curtain that soon opens to give way to the function. The reader meets a staging consisting of small texts and photographs on black or red surfaces, as well as with headlines of various sizes, in white, which are the conductive threads of what is told and shows.
But what is this book published by Meso red editions? It goes from the theatrical scene of Guayaquil and the cultural history of a city that lives so in a hurry that many times forget or omit to register that walk. Who has written the history of theater in Guayaquil? What books collect the history of dance, literature, or visual arts in this pioneer city in many aspects of art in Ecuador?
Massucco, born in 1936, who lives here since the 70s (then Argentina lived the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla), he exposes in This book, with almost 400 pages, a rich documentary material: the photographs that he, also actor and puppeteer in his youth in his country and assiduous assistant to the theaters of Guayaquil, managed to make Throughout the years in this city that welcomes it.
In the volume he delimits: from 1979 to 1994. Of course, everything that occurred in Guayaquil is not in that period, but what he could photograph. There is the scenic work of groups such as The minstrel, the grimace, Sarao, Gestus, Arteamerica. Of actors such as Marina Salvarezza, Hugo Avilés, Rossana Iturralde. José Miguel Salem’s musical theater. Schuberth Hookozo’s proposals and more. How much story. How much work. How much vocation gathered.
And not only are the photographs, but the author accompanies them with reflections on the theater, reality, fiction, life. What is fiction? What is reality? What is life? Dictionaries provide a concept, a definition, but the concept or definition always falls short in the face of daily experience. This is what Massucco poses in his incessant philosophical, based on readings, in authors, in experiences.
It is a book of a scholarly person who takes solemnity to the word erudition to transcend a daily life that we share and understand all. In a simple and sometimes playful way, it makes us think, he launches questions that we have left not as a task, but as a possibility that dialogue does not run out. Continue after we get out of these deep and beautifully designed pages.
Like any staging, in the realization of this book a team has worked. The images of the cover and back cover are by Marina Paolinelli, wife of Jorge Massucco, also a photographer by profession. In the selection of the photographs his son, Diego Massucco Paolinelli. The design and diagramming was carried out by Sebastián Sánchez. The visual conceptualization belongs to Mario Rodríguez Dávila and editorial care was in charge of Bertha Díaz, from Manso Rojo Ediciones. The prologue was written by the cultural journalist Lola Márquez.
Thank you, Jorge Massucco Corti, for refreshing the memory of those who already have gray hair and for telling the story not registered with the new generations. Books like Fiction from a horizon corner (1979-1994) They are necessary and remind us that, in spite of everything, against wind and tide, in Guayaquil theater has been made and that this is still alive. The function must continue! And the documentation too! (O)
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