Sarah Lloyd, “Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: ‘A thing … never heard of before,’” Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (2013): 844. The earliest prototypes of steam-driven locomotives were produced at the end of the eighteenth century, with the British railways—initially as short local rail links run by separate private companies—beginning operations in the 1830s. In 1840, the Act for Regulating Railways placed these private companies under a minimum form of centralized government control, although a bill to nationalize the system in 1844 was not passed, with this only taking place much later, during World War I.
Lloyd, “Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century,” 860. Lloyd argues that in the nineteenth century, it was precisely the use of tickets for “railways and trams” that “weighted down” their adept fluidity across culture and “social contexts.” Edmondson’s invention in particular, with its removal of the human hand from the process of ticket production, would seem to support Lloyd’s contention that in modernity, a “rage for system” began to win out over a certain informality and heterogeneous use.
The idea that ABTE is in part or in whole a “fictional” entity has attended writing on the group from its origins through its 2013 retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Yet this deployment of fiction should not be confused with contemporaneous strategies premised on “games with the truth,” as in the “parafictional” practices identified by Carrie Lambert-Beatty. While ABTE was not any sort of officially existing body, it did serve to connect actual ticket collectors and railway enthusiasts, just as its unsanctioned interventions at railway sites nonetheless took the form of material alterations to station infrastructure. See Agustín Diez Fischer, “Viajes Ferroviarios con Boletos de Carton,” in 57 × 30,5 mm.: Quince Años de Cultura Ferroviaria ABTE, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: MAMBA, 2015), 61; Andrea Giunta, Poscrisis: Arte Argentino Después del 2001 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2009), 169; and Carrie Lambert, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October, no. 129 (Summer 2009): 51–84.
Valeria González, En Busca del Sentido Perdido: 10 Proyectos de Arte Argentino, 1998–2008, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Papers Editores, 2010), 20–33.
Situationist International, “Definitions,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 51–52.
In the United States, institutional interest in modern and contemporary Latin American art has been most recently exemplified by the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA / LA” initiative, which opened some sixty simultaneous exhibitions in the Fall of 2017, among many other examples. For an eloquent critique of the “pseudomorphism” that frequently attends “global contemporary” exhibitions and paradoxically subsumes non-Western art under Western paradigms, see Kaira M. Cabañas, Learning From Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 143–46.
These years correspond to the implementation of neoliberal shock tactics in nations around the world, but Harvey also points to the key date of 1947, when Friedrich von Hayek created the Mont Pelerin Society in the company of Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others. See David Harvey, A Short History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 1 & 20. Harvey's understanding of late capitalism's colonization of public space is also directly relevant to ABTE's railway interventions, particularly his understanding of "relational space," in which "there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them." See: David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso, 2006), 123.
See Mario Justo López and Jorge Eduardo Waddell, Nueva Historia del Ferrocarril en la Argentina: 150 Años de Política Ferroviaria (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2007), 157–76.
See Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Ravi Ramamurti, “Testing the Limits of Privatization: Argentinean Railroads,” World Development, vol. 25, no. 12 (1997): 1976.
Even before the military coup, Isabel Perón’s rule was compromised by economic shock measures known as the “Rodrigazo” (after then-economy minister Celestino Rodrigo), instituted on June 4, 1975: a 160 percent devaluation of currency for the commercial exchange rate; a 100 percent increase in utility and transportation prices; a 180 percent rise in the price of fuel; and a 45 percent increase in wages (which was insufficient to boost the “real wage” in relationship to the new rate of exchange). The inflation rate climbed to 35 percent per month, leading to a general strike, instability, and fertile terrain for the military coup that followed in March 1976. See David Rock, Argentina 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (University of California Press, 1987), 365–66.
See Raúl García Heras, “The Return of International Finance and the Martínez de Hoz Plan in Argentina, 1976–1978,” Latin American Research Review 53, no. 4 (2018): 799–814. Martínez de Hoz was indicted for human rights abuses in 1988 and pardoned by Menem, along with the rest of the junta, in 1990, leaving him free to return to business. Among other endeavors, he joined the board of Banco General de Negocios, which would later help its clients wire some $30 billion out of the country just before the 2001 economic crisis.
See William C. Smith, “Democracy, Distributional Conflicts and Macroeconomic Policymaking in Argentina, 1983-89,” Journal of Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 32, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 1–43.
Osvaldo Soriano, “Living with Inflation,” trans. Patricia Owen Steiner, in The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2002), 483–85.
William C. Smith, “State, Market and Neoliberalism in Post-Transition Argentina: The Menem Experiment,” Journal of Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 33, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 45–83.
See Santiago Duhalde, “Neoliberalismo y Nuevo Modelo Sindical: Los Trabajadores Estatales Durante la Primera Presidencia de Carlos Menem,” Espacio Abierto Venezolano de Sociología 19, no. 3 (July–September 2010): 417–43; and Alfredo Pucciarelli, Los Años de Menem: La Construcción del Orden Neoliberal (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011).
Vicente Palermo, “The Origins of Menemismo,” in Peronism and Argentina, ed. James P. Brennan (SR Books, 1998), 141–76.
Ramamurti, “Testing the Limits of Privatization,” 1973.
