“Conan is dead”. The phrase, in blue letters, is cut out on a white poster. It is posted on a building near Congress. The place is not coincidental: it is the area that the CGT chose to carry out the first strike against the Government of Javier Milei, in the days before the vote on the omnibus law. That day several of these posters appeared on the walls and quickly went viral on the networks, fueling the curiosity around Milei’s ghost dog. Behind it there is a story that combines the start of the new government, one of the most famous phrases of Nietzsche and the vision of a graphic artist from La Plata.
“The thing is I wanted Conan as a minister, throwing data from the sky“, Explain Máximo Cerdá, designer in Visual Communication and professor at the National University of La Plata. Beyond the humor, the author of the posters – which he made together with the “Cumbre” printing press – points to what he understands as one of the distinctive features of the start of the new government: “As an opponent There is some disappointment in Milei’s promise to go against caste and end up with a cabinet dominated by the PRO. That is why he paraphrases Nietzsche: it is the end of an illusion, of a belief, the disillusionment of reality returns to hit us in the face. It is the end of all morality.”
The sign, which can be seen on several streets in The Silver and of the Buenos aires city, is the latest in a saga that Cerdá started in the middle of last year, in the middle of the campaign. “The first poster in this series is one I made ‘the crime of silence‘, with an over-relief technique, which dialogues with a quote from Bertolt Brecht that talks about the cost of an election and how speaking out against or not speaking out against a specific regime inevitably means taking sides,” says Cerdá, who together with Micaela Ibarrola runs the workshop “Minute 81”. Then, days before the ballot, the artist made another that said “I buy organs – children under 12 paid more”, playing with Milei’s idea of promoting a market of these characteristics. The technique he uses is letterpress printing, with movable type. “This is how the printing press was born. We return to the craft in some way, but we do it in a more artisanal way, because what we are looking for is an artistic production.”
“Later, with Milei elected, we did the ‘chaste he who reads’, in reference to the historical legend of ‘fucking he who reads’: simply by reading it you are already a victim of the advertisement itself against your will, that is where the path of disillusionment begins,” he says. Sow, who later took all this work to an exhibition in La Plata, curated by art historian Magdalena Pérez Balbi. The fact of intervening on the street is also a decision, with a certain push into the digital world where Milei and her followers usually take over the networks. “Perhaps the end of certain illusions is coming, and people are going to start looking for realities in the things they can touch, like the refrigerator, the supermarket shelf, the hospital that no longer provides the service it used to. I choose to believe that the message on the street has a more real message than something you can see on social media. Hence the importance of occupying the street, something that is in dispute today, how to construct new meanings. “We think the posters leave at least one question.”
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