Scouting Buenos Aires

Simon O’Carrigan has posted his collages today on Ballardian, a collection heavily influenced by J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.   These fit nicely with my earlier post about the Venicification of Buenos Aires.

Now:

(Photograph of Recoleta by Thomas Locke Hobbs)

Inevitable destiny:

(Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 30 x 60 cm.)

The formal parallels between the Recoleta photograph and O’Carrigan’s “Lagoon” are obvious.  The only thing that separates them is time.  But also, in today’s post on Ballardian, O’Connor cites the foreign word nachtraglichkeit as a secondary influence.  This is remarkable.  I don’t know what it means but it’s easily translated into Castellano.  “Nach” is an abbreviated form of “Nacho”, which is the name of most people in Argentina.  The second part of the world, -traglichkeit, is German for “tragic like a kite”, meaning hung up, tangled, destined to be hit by lightning, etc.   The closest word in Spanish is colgado. Thus I propose the translation nachocolgado for O’Callaghan’s foreign word.

Here are a few more future images of nachocolgado flooding.

(Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “The Drowned World”. 2007. Digital montage. Dimensions variable.)

(Simon O’Carrigan. Rain Dogs. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.)

With the reappearance of the submerged streets and buildings his entire manner had changed abruptly. All traces of courtly refinement and laconic humour had vanished; he was now callous and vulpine, the renegade spirit of the hoodlum streets returning to his lost playground. It was almost as if the presence of the water had anaesthetized him, smothering his true character so that only the surface veneer of charm and moodiness remained.

— J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Corresponding quote selected by the artist Simon O’Carrigan.