To ramble through a city without direction constitutes one of the most exciting experiences.But to those devoted to photography it is also then innate passion for curiosity: to discover different photographic scenarios that constantly renovate. The art of photography, by the way, thus becomes a privileged instrument to record -among other things- the walls of a city.
So the walls speak, they are a metaphor of their inhabitants. That express themselves in a language both exquisite and highly demanding as it stimulates the viewer to decipher what is revealed and, in the same act, hidden. This intermittent game summons an hermeneutic of the image that challenges each observer.
Far from its humility, the work of art is subject to demanding cares: restorers, museums and gallery curators hold the mission of preserving an inert physical body that, paradoxically, is also perishable. But alike the gods, the work of art evokes the illusion of eternity.
I have tried to preserve these walls photographically, defying the finiteness of works registered once, but most of them no longer existing today due to the natural deterioration of time, or vandalism or, as the ancient painters did with their canvases, overlapped by the work of some other artist.
Although ephemeral by nature and necessarily doomed to disappear, art in the public space can, and must, be rescued from oblivion.
Gustavo Agrest
Buenos Aires, September 2019
