The lariviere foundation opened a wide and comfortable space within the arts district, with a collection specialized in Latin American photography of more than 3,000 pieces, with a library and bookstore plus a temporary exhibition room. The current exhibition bears a suggestive title: Japan, are photos taken by Facundo De Zuviría (BA 1954) in the period between 2016 and 2020 prior to the pandemic. Situations found at random to count urbanity
without portraying characters with the curated by Francisco Medail and support in selection of diptychs made by Paula Serratmarried to Facundo 37 years ago.
The sample does not portray the journey of a walker through the Asian country, but is made up of digital shots,
direct, without subsequent intervention, captured by those who apply a remarkably trained eye to know what interests them to cut in each case. The curatorial text suggests that this photographic story is based on the framing that allows the Japanese concept of Ukiyo-e, which literally translates as “floating world”, and refers to an idea of happiness derived from the realization of the world that is “ephemeral, fleeting or transitory”, as much as each sign that captures the photographer’s attention to achieve the shot.
These are eighty photos of the same size that recover small landscapes and geometries that are discovered in the
surface of the city, operating as conjunctions of lights and shadows, loaded with accents and details that account for the boiling life of a common inhabitant who reviews billboards, stained glass windows, curious details, lost traces with his gaze. Most were taken in Buenos Aires, but there are also some from Egypt, Belgium, Tierra del Fuego, Paris, Rio de Janeiro or Rosario. The author clarified that the place of the shot is not important, because since it
describing a city in particular “talk about a world that today, after these two years of uncertainty and restrictions, seems to belong to the past.”
Japan is a word that resonates in the urban area associated with Japanese emigrants and their famous dry cleaners, but also the name itself brings the idea of a remote, exotic world that is as desirable as it is far away, especially since in those static shots, where the configuration of an old dusty and abandoned shop window, or the graffiti that is immortalized for a short time, or the mannequins in a shop window with their impersonal gesture, can be found
throughout the contemporary world, in any neighborhood in the world.
In separate bands on the long walls of the room, a female torso cut out on a light green background that reflects three horizontal straight lines in contrast to a neutral background with the free gesture of a curved line that resembles a drawing. A bar window that reveals the name of the business: PALACE with letters worked by hand that reflect what is in front of that sidewalk downwards. A poster that reads JAPAN surrounded by white bubbles in relation to a rhombiodal pattern curtain that reveals a winter landscape with a deer. Windows open to the
curiosity of the walker with his camera in hand.
By Pilar Altilio
