Hernán Alfaro —Uruguayan, 27 years old— and Analía Berroja-Albis —Argentina, 73 years old— look into each other's eyes and talk.
They are in the center of the Puente de la Mujer, in Buenos Aires, and they arrived there summoned by the artist Marta Minujín, who to close the performance
Biennial
proposed to the public to meet at that point and look for their “opposite souls.”
Hernán and Analía do not know each other and they tell each other: that he is a graphic designer and she is a teacher;
that he is a virgo and she is an aquarius;
that he is an introvert and she is not, that is why he took the first step to start talking.
“Generating meetings in this time is not easy.
In an individualistic world, looking into each other's eyes is fantastic,” says Analía, who adds: “This is art.”
The public participates in the 'performance'.Mariana Eliano
Minujín, the most popular Argentine contemporary artist, invited the public to meet this Saturday on a cable-stayed bridge designed by architect Santiago Calatrava in a wealthy area of Buenos Aires.
Attendees had to first download an application and answer a series of questions about their food, artistic, and political preferences... When they finished, the application returned two works by Minujín: one that represented them and another that represented their “souls.” opposite."
At the Women's Bridge, each attendee received a
sticker
with the work that defined them and stuck it on their chest.
Thus, the participants identified people who were different from them.
To make this proposal, Minujín was inspired by his own story.
“I was married to a person totally different from me,” she told EL PAÍS days before by phone.
Her husband was Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini, an economist who advised different Argentine presidents and the International Monetary Fund, among others.
He, with whom he had two children, died in 2021. “I didn't go to the social gatherings that he went to and he didn't come to mine, we traveled separately, he was very organized and I was messy, he liked to go sailing and I liked to go to the mountains alone.
But the love remained,” said the artist and added: “It is interesting to live together as opposites.
Knowledge expands and one has to learn from the other.”
This Saturday's work is a new version of another action that Minujín did in 2015, when he invited the public at the
Performance
Biennial to find their "soul mates."
This time, more than 7,000 people answered the questions of the application in different countries and more than a hundred gathered at the Women's Bridge.
Some accepted Minujín's proposal and talked with strangers, others watched from the bridge railing and others activated their own artistic proposals, such as three girls who improvised a dance work or a woman covered in a black suit who held a protest sign: “A country that dismantles education, arts or culture is already governed by those who only have something to lose from the dissemination of art.”
View of the participants on the bridge.
Mariana Eliano
Everyone was waiting, above all, for Minujín to appear and they raised their cell phones in unison when a helicopter appeared in the distance.
Her audience follows her because he says that he is an “icon”, “the Argentine Andy Warhol”;
because he is “avant-garde” and “breaks everything”;
because it is “a delirium”;
for “his bravery” and “freedom.”
“I'm about to arrive,” announced the recording coming out of the speakers with the artist's voice.
The noise of the propellers was heard and white, red or purple flower petals flew.
The cannons that fired them did not have much power.
A few seconds later the helicopter disappeared with Minujín on board.
At 81 years old, the artist maintains the whirlwind that characterizes her, in addition to the platinum white hair, the straight bangs, the Ray-Ban glasses and the overalls that turn her into an androgynous being.
She was born in Buenos Aires, she lived in Paris and New York, and she returns every year to Villarino, a town in Patagonia where she spent her childhood riding bareback horses.
While she lived in France or the United States, Minujín suffered hardships because all the money she received from scholarships and awards—Guggenheim scholarship, Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, national prize from the Torcuato Di Tella Institute—was allocated to her art.
She sold her first work after turning 40, she said, and this year she will have exhibitions in New York and Denmark.
For now, she has no intention of stopping.
"So that?
I'm dying.
“I am going to die like Picasso, with the brush in my hand,” he told EL PAÍS.
“I have been in this since I was born.
“I think I was born a genius,” he added.
When he speaks he makes comparisons like these, with the painter from Malaga or the soccer star Diego Armando Maradona: “I invented many things that no one invented.
People love me very much, they only tell me I love you, but at first they called me crazy.
'Either she's crazy or she's stupid,' they said.
“I never cared about anything.”
Participants of Minujín's proposal in the Puente de la Mujer.
Mariana Eliano
A pioneer of participatory, controversial, experimental art, Minujín has carried out some of the
most remembered
performances in the country, such as
La Menesunda
, a labyrinthine tour through various situations that proposed multisensory stimuli (1965);
Obelisco de Pan Dulce
, a reproduction of the Argentine monument made of bread that the public could take away (1979);
Parthenon of forbidden books
—one of his favorites—, which consisted of a miniature replica of the Greek temple made with books censored during the last Argentine dictatorship (1983), or
Payment of the foreign debt with corn
(1985), a series of photographs with Warhol.
Like most of his proposals, this Saturday's was a work of mass participation, a
brief and ephemeral
happening that put the public into action.
Hernán Alfaro, the 27-year-old Uruguayan, and Analía Berroja-Albis, the 73-year-old Argentine, in the middle of the bridge, told each other: that he arrived in the city at noon to go to a concert by an Australian band that night. psychedelic rock;
that her father always instilled music in her.
Then they said goodbye.
“The opposite, how opposite is it?” Hernán thought.
He stood still and she moved across the bridge.
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