Santiago Porter

I choose the work "Hospital", (2007). A photograph in which you can see the façade of the Policlínico Ferroviario, Buenos Aires. Starting from my interest in the representation of absence, space and stories, my interest in working with the appearance of some city buildings bears several possible explanations. From its metaphorical approach, the intention of doing historical comments, to the idea of working with almost taxonomic objectives. So, given the premise of working with architecture as an explicit form of the city's transformation, I started focusing my attention on some public buildings. The connection between their history and appearance. The shell and its content. When focusing specifically on the façades and work on them as if they were portraits, hypervisibility functioned as a resource to make evident the different historical layers accumulated within such deteriorated architecture, and producing, thus, large-format photographs, as obsolete monuments. The first example of this, that later on worked as a pattern for the further development of the series, was the Policlínico Ferroviario. A building that caught my eye because of its monumentality, its dimensions, but most of all because of its story. It had been inaugurated by Perón in 1952. It's a nine-floored mass, covering an area of 10.000 m2 that used to have almost 700 beds to take care of almost 225.000 members of the Union´s sponsored HMO. As branch lines started to close, during the privatization of the railway services during the Menem era back in the 1990s, the numbers of rail workers started to decrease drastically and so did their contributions to the union. The hospital end up closing in 1999, surrounded by a cloud of scandals and corruption. To sum up, everything I wanted to work on was there, in the cracks of this abandoned building, like stories read in the wrinkles of someone's face.

I don't think I can suggest a way to read my work, but I can mention some concerns or motivations that I've had when producing it. In most of the works I've made up to this day, I've been interested in the issue of absence; its different manifestations and representations. Sometimes I think that, in relation to my photographs, what is meaningful is not visible. Taking this into consideration, I don't work that much with representing objects, but with its dissapearance. What Chinese artist Sze Tsung Leong called the ‘ashes of time’, the remains left by life. The dissapearance of all stories.

I am (I was trained as) a photographer, and to be honest, I can't place myself as a part of any tradition. I always keep in mind the work by some other artists. Robert Frank, Liliana Porter are inexorable references. And, among others, I'm interested in Sugimoto and Humberto Rivas. Bernd and Hilda Becher, Diane Arbus and Dani Yako. Jeff Wall and Boltanski. Also, films by Shirin Neshat, the work by Macchi, Cesarco and González Torres.

I can think of two exhibitions: León Ferrari's retrospective in the CC Recoleta, 50 years of a touching intensity; and "Gotas" (Drops), by Luciana Betesh in Duplus. Pure poetry, pure love.