Medio: La Nación
Autor: Celina Chatruc
Fecha: 19/05/2023
A photography exhibition curated by Francisco Medail, along with an accompanying book, will surprise visitors starting tomorrow at Fundación Larivière.
“Japan has no photos of Japan,” Facundo de Zuviría—one of Argentina’s most acclaimed photographers—repeats again and again when asked about the exhibition opening tomorrow at Fundación Larivière. It bears this title because the word appears in one of the eighty photographs brought together in the show and in a book, arranged as forty diptychs. It was the spark for an imaginary journey he undertook with Paula Serrat, his partner of 37 years, during the lockdown.
“I always had the dream of going to Japan,” she confesses, the driving force behind this initiative that became a playful at-home adventure. With printed copies of photographs taken between 2016 and 2020 in Buenos Aires and other cities around the world, the two of them began pairing the images to shape this visual narrative composed of shop windows, mannequins, signs, and façades. These are recurring scenes in the work of this artist, whose photographs are part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), who exhibited a retrospective this year at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, and who recently participated in Photo London, represented by Rolf Art gallery.
“Where is Japan in Buenos Aires?” asks Francisco Medail, curator of the exhibition. “Japan is a distant world you can reach by subway or glimpse through the bus windows while standing during rush hour,” he adds. “Japan is contemporary urban life, the real city. And because it is so real, it becomes fiction.”
Something like this happens when De Zuviría goes to pick up the books and postcards he buys on Mercado Libre from the sellers’ homes. He takes the subway to the nearest station and then walks, camera in hand. He goes down one sidewalk and returns along the other: it is his own way of traveling.