See Juan Carlos Cena, El Ferrocidio (Buenos Aires: La Rosa Blindada, 2003).
See Lucio di Matteo, El Corralito (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2013).
María Guillermina Fressoli, “El Recuerdo como un Problema del Espacio Pictórico en los Paisajes de Patricio Larrambebere,” Hallazgos 13, no. 25 (September 2015): 147–48.
Luis Felipe Noé, “Otra Figuración,” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, eds. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, exh. cat. (Yale University Press, 2004), 481. See also Patrick Frank, Painting in a State of Exception: New Figuration in Argentina, 1960–1965 (University Press of Florida, 2016).
Artists who made such representational turns during the Proceso include Oscar Bony, Margarita Paksa, Pablo Suárez, and Nicolás García Uriburu. Antonio Berni, a representational painter his entire career, nonetheless produced haunting images in this period that belong in this subgenre. I have written about Bony’s painting at this time; see Daniel R. Quiles, “Between Organism and Sky: Oscar Bony, 1965–1976,” Caiana Journal, no. 4 (July 2014): 1–14. See also Viviana Usubiaga, Imágenes Inestables: Artes Visuales, Dictadura y Democracia en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2012).
Fressoli, “El Recuerdo como un Problema,” 137.
Fischer, “Viajes Ferroviarios con Boletos de Carton,” 68.
See Teresa Riccardi, “Archivo Caminante: Constellations and Performativity,” Afterall, no. 30 (Summer 2012): 76–85.
Patricio Larrambebere, “Artes Visuales, Pintura y Ferrocarril. Edmondsonianismo,” in 57 × 30,5 mm., 106, my translation.
See Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires, ed. Ursula Dávila-Villa, exh. cat. (Blanton Museum of Art, 2011). Although her career was established before the heyday of Rojas, Liliana Maresca should also be mentioned in any discussion of 80s/90s art, the readymade, and critique of menemismo. See: María Gainza, ed., Liliana Maresca, exh. cat. (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2016).
See Pombo, ed. Inés Katzenstein (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2006).
Sebastián Gordín: Un Extraño Efecto en el Cielo, ed. Victoria Noorthoorn, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2014), 126–29.
Giunta, Poscrisis, 19, my translation.
Giunta, Poscrisis, 55, my translation. Giunta also wrote a short review of ABTE’s “temporary headquarters” at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in 2003; see ibid., 169–71. See also: Ana Longoni, "A Long Way: Argentine Artistic Activism of the Last Decades," in Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995-2010, eds. Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester (Duke University Press, 2017), 98-112.
Marina Sirtin, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books, 2012), 3. “Horizonality,” Sirtin writes, “is a social relationship that implies, as its name suggests, a flat plane upon which to communicate, but it is not only this. Horizontalidad implies the use of direct democracy and striving for consensus: processes in which attempts are made so that everyone is heard and new relationships are created. Horizontalidad is a new way of relating based in affective politics and against all the implications of ‘isms.’ It is a dynamic social relationship. It is not an ideology or set of principles that must be met so as to create a new society or new idea. It is a break with these sorts of vertical ways of organizing and relating, and a break that is an opening,” ibid., 9. See also Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006).
See Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (Verso, 2014), 49–66.
Here I am thinking of the numerous reports of the “resilience” of the Puerto Rican people in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which bore, consciously or unconsciously, the implicit suggestion that this was proof that they did not need help from the US government.
Javier Barrio, “Lisergia Ferroviaria: Visiones y Ocultamientos en Open Door,” in 57 × 30,5 mm., 174, my translation.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), 76. The quotation is from Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard’s The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2.
As Luigi Manzetti notes, Néstor Kirchner had supported privatization under Menem, who was also a Peronist, but renationalization proved enormously popular in the wake of 2001. Luigi Manzetti, “Renationalization Under the Kirchners,” Panoramas (Center for Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh), November 23, 2016 →.
Despite Macri's imposition of the harshest austerity program since the 2001 crisis, the international press has cast him as an improvement over the Kirchners precisely for his willingness to work with the international financial interests controlling Argentina. This portrayal of Macri is typified by a scandalous recent New York Times article that blames Argentina's financial woes on the Kirchners' "populism" and "unbridled spending." The article does not even mention the Menem years or his policies. See Peter S. Goodman, "Argentina’s Economic Misery Could Bring Populism Back to the Country," The New York Times, May 10, 2019, →.
Elizabeth González, “Is Pension Reform on the Ballot in Argentina’s Election?” Americas Society / Council of the Americas Bulletin, March 29, 2019 →.
Nato Thompson, “Living as Form,” in Living as Form, exh. cat. (MIT Press, 2011).
Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy, and Activism in the Americas, ed. Bill Kelley, Jr., exh. cat. (Otis College of Art and Design, 2017), 7. For an important precedent of this exhibition, see Agítese antes de Usar: Desplazamientos Educativos, Sociales y Artísticos en América Latina, eds. Renata Cervetto and Miguel A. López, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2016).
“A Conversation Between Eduardo Molinari and Nuria Enguita Mayo,” trans. Tamara Stuby, Afterall 30 (Summer 2012): 70.