Monico Family Travels

We caught the last day of Art Basel Buenos Aires this afternoon.  With limited time we picked 2 installations to view.

The first was at the end of a long wooden pier: a precarious yet mysteriously resilient structure stretching 800 meters out into the Rio de la Plata.  The pier has been home to an old fishing club since 1934, and as we embarked on the long rickety walk to the installation at the end we stopped to watch an old fisherman gut and scale a huge bloated fish.  As we neared pier-end oblivion, we stumbled through a rather strange entrance way which comprised a blackout tunnel containing a silent man working a lathe.  Bursting back out into daylight we found the main event: these revolving doors:

Perspective of Absence, by Eduardo Basualdo

I quite liked them, and tried to engage the girls in interesting conversation about the artistic properties of said installation and what it might signify, but they were singularly unimpressed (I’m not sure if their apathy was triggered by the length of the walk, or the actual artwork).  They would apparently have been more impressed if they could have spun through the doors and landed in the ocean, or even better onto a trampoline suspended above the water.

On the walk back (did I mention the pier was long?!?!), the girls decided to up the ante and offer us and the other attendees some alternative performing arts:

Two Rocks on a Pier, designed by Bella Monico, performed by Bella and Emily Monico

Just to keep things exciting, the rocks occasionally popped up!

The second installation we engaged with was David Horovitz’s Señalamiento del cielo (Signaling the Sky) which involved the release of 200 helium ball at several different times and places across the city.  His concept was to pay homage to Marcel Duchamp.  Horovitz encouraged audience participation, as an opportunity for viewers to look at the industrial skyline in a different way.  We found ourselves outside the Ex Cerveceria and were lucky enough to get our hands on 2 of the 200 balloons!

The balloons were attached to strings that were each exactly 1 mile long.  We had fun playing with them on site, trying not to get them tangled with everyone else’s balloons, then stuffed them in a taxi to bring them home to our AirBnB in Palermo.  At sunset we took them to our roof terrace, and let them out REALLY far on their strings……….then pulled them back in again.  Bella and Emily got a bit emotionally attached to them, but ultimately decided that they would have a better ‘end’ released to experience freedom and see the curvature of the earth, than tied to a chair to deflate overnight.  So they tied the balloons together for companionship, said fond farewells……

and watched Bobby and Luna dance their way to space!

NB the above is a video – if you are reading this by e-mail, then the video won’t come through, so go to the website (www.monicofamilytravels) to watch.  Caveat: this video is basically 2 balloons disappearing into space, so depending on how stoned you are, it is possibly a less exhilarating watch than the high-adrenalin galloping-on-the-dunes videos shared in earlier posts.