Asunción, Paraguay
Gisela Esposito, a Paraguayan artist and teacher, said to me: “when I learned that a Pan-American project was coming to Paraguay, I couldn’t believe it. No one ever considers us when there is talk about the continent”. Paraguay does live the difficult historic situation of being in between two giants of the South cone – Argentina and Brazil— which contributes perhaps to this feeling of cultural invisibility.
Actually, Paraguay has a very singular culture, nurtured mainly by the Guaraní traditions and customs. A great deal of the population is Guaraní, and the majority of Paraguayans speak it along with Spanish. The city of Asunción shows this diversity, but at the same time it also shows its drastic social contrasts. These are particularly dramatic in the area where we presented the schoolhouse, at the municipal building of El Cabildo which is surrounded by a large section of favelas that go around the Bahía de Asunción and sit right in front of the paradoxically modern Edificio del Congreso. “This is the last authentic part of old Asunción”, I was told by scholar Carlos Sosa, who explained that the favelas are sitting in the same spot where Asunción was founded, and that after XIXth century dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia ordered to make an urban grid out of the entire city, this was the only spared area. Another famous Paraguayan dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled for tour decades, was less known for his urban innovations than for his brutal military regime. Stroessner has just died a couple weeks ago, at 93 and in exile. While this news appeared to give some respite to Paraguayans, his shadow still feels strong in the history of the country – and additionally, it doesn’t seem to be entirely gone: his grandson is now running for office.
The multiple delays and mishaps that I had to get to Asunción (I arrived with two days of delay, without the van, and without the schoolhouse, which was stuck in Venezuelan customs) still did not manage to impede us to make the project happen here. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the local art community, we built a surrogate version of the school out of fabric and wood. The Plaza del Cabildo, which is adjacent to the slums of La Chacarita, is pretty much dominated by the children of the area, who spend the whole day there. They immediately involved themselves in the project, so it became just natural to formalize their involvement. Every object placed in this plaza disappears within minutes, to become construction material for one of the houses in La Chacarita, and the schoolhouse, which we needed to keep there overnight, was certain to have the same fate eventually. We were nonetheless able to convince the children that it was critical not to steal the materials until the next day— after that, they could dispose of it as they pleased.
The fact that we conducted the Panamerican ceremony from the balcony of the Cabildo, which was until recently the Paraguayan congress, gave the event a particularly significant dimension. Shortly after the event was over, the kids from La Chacarita took apart the schoolhouse in a snap, returning Panamericanism once again to an ethereal state.
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Gisela Esposito, profesora y artista paraguaya, me mencionó en una conversación: “cuando me dijeron que venía un proyecto artístico panamericano aquí a Paraguay, no lo podía creer. Nadie nos considera nunca para nada cuando se habla del continente”. Paraguay vive la difícil situación histórica de estar ubicado entre los dos gigantes del cono sur (Argentina y Brasil), lo cual genera a veces esta sensación de invisibilidad cultural. En realidad, Paraguay tiene una cultura muy singular, en gran medida nutrida por las tradiciones y costumbres guaranís. Los múltiples retrasos y percances que tuvo la EPD para llegar a Asunción (Llegué con retraso, sin camioneta y sin escuela, pues esta sigue atorada en la aduana venezolana) no fueron suficientemente agravantes como para impedir que se desarrollara el proyecto a fin de cuentas. Gracias al entusiasmo de la comunidad artística local, pronto determinamos una estrategia para rearmar el proyecto. Consideramos importante el construir una versión alternativa de la escuela, y en el acto pusimos manos a la obra, consiguiendo tela y madera. El realizar la ceremonia desde el balcón de lo que fue hasta hace poco el congreso de Paraguay y el poner la escuela en su plaza le dio una dimensión particularmente significativa al evento. Y poco después de terminado el evento, los ninos de La Chacarita desmontaron la escuela en una exhalación, devolviéndole su inefable abstracción a lo panamericano.