Miguel Rothschild

The fragments of our happiness: this could have also been the title of our exhibition Buenos Aires. At Kuckei + Kuckei, the Argentinian artist Miguel Rothschild, who lives in Berlin, is charting his home town anew. In so doing, he is challenging – with every step – conventional demarcation lines and, not least, those between reality and fiction. For his Atrapasueños series (english: Dream Catcher), the artist photographed telephone lines and electric cables in one of the slums. Their course is reproduced precisely on smashed shatterproof glass. Two centimetres separate the glass and the photo from one another: in this empty interstice, any questions that arise are allowed to remain open. It is as if Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos were spinning their threads above the city on the Río de la Plata and deciding their fate anew with every day that passes, Rothschild presents a photo – Parzen über Buenos Aires, which explodes the frame and metamorphoses into an installation – by means of cords that replace extension cables and reach to the end of the exhibition wall.The work entitled Memento mori. Work in progress is subject in a very special way to the principle of die and become. The photograph shows a harp, a shabby-looking shop sign overrun by rust; it bears the inscription Creaciones and dates from 1963, the year the artist was born. As soon as a visitor approaches the work, two extremely powerful spotlights are activated by motion sensors. In the course of time, this light will change the artwork, which has, from the very start, devoted itself to disappearing. It becomes paler, whiter, more translucent and consequently clear to every one of us that it is full of life.