The Fruits of Peripheral Loves
Author: Ines Martinel
Her lips were chapped, her smile split them.
No, Rosario doesn’t linger in the past.
I arrived there a year and a half ago; I had just left the ‘Old Continent’.My European town, an older French lady, moves forward. She carries with her 2000 years of Gravity, the weight of her substance, of her monuments and memories.
In the meandering old streets, the breath of time swirls the colorless photographs and memories around, like an autumn, frozen in time.
Rosario doesn’t like Black and White.
Melancholy…only the ones who leave hold on to it and swift it away with them.
Whereas she inspires the colors and lightness of immediate Snapshots, she expresses however, the hazy fleetingness of her future. In this race between what is and what might be, Rosario rushes forward away from a ghostly past. She awakens in the present, in the ‘Now’ which shapes her.
This speed marks her with noticeable signs of social and spacial contrasts.
Across her face come to a confrontation, the expressions of the incompatible standard of living, social codes and mentalities.
The arrogance of the too fast growing towns, echoes upon her streets.
So the young Rosario is not an accumulation of historical strata. Between the neat lines of her arterial grid, other layers are intertwined. Impalpable forces.
Streams link contrasts. They play at matching oppositions, at coming and going between one and other. Their converging flows reveal their relationships and tell the story of the city.
Since Rosario lives at a fast pace, it takes time to adopt and adapt to her rhythm, to feel her pulse, to tame her.
Weeks, months, years of living there are necessary to meet her, get to know her, become intimate with her.
And as time goes by, she opens up and we end up taking on roles and becoming actors, keeping alive that non-materialistic quality.
The actions and interactions, which take place, appear to compose the strength that moves her; development, the individual or collective relationships.
They are the stage of emotions and sensations, envies. They become happenings.
Among that peculiar mass, two specific movements, which take part in her never-ending mutation, can be distinguished from each other.
In a parallel courant, they link and unlink towards objectives triggered by love and exchange.
They have taken on in their intervention, Rosario’s pace. They face the current, daily problems; take charge of the present and its questionings. They act in the moment through their quickness and precision of intervention. Always turned towards the future, never ceasing to stretch towards the becoming.
Though the city-center slowly becomes the home of sharp towering glass buildings, along the Parana River the outskirts of Rosario pursue their survival, reaching out to the metropolitan monster’s crumbs of fortune.
Her active movements, feeds the urgency of the emergence while impelling new paths in order to develop the districts.
With a popular and contextualized architecture, they suggest the spontaneity and evolving aspects of her territories.
Independent, those movements craft social and cultural links between la Facultad de Arquitectura, Planeamiento y Diseño de la UNR and the Magenilised Rosario.
They are called “Matericos Perifericos” and “Domino”; they have their part to play in the non-palpable substance characteristic of Rosario. Behind those names, are forces that create and amplify human conexions.
With their tools and will power they help the inhabitants, who have planted seeds of envy, need and desire. A floor, a roof, a community house, they offer meeting spaces, living spaces, permanent housing… where children, projects, dreams are raised and grow.
We were inaugurating the community center at Villa Itati.
This time we had offered a floored-stairs, in response to a slanting roof, between which shows relaxations and prayers are already lead and taking place.
To celebrate this moment, a butterfly has been painted on her cheek.
Her lips are chapped, her smile splits them.
