The must of hope

by Patricio Loizaga*

I – The history of photography recognizes a meaningful documentary origin in the portrait, linked to the anthropological and also to the socialization. The id photo, the close up or waist shot with neutral background, blank of references, is a practice that has been used by great photographers as Richard Avedon or Andrés Serrano. In both cases, many times, they showed us through a process that implies a triple sight, what we don’t know or what we don’t want to see. Juan Hein lies his sight over the sight of the portrayed ones, who direct their sight to our sight, building that triple process. There is a whole ethical conception on putting the sight over the sight from those ones that the society doesn’t want to look at. In that ethic is inscribed the series “Dreams of cardboard” by Hein, that rescues, dignifies and legitimize a group of cardboard searchers.

II – The Argentinian crisis imposed a culture of resistance. Some observers, particularly in the press mass media, have focused on identifying that resistance within the growing of the urban cultural consumption. There has been some of us that did not agree with that view and we identify the whole resistance idea with an idealistic social expression against the adversity, like these cardboard searchers. There is a creativity of surviving in them that also builds a social pedagogy. It is not about renouncing to a level of creativity excellence but to recognise the moral value of that survival creativity.

III – In his book Last consumer the poet Pedro Mairal says in the supermarket the cashier lady / with her red uniform asks to me / final consumer? / I answer yes / and I think that one is me, / the final consumer, / the last link in the chain, / last carnivorous <em>pesified</em>* / the last witness of the final fall, / the one who eats to everyone else, / the one who ate what was left / the one who carries in the trolley / mammals chopped on platters / wrapped in cellophane, its cold limbs, / tubercles, grapefruit, grapes, / milk from electric dairy farms, / light blue water bottle, / trash bags to fill / and fill and fill. /... / to fill with what? / consumer of what? / of which final? / what is ending in me? / terminal consumer? / is it me the great consumer / that is dying? / or is it the end of everything? / emaciated, final, / finished, skinny / wasted, fallen, / finally the ending, / consummate, / consumed, / final stomach, / the final hunger, / the one that digests to all, / final <em>masticator</em>**, / final ghoul, / final omnivore, / predator, / the last animal, / final, equal as the tiger? / the consumer in extinction? / the best murderer? / ... / and we go with the trolley, to where? / which is the horizon towards we walk to / all of us that pushes the trolley? / we push the trolley to the dawn, / towards the end, oh, final consumers, / the night falls into the world and we go pushing / the trolleys of the shinning supermarkets / through infinite streets between <em>gondolas</em>*** / streets of gondolas, hoods of gondolas, / suburbs of gondolas, / countries, under the cobalt blue sky, / a horizon of gondolas, the last ones, / we, final consumers, / in our extinction path, / we go, we go consuming, / choosing products, no stopping, / quick soups, saint vincent noodles, / gillete shaving foam for soft skin, / goodbye cruel and fluorescent world, / goodbye my gondolas, / goodbye milky and sausage sectors, / price comparisons, / free samples, we leave, / we push the pack trolleys to the desert, / to the dumps of the <em>pampa</em>****, / towards the last towns of gondolas, / with acid crying drops rolling down the face, / to the obscure oblivion, and at the end, / to the end, to the wind of the night, / final consumers, / final, until the end.  

IV – The Buenos Aires urban scene expresses as a paradox the contradiction of the faces of two realities in a supermarket trolley that originally is the same trolley that has been used by the first cardboard searchers from these recent days. A culture around the abundance confronting the culture of a lack of resources, a culture of the permanent in-satisfaction, before a culture of the satisfaction, as Galbraith would say, because it is about a insatiable capitalism, a final culture, dying and decadent, in words by the poet Mairal, in front of a culture of the individual and familiar responsibility, in front of a conception of hope as a must before than a right.

*Patricio Lóizaga was an Argentinean poet, essay writer and teacher, and among other institutional and academic roles he was also the Director of Palais de Glace, art hall from Buenos Aires, from 2003 and until his death in 2006. Text included in Hein’s Dreams of Cardboard exhibition catalogue, November 2004.