As an artist from the United States, Tranqui Yanqui has swept Buenos Aires with his techinicolour pancho-pancho. He has spent five years in the city and has found it full of inspiration; a place where he could be the character he had wanted to creatively explore.

Tranqui Yanqui at one of his fashion shows (photo courtesy of Tranqui Yanqui)

His medium is hard to pin down, as it combines sculptures with flurries of colour, fashion shows, ‘tranqui’ apparel and live performances and interventions on the streets. Over the recent years, his art has been motivated by street and pop culture, specifically looking at the relationship people have with facing different cultures.

Tranqui Yanqui has become quite a character of quirky collaborative force between the United States and Buenos Aires. He combines spunky glitz with buena onda in his creative projects and the culmination of his experience here will be in his newest project, the ‘Tranqui Torres’. He hopes to construct two towers with doses of T.Y. pizzazz and display them in Pateo de Liceo in commemoration and reflection of the events of 11th September. When asked what motivated him to do the project, he said that he “wanted to build Tranqui’s version of the twin towers to not only highlight the date and T.Y’s ‘American-ness’, but also to define a personal story as well”.

As he explained, the T.Y. story is one of expression and escape. He was born in Miami, Florida and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. He made the move to Buenos Aires as he felt that the city would give him the freedom to express himself as an artist, something that he believes has been accomplished. Living in a Tranqui World, as he refers to it as Tranquilandia, has always circled around major North American and Argentine events and icons within popular culture. This September, the towers will be no different.

The artist also said how his time here was not just expression, but reflection, too. He explained how life here, bumping into different nationalities and cultures, has shown him that not everything is, as he puts it, “black and white”.

“While the twin towers are an important symbol for everyone – and a delicate one to work with – I do think it’s possible to tastefully recontextualize them to tell your own version of a story. That has been the goal of Tranqui Yanqui all along, to tell the story of place, nationality, and culture through the filter of a colourful character.”

Although it has been over a decade since the Twin Towers fell, it symbolically changed the world. It shifted political, economic and sociological perspectives and questioned our notions of what it means to be a part of a country or nation.

The opening of the art event will be on September 11

Since that date, the way we travel has also changed. Getting from place to place is easier but with more restrictive on where we should go, more accessible to some, but more constrictive on others. The borders have become fuzzier, more confusing, almost psychedelic.

The Tranqui Torres are not intended to mock the event. Instead, like his other projects that were Tranqui-fied, they intend to revisit an iconic event through a more colourful lens of the artist’s Tropical Pop Universe. He hopes to gauge the response of the viewer before making conclusions about what the installation is about.

T.Y. is using the idea.me platform to fund his project that is to be opening at Lista Ya Galeria in Pateo de Liceo, Santa Fe 2729, on Sept. 11th 2012 from 7-11pm. Head to the opening or offer a donation online through idea.me.

Campo de Piedra Pomez in Catamarca (Photo: Marcelo Gurruchaga)

The latest exhibition by photographer Marcelo Gurruchaga is a love letter to the power of nature and the glory of the Argentine landscape. The exhibition takes place in Palermo’s T-Bone restaurant, where sweeping shots of the Rio de La Plata accompany the daily carousel of pasta, pizza and empanadas.

Looking outside the restaurant window at bustling Av Santa Fé, it’s easy to forget the magnitude and the diversity of the Argentine countryside. The dense warren of streets in the capital is a total anathema to the intense, panoramic visions of Argentina that Gurruchaga presents in his show. Sweeping shots of unmarked countryside made up of intricate paths and weaving waterways are captured in an intense spectrum of colours. These photographs are dedications to an environment both fundamental to and threatened by human existence, serving as reminders of both human origins and footprints.

‘Tierra Madre’ (‘Mother Earth’) takes the themes of origin and light as its focus. The exhibition is the next step for an artist dedicated to portraying the enormity and magnitude of the natural world. Gurruchaga has worked in photography for over 30 years, teaching photography, graphic design and even architecture and design in the University of Buenos Aires, UADE and Belgrano. His key focus within his work is on portraying conservation and heritage issues through his photographs.

Gurruchaga’s previous shows, shot in far away locations like Antarctica, show a similar desire to capture the beauty of unsullied environments. However, these works are a deliberate homage to his birthplace and to human origins in nature.

“I wanted to show our purest origins” says Gurruchaga, “It is this type of landscape which appeals to me most; the insolation, infinite landscapes like the Pampas. These are the places that attract me”.

This reference to insolation, the science of light measurement hints at a deeper interest in light which runs throughout this exhibition. Gurruchaga’s respect for the natural world and our place within it is evident. Also obvious, however, is his fascination for light and the photographic method, evidenced in the glorious colours achieved in his images.

“Achieving the intensity is about a method of exposure to achieve the right measure of light, above all, the theme of photometry” he says.

Gurruchaga’s interest in insolation and photometry – the name given to the science of the measure of light – shows a deep respect for, nature and photography. It is this obsession with and respect for the enormity and complexity of his subject matter that takes his work beyond the realm of a Windows screen saver.

Opening night on Wednesday 4^th July finds Gurruchaga amidst a swarm of eulogising fans. The evening is an intimate affair and the conversation is flowing – due in part to a seemingly endless supply of empanadas and red wine. Beaming guests sit at tables and weave between waiters and dinner parties to admire the array of canvases lining the walls.

