The policeman, the boy and the 'turra': three anonymous characters to think about Buenos Aires

The Chilean artist Nicolás Miranda plants in different parts of the capital, fleetingly and without warning, hyper-realistic sculptures that propose a critical reading of local reality

Nicolás Miranda walks through the center of Buenos Aires with a sculpture on his shoulder. The work weighs, more or less, like a nine-year-old child. It is inspired by a character from the Argentine popular imagination, Juanito Laguna, a subject invented at the beginning of the 20th century by the muralist Antonio Berni, who conceived him as "a child from outside the walls of Buenos Aires or any Latin American capital": "A poor child, not a poor child”. Miranda –Chilean artist, 43 years old– discovers the sculpture and sits it at the foot of a robust building. It is tiny next to the golden door of the Stock Exchange headquarters.

The sculpture will remain there for only a few minutes. The fleeting intervention that Miranda makes together with a team of artists, photographers and friends proposes a critical reading of the local reality. "We think of certain anonymous topics that are on the opposite side of the figures that are already installed in Buenos Aires based on their particularity," he told EL PAÍS. He, he says, has sought to “take clichés and generate counterpoints” from three characters –Juanito Laguna, the Policeman and La Turra– that he places in different parts of the city.

Miranda has been working on the project for four years. The social outbreak in 2019 in Chile, first, and the covid-19 pandemic, later, delayed the work. In between, he carried out a similar work in Madrid that led the mayor of the Spanish capital, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, to say that it was "an idiot." The artist placed a sculpture of Juan Carlos I, the emeritus king, pointing a rifle at the bronze bear in Puerta del Sol. There were 10 minutes of provocation.

The difference, in this case, is that the characters are not known personalities. “They are tentative,” he says of the three sculptures he created: “They could be others; the locations too. Hence the title of the project, People in their place, or attempts at a noble equality. “[The characters] are more or less universal, at least in the region. But this project only works here because what I blend in with or camouflage myself with is spaces that already exist. I am interested in reading the codes that exist in a certain place, in this case, Buenos Aires”.

This Wednesday, he installed the sculpture of the child at the foot of the Stock Exchange. He had left the tenement where he always stays in Buenos Aires, in the south of the capital; through the financial district; he had crossed paths with caramelized vendors, office workers, flower vendors, urban waste sorters; he had passed in front of the Casa Rosada, and continued a few more blocks. The piece, made of lightweight materials such as Styrofoam and painted with oil, remained there for around 15 minutes before being removed.

A man, a life partner of the Stock Exchange, immediately saw the contrast between the hopeless child and the building that was raised over his head and began to take photos of the work: “We are all going to be like this. Listen to me: if the dollar doesn't reach 800 [pesos] today, it's going to be scraping. There are people who are getting better while poverty advances at an accelerated pace. They want to cling to [Javier] Milei, who is a crazy person on the loose. But sanity did not always prevail here, ”he said days after the ultra candidate was the most voted in the primary elections and the peso devalued almost 20%.

Miranda, however, does not seek the reaction of the spectators with this action. And actually, very few passersby stopped to interact. “It is not a sociological experiment, I am not interested in experimenting with people. If someone joins and takes a photo, perfect. And if not too. I care about the story that is generated and that story lives in the archives, ”he tells this newspaper. After several weeks installing the works in different areas of the city by surprise, on October 20 you can see the result and the sculptures in the Pavilion 4 Gallery.

He repeated the same exercise that he did with Juanito Laguna with the sculpture of a young woman with a shaved neck, earrings on her face, various tattoos, bare belly, leggings and slippers. She was placed this Wednesday next to Las chicas de Divito, the sculpture of two female characters with impossible curves created more than half a century ago. He called it Turra, for its aesthetic related to a particular urban identity.

He also repeated it with the Police, an agent who carries the gun in one hand and the cell phone in the other. He was placed, first, next to a character created by the cartoonist Manuel García Ferré and, later, in front of an old clandestine detention center of the dictatorship. “Each one has a different reading. Both can be violent; one from the absurd and another from the more political character ”, he says. In all three cases, he sought to appeal to humor: "It has to do with questioning your environment, with questioning it, with ridiculing it."

https://elpais.com/argentina/2023-08-19