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Tropical Table Party is a structure designed by María Inés Rodríguez and Pablo León de la Barra to circulate and promote magazines, publications and other literature, all independent projects by mainly Latin American artists and collectives. The publications are in themselves an attempt to create a high profile using low cost means.
María Inés Rodríguez, curator of Tropical Table Party in the Consulta space at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, briefly explains the germ and the development of the project.
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| Tropical Paper n. 00, hivern 2004 |
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| Dmente 03, n.3, febrer-març 2004 |
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| Pulgar 17, n. 6, setembre 2004 |
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MARÍA INÉS RODRÍGUEZ
‘... I would spend the last two hours of the afternoon (geography and history) thinking about the magazine stand. There was one at the first silk-cotton tree on the right in Paseo Bolivar, which I’d found when I was looking for stories about Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask (which I was forbidden to read at home, along with Edgar Allan Poe stories, because they were for the hoi polloi) and where I eventually discovered magazines with women in; when I became a regular, the owner of the stand surreptitiously showed me them (...) when there wasn’t a single Santo story I hadn’t seen, including the spines, he said to me:
- Come here, let me show you something.
I went up to him cautiously. Under a whole pile of Domingos Alegres he revealed the first magazine...’
Andrés Caicedo
Angelitos Empantanados o historias para
jovencitos.
This is how ‘magazines’ appeared in the life of the narrator of Angelitos Empantanados, there in Cali, an enigmatic city situated in the west of Colombia, ‘with a semitropical vegetation of bamboos, banana and papaya trees, Cali is a relatively pleasant city with a good climate. Here you don’t feel the tension. Cali has a high rate of crime—real, not political. Even safe-busting...’, according to William Burroughs’ description of it in 1953 in The Yage Letters. Today, there are still traces of that time, and the climate is pleasanter than ever; crime is still real but also political and escalating, conditioned by the agitated context in which the country lives and under the weight of which Cali has been crushed. Its streets are still full of all kinds of ‘bogged-down little angels’ trying to recreate an imaginary city by injecting meaning into places in order to survive.
It is in this city, a tropical phantasm of coloured lights that calls for a constant redefinition of terror and escape in order not to perish, that Andres Caicedo’s characters live. Life in Cali, as in many other of the world’s metropolises, is marked by a complex, convulsed situation. Social contradictions and the chasm separating the population’s various groups have grown in leaps and bounds, turning it into a veritable contemporary urban laboratory.
The world of youth described in this refreshing novel from the 1970s draws us into an initiatory journey to places still unknown. It is a dramatic leap from the heroic but ingenuous comic-book world of Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask to the world of adults and a sexuality that is desired but forbidden, represented by porn magazines. Yes, it’s magazines again, this time acting as a window onto the other side, showing ‘that’, the object of desire with no immediate access.The idea of creating a structure to circulate and promote magazines, publications and other literature came into being right there, in Cali, in Avenida Colombia (keeping it in the family), after a long interview with Miguel Gonzalez, curator of La Tertulia museum, near Caliwood ,a movement of which Caicedo himself formed part. The connection may be a rather tenuous one, but that’s sometimes how ideas come: sipping a soft drink under a silk-cotton tree and listening to stories about the cinema and vampires.
The relation might be found on the side of collective artistic practices, since, as Miguel Gonzalez recalls, ‘in 1970 an arts centre called Ciudad Solar was set up in the city centre. It ran a film magazine, made a few shorts and Andrés Caicedo started to make his film. Every Saturday saw Caicedo’s film club in the courtyard and San Fernando theatre, and contemporary artists showed in the gallery’.
Thus far, then, it’s a question of artistic practice, space and visibility of artistic projects. If we look closer at the publications (paper support), we see they are a perfect strategy that allows interaction with the three, as well as including greater mobility, as they are mobile spaces. The reflection that follows guarantees the circulation of these publications, since here we are dealing not with major publishers with distribution networks, but artisan production and distribution systems that are sometimes passed from hand to hand, and that struggled to survive beyond issue one.
The idea of creating a space that contains a series of independent publications and editions has taken various forms and fostered reflection on production, independent publishing, distribution networks, contents, design, etc. Space as a physical and mental place also came to the fore; it was not enough to transport magazines and place them on a table, it was necessary to create a flexible mechanism that would adapt both to printed matter and to the real space that accommodates it. We therefore developed an initial collaboration with Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, a travelling kit magazine stand that ‘could travel round the world with the culture magazines’ that we all want to read. The adventure got no further than the design of the newsstand.
Some time afterwards, we embarked on a long and productive collaboration with Pablo León de la Barra, urbanist and architect, centring on space. Gradually we discovered how to formulate our ideas and the mechanism serves as a testing and negotiation ground. The publications have become a good strategy to construct mechanisms for the promotion of everyone’s cultural constructions.
To quote Miguel Gonzalez, Caliwood ‘emerged in the 1970s, bringing together, among others, Caicedo himself, Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, the film directors. A generation marked by a fascination with the literature of Edgar Allan Poe and books like The Naked Lunch. Marihuana, magic mushrooms, acid and alcohol as the foremost means of special recreation. Musical tastes divided between rock and salsa, and addiction to American films but also to the Japanese industry and European films in the form of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Passolini, Antonioni and Don Luis Buñuel’. [Tornar] |
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