While an unconventional setting for a photography exhibition, it is still possible to get a good look at all the pictures without getting too involved in a first date or sitting on someone’s lap. It does take more concentration to connect to art while dodging a dinner service, but the atmosphere is relaxed and accessible. Plus it’s easy to find a coffee after the show – just ask the waitress whose path you’re blocking.

Do humans perceive the passage of time from some internal, eternal clock, or through external clues? On the one hand, there is an objective dimension tok measuring time — astronomic and measurable, directly related to sunlight and darkness cycles. On the other, society establishes rules, rhythms, and times for production and rest, historical times and cultural conventions related to dates and temporal perception, which also vary from person to person. There is biological time, psychological time, relative time and geologic time. Which measures time correctly? Perhaps time can be considered as an idea — one that functions in a subjective and relative way, but that can be measured with the help of instruments. In any case, for visual arts to deal with it, new tools of representations are required.

Rosa Chancho, Sopor, installation view at Mite

“What is time? We don’t know,” asks and responds Michel Siffre, French explorer and scientist whose underground experiments provided foundations for research in cronobiology. Cronobiology explores human biological rhythms. Siffre’s experiments consisted in isolating himself in a cave, without any kind of clock, watch or instrument for measuring time. He intended to explore geological formations, but mostly to study biological time — the cycles of wakefulness and sleep dictated by the needs of the body and beyond the effects of culture.

Interested in exploring these notions, artist collective Rosa Chancho constructed an artificial cavern in their workshop. The group also decided to continue Siffre’s investigations with one of their own — this time in La Caverna del Caos (Chaos Cavern) in the Catinzaco region in the Argentine province of La Rioja. They wanted to explore their own cronobiological rhythms and so they went into isolation collectively. The exhibition, Sopor, at Mite, relates the experience, transferring or “transcribing” it to the gallery space.

Rosa Chancho, Sopor, installation view at Mite

Rosa Chancho has translated this transformation into the exhibition space, thus turning the gallery into a cavern as well. The “void,” for instance, appears as a tangible object — a sculpture at the center of the room. It looks like a kind of timeless totem from the caverns, covered with craft paper. The sculpture represents, according to Rosa Chancho’s Javier Villa, the “hole of emptiness” that the group has used for discarding excrement.

The group has visually organized the exhibition around this sculptural, brown object of indefinite shape. On one of the walls around it, in front of the entrance, a board displays a sort of bibliography of caverns — Siffre’s journals, a scientific encyclopedia and pages from popular science magazines, graphics, comics, photos, sci-fi stories and comments on the vision of color. It provides a variety of fictional, scientific and pseudo-scientific literature, mixed with theoretical and practical texts about caverns, isolation and the exploration of unknown worlds.

Meanwhile, to the left, two snails with a red body slide across the image projected on the glass window overlooking the street.

Rosa Chancho, Sopor, installation view at Mite, projection

On another wall, diagonally in front of the bibliography, hang nine framed pages transcribing the notes taken during the group’s experiences at Chaos Cavern. Beside it, a dark wooden stand supports two microphones that wait for a speaker who will pronounce a speech looking out the window over Santa Fe Avenue. On the glass panel, four projected images alternate at 20-minute intervals,in a sort of slow and endless PowerPoint presentation. The speaker is absent, but the traces of the speech still appear on a whiteboard showing graphics and the traces of detailed explanations, perhaps derived from the hallucinogenic imagination of a scientist that never arrived.

Rosa Chancho, Sopor, installation view at Mite, detail

Reading Rosa Chancho’s annotations, the text becomes the center of the exhibition. It further explains how the group’s experiment hasn’t really concentrated on the specifically crono-biological effects or on the search for a scientific truth. Instead, it focused mostly on the symbolic implications of being isolated from light and the consequences of that on the mechanics of thought and memory. “Surrounded by darkness,” they point out, “with just a light bulb, memory stops capturing moments. You forget. After two or three ‘days’, we didn’t remember what had been done before. All was black.”

In the darkness, movements also take on a different shape and meaning. “We spent a long time without moving (…). It’s hard to tell who said what first and what came later,” notes Rosa Chancho. Siffre had also observed that he’d “had the impression of remaining motionless. However, I knew I was being carried by the continuous flux of time. Time was the only moving thing through which I was advancing. I tried to determine it, and each night, I knew I had failed.”

However, when a light unexpectedly floods the nave, it alters the “perception of space, perspective, volume, emptiness and color. Images disappear. Symbolic, associative thinking vanishes. No point is more special than the others to look at.” The limits between the body and the space surrounding it begin to melt. Stalactite and mud become embedded in bones, skin and mouth.

When thought can’t fix on any particular object, the process of metamorphosis is permanent and in this subterranean logic, dreams reproduce daily reality from the outside world.

In these experiences of ethereal obscurity, of a long endless day, in the absolute absence of cycles that alternate between day and night, the notions of “before” and “after” disappear. Without them, narration ceases to make sense, deeply transforming the meaning and shape of all things and thoughts.

Although Siffre distinguished between night, darkness, opacity and shadow, their meanings continued to trouble him: “Subterranean night isn’t the cosmic night; opacity is absolute. In this world where all is nothing, one thing persists, my thought: Is it going to sink into the shadow of endless nothingness too?”

Sopor, by Rosa Chancho, installation view at Mite