Revisiting a city, never having seen it before. This is the principle behind the works displayed at Patricia Osses’ first Parisian solo exhibition at La maudite. The works, all unpublished, are the result of a residency on Jorge Luis Borges’ Buenos Aires to discover what kind of visuality could arise from the literary spaces contained in this author's short stories, as well as from the experience in the town. Among the actual locations for the new fictions, she discovers the former National Library of Argentina (now empty), an overflowing labyrinthine used bookstore (in the best Borgesian style), the town itself... and other stories, like those by Cortázar and Benjamin. The same urge brought Patricia to France, this time in the quest for the places of Marguerites Duras.

 

The exhibition begins with Prologues, a series that combines images of Buenos Aires (the entries of buildings) with texts of the philosopher Walter Benjamin about Paris. This is the initial connection between Paris and Buenos Aires, crowned, at the end, by a text written by Julio Cortázar, "El otro cielo", linking the two cities through the covered galleries.

 

The visit continues through the eyes of an Antílope (Antelope) that watches us. Three photographs get us closer to it through the perspective of a corridor in ruins, as in a zoom that grows sequentially. A resident of the library, like so many others.                

 

Still on the same floor, two images converse with the shelves in our office. This is the Libreria Universal de Bolsillo (Pocket Universal Library), which contains everything, but fits in your pocket and is easily transportable.

 

Downstairs, the basement houses the sound of one tango, which fills the empty shelves of the former National Library of Argentina. The video is named after the music: Sin Palabras (no words), singing absences in the exact measure of the large emptied hall.

 

In this hall, only the shelves remain, covered in several layers of age-old dust. To them are brought back, if not the books, at least the names of the authors, through Missing Names: photographs that register the action of writing in the dust the 96 names (+1, that of Jorge Luis Borges) engraved in the library’s columns.

 

 

 

Patricia Osses

Born in Santiago/Chile, 1971. Lives and works in São Paulo/Brazil since 1973. Patricia Osses is a visual artist. She is graduated from the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo, where she currently prepares a PhD supervised by the artist Carlos Fajardo. She has also studied architecture and music. Her work deals with space and its perception through different media such as photography, installation, performance and sound. She has shown her work in Brazil at Centro Cultural São Paulo, MAC, Maria Antonia and Funarte. She has also exhibited in Chile and England. She was artist in residence in Buenos Aires (UBA), London (British Council), Santiago de Chile (Casapina) and Tours, France (École de Beaux Arts). She is currently visitor PhD student at Paris 1 Sorbonne, where she conducting researches on the writer Marguerite Duras. Her work is represented by Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo.

 

Translation Port/Eng by Julia Vidile