DIPTYCH
1. I think of a ghost house. Not a house inhabited by ghosts. In Spanish we call those houses embrujadas (“bewitched”), but it’s a very inaccurate term: it assumes that the place was once occupied by a witch who cast a spell on it. And a ghost is something very different— it is a filament of the past, forced to repeat itself even though it is no longer identical to what it once was: it is no longer what it was. What arrives in the present is usually the representation of its trauma: the ghost appears and re-enacts what wounded it, what harmed it. Some are not frightening because they do not appear in order to display their pain: they simply return to the place that once knew them, or visit the family that once loved them, watching silently. All of them inspire fear, although none can hurt us.
In English there is a more precise term for houses inhabited by ghosts: haunted, meaning “a place visited by ghosts.” It also means to be uneasy, restless, pursued, perhaps we could say out of place.
Jorge Macchi opens the archive for the first time in a café in Villa Crespo. Outside, the sun is shining. The project is called Diptych, shared with the architect Nicolás Fernández Sanz, and it consists of something as simple as it is unsettling: to reproduce the space of the legendary Ruth Benzacar gallery as it existed in Plaza San Martín inside its new venue here in Villa Crespo, near the train tracks. It is an act of conjuring the old gallery: a conjuration is a calling, an invocation for an entity to appear.
Macchi and Fernández Sanz, conjured together, summon that gallery and insert it into this space that is now also a gallery, but was once a warehouse and other things still. The new room, modified and refitted by Fernández Sanz, is very different from its predecessor: if the earlier space was an underground room permanently lit by artificial light, the new one receives daylight through a large skylight in the ceiling; if the ceiling was low, now it rises to a great height; if the subterranean room was interrupted by three columns and a ventilation shaft, the new space opens without obstacles.
The San Martín gallery, Macchi tells me, cannot be transplanted here as it was: the “transfer” is not a faithful representation but a 1:1 scale model. And that seems right: ghosts are never as they once were. They are uncomfortable, restless, and repeat only fragments of their past.
The new-old gallery inside the new gallery (the present one) does not explicitly bring with it its artists, its crowded openings, and its legends. Yet they are there, in echo—just as the new gallery carries traces of the old one: some traces were physically moved from Retiro to Villa Crespo. Door handles and galvanized railings, originally designed by Benedit. Orly Benzacar’s desk, a solid marble square capable of breaking bones, previously belonging to her mother Ruth. A giant magnifying glass with a golden handle. Clues. Recoveries.
The maxim at the heart of modern magic is “as above, so below”, meaning in broad terms that everything above corresponds to what is below, so that the miracle of the One may occur. Everything that happens on one level of reality happens on the other.
Strictly speaking, the maxim is used to relate the microcosm to the macrocosm, the one to the universe. But I prefer to think that, in a parallel reality, while Diptych is being erected, the doubles of Macchi and Fernández Sanz are constructing the Villa Crespo Benzacar inside the subterranean Benzacar.
Mariana Enriquez, excerpt from the text Díptico, 2017
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Photos: Javier Agustín Rojas.
