On the bus in Formosa, Argentina
I believe to have entered into a state of semi-depression, partially due to the low energy I have, the continuing difficulties of the trip, my tightening budget, and the growing sense of dislocation for having been away from home for so long. It also has not helped to travel through countries where one sees so much poverty and corruption that it is hard to maintain a positive outlook about things. In this sense, Asunción turned out a particularly exciting –and saddening— place to be.
Being in Asunción revived in me a feeling that I had while traveling through Eastern Europe over the last few years. I would call it “the melancholy of the silent periphery”. Paraguay, like Eastern Europe, is an area that incorporates all the references of the West, but in an obtuse manner. While they follow the music, culture, and fashion of the outside, and they emphatically see themselves as part of Latin America, they also accept their role in this process as of mere spectators and consumers, which creates a strange environment where they seem to accept that their local reality can never be referenced whatsoever, nor that they can ever aspire to be heard.
In some cases the melancholic countries of the silent periphery have attractive and interesting idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, their sense of identity is vague at best, and aside from the regular nationalistic affirmations, there seems to be a resignation toward the exterior model. But in contrast to the Slavic countries, whose economy is improving thanks to its gradual integration with Western Europe, countries like Paraguay do not see any light at the end of the tunnel.
Paraguay, which by most standards is the poorest country in Latin America after Haiti, has such a painful history of failure, has accumulated so many problems and vices amongst its ruling class, and has carried over so many economic, social and political conflicts that it is not surprising that most Paraguayans see their own country as hopeless and turn to the U.S. as the only alternative for protection and stability.(although it was U.S. policy which supported and encouraged the rise of Stroessner to power). “The only thing left here is to put the U.S. flag in the country”, told me a sixty-year old Paraguayan woman who sat next to me on the bus. “Things have just gotten worse. In the last five years, crime has grown so much that I now have a rifle, one rottweiler, and a doberman”.
Incidentally, Stroessner died a few days ago, after a long exile in Brasilia, at age 93. In a local magazine that comments on the dark Stroessner legacy, there are accounts of people who personally went through torture and imprisonment under this dictatorship, all of which are seen as normal. The “archivo del terror”— a recently discovered archive created during the Stroessner regime that documents the many atrocities it did to its citizens— is only but an example of the trauma of this country. In many conversations I had with Paraguayans, many spoke about having a collective inferiority complex. More than in any other place, I saw a country that had a very peculiar richness, and yet such a deep sense of failure that most appear to have given up.
In a context like this one can ask what could possibly be the role of contemporary art in a place like this. The internationalism of contemporary art only feels like a reminder that there is no art market here, no great stimulus to make art, and little interest from the outside.
While I left with this sense of hopelessness, at the same time I had the strong feeling that this was the absolute best place to be for an art project such as the one I was bringing. As opposed to some art communities that felt too international or sophisticated for a project like this, or felt that they did not need to be lectured by what they see as a privileged artist from the “center”, here the sense was an infinite thirst for anything that would come from outside, and the desire to be part of something larger. In Paraguay I quickly became known as “the Mexican”, or, like local artist Mónica González called me after a workshop: “the Panamerican psychiatrist”. Two weeks are left before I take the plane back to New York. So much has happened since I boarded La Panamericana on that spring day in Anchorage. Neither myself, nor the continent has remained the same
At this point, and after having crossed seventeen borders, there is a cacophony of memories in me. It is hard to make sense of all this. There are too many voices, too many images, and too many roads that have taken me through (or away from) the Panamerican highway. Yet, Panamerica is appearing to me in the form of informal commerce, of splendid landscapes, endless waits in gray rooms, the savage “every man for himself” nature of the borders and the highways, human kindness and human violence, ingenuity and sarcasm, deep fried yucca foods, Shakira everywhere, local beers and cell phone companies, and a myriad of accents, most of them saying things I don’t comprehend, but that I still am trying to connect.