Two assistants from the exhibition “Participation in Power” read the letters to Perón.VINICIUS TABORGA (Courtesy)
In late 1951, Juan Domingo Perón, who had ruled Argentina since 1946, was re-elected president. During his first term in office, he had launched the first Five-Year Plan, a set of policies designed to develop the country economically and socially. In the 1950s, the first program had to be reconsidered as the context had changed and the country was going through a crisis. But before launching it, the president asked citizens to make suggestions, and anyone who had a radio heard, “Perón wants to know what his people need.”
People responded with more than 70,000 letters, which arrived at the Ministry of Technical Affairs and were addressed to the President. Shortly after Perón was overthrown in a coup in 1955, the ministry was dissolved and many of these letters disappeared. The nation’s General Archives preserve some 20,000 of these letters, expressing citizens’ ideas and suggestions, and in some cases sent with drawings, plans, spreadsheets or photographs.
People in the exhibition halls during a press tour. Vinicius Taborga (Courtesy)
Starting this Thursday, the Kirchner Cultural Center in Buenos Aires is showing copies of some of these letters in the exhibition La participación al poder. The huge cultural complex, inaugurated in 2015 in the old Palace of Posts and Telegraphs and named by Peronism in honor of former President Néstor Kirchner, who died in 2010, will also feature ten Argentine artists’ reinterpretations of some of the messages sent in the fifties. The exhibition was curated by Cecilia Priego and Andrea Wain.
“In response to the call made by Your Excellency to draw your attention to the needs of the Argentine people, I have moved to address these lines to you,” begins initiative No. 14,690 of December 19, 1951. Who writes , the principal of a rural school in northern Argentina, continues: “I live in this part of our country for work reasons and I cannot help but express the pain I feel when I see the injustice that knocks at the door every day this Argentine knocks.” who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow”. Signatory Mario Moreno demands “a piece of land” from the residents: “Then peace will come.”
The incoming letters were immediately converted into files and forwarded from one state agency to another. The letters were read out in detail and even underlined. An answer was then offered to the citizen. “Much has been said about sex education, but it is extremely dangerous and slippery. “Nothing concrete should be told to the teacher, apart from scrupulous attention to his students,” an official responded in 1952 to Initiative No. 18.111, which suggested, among other things, “mixing the elementary school” and “that this should be done in due course.” sexologically formed”.
One of the works in the exhibition “Participation in Power”. Vinicius Taborga (Courtesy)
“In the rooms there is everything: anonymous letters, a small square proposing to study tin in northern Argentina, even the proposal for a highway or a dam.” [la provincia de] Black River. “There are many dreams of citizens and a government that lets the state work in such a way that its goals are the dreams of the people,” said Cecilia Priego, who has been studying the letters kept in the archive for years, at the opening of the exhibition. general of the nation. She and a team of four other people have spent the last year reviewing all of the cards and selecting some of the proposals on display today. “That’s a treasure,” said the curator.
Initiative 8,700, for example, proposes building a highway running north-south through Argentina “to bring sources of raw materials closer together and share them.” As a “big artery,” it reads the handwritten text that includes colors, rectangles, and arrows. Attached to this letter were maps of the state, overriding the proposed infrastructure diagram. There are more modest proposals, such as those simply suggesting replacing “the current phone plate system” with “small number buttons” similar to those on current cell phones. Or that of an artist from Santiago who wants “a vehicle owned by the nation” to take his music “to the farthest corners of the country”.
Artist Daniel Santoro with the charcoal drawing he made of Eva Perón. Vinicius Taborga (Courtesy)
Some of these letters have been taken up by 10 contemporary artists and reinterpreted in works of different formats, which can be seen in the exhibition spaces until the end of October.
Daniel Santoro, for example, depicted in charcoal the “desire for monumentalization” expressed in many of the letters, such as the one in which he asked: “Create a modern city called Gran Nueva Argentina (…) Choose a prominent place for their establishment.” at the entrance to the port, which can attract the attention of tourists and foreigners. (…) Take water from the river through a canal, direct it to the railroad tracks and form the words “Perón-Evita” in a semicircle. The artist drew a huge head of Eva Perón on the wall. The picture is reminiscent of “an amusement park”, with pavilions in the eyes and a bun of the first lady, the most attractive woman at the time. All around a high-speed railway, elevated roads, an Arc de Triomphe…
On view is a work by Gabriela Golder, who used eight letters written by women to create Las Inmortales, a video installation in which actresses and lyrical singers loudly voice some of the demands for equality, decent wages or retirement for workers and housewives , which were founded in 1951. They had been allowed to vote for the first time in the country. Or one by Hernán Soriano, who created a musical instrument that can be transported “to the furthest corners of the country,” as the man from Santiago imagined. There are also creations by Eugenia Calvo, Andrés Denegri, Lucas Di Pascuale, Guadalupe Fassi, Patricio Larrambebere, Marcela Sinclair and Santiago Andrés Viale.
They also hang a painting and a sculpture by Alicia Herrero depicting on canvas “the experimental and projected state of the economy”. “[Escribían] Unions demanding wage increases or ordinary citizens writing about meat prices,” Herrero said in the presentation this Thursday, the same day it was announced that the inflation rate was 6% in June. “There’s a part of it [de las propuestas] that it is still unfinished, that it is latent,” the artist pointed out. “This exhibition brings the past into the present, and from the present we can speculate about the future,” he suggested.
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