Spanish version (español)

I traveled to Mexico on March 5, 2020 to give woodcut workshops and talks at the Museo de la Estampa in Toluca and at the Universidad de Hidalgo. A few days later the WHO declared the pandemic, and the workshop scheduled at a Faro Cultural had to be cancelled. While strict quarantines began in Argentina, the borders closed on March 19 and I was left stranded in Mexico, not knowing how long I would be there or where I would stay.

I moved between the inspiration of the trip and an increasingly apocalyptic urban climate: empty streets, ambulances, official posters, dramatic headlines. That mix of strangeness and helplessness sparked an urgent need to produce and document. Although #stayhome prevailed, I went out to paste up my spoon-printed works, small engravings on self-adhesive paper, photographed them and posted them on social media. That is how my xilo-stickers were born, street interventions that became an exercise in visual record-keeping and also in catharsis.

At the same time I began a graphic diary influenced by Goya, by Posada and by the dances of death. I drew scenes in which I myself appeared walking through a dystopian landscape, characters covered by giant prophylactics, or terrified skulls in front of screens. The city seemed like fiction, and I walked in it as one more character.

While I was stranded, because the borders in Argentina had been closed, thanks to the engraver Manuel Ruelas I was able to set up a small workshop in a room in La Roma. I used styrene plates that were given to me at a print shop in the Doctores neighborhood and the burins I had brought with me. From that productive confinement came a series of 5 × 10 cm engravings with words taken from the media bombardment: "invisible", "nightmare", "people are dying". I pasted them in the streets over official "stay home" posters, making visible what remained outside every protocol: the stranded, the vulnerable, those who survived on the move.

I gathered ten images in a folder that I titled Post-Apocalyptic Chronicles. The last one depicted the corner of Av. Baja California and Tonalá, where I lived, transformed into a fantastical scene of dancing skeletons and deformed buildings.

After two months in that suspended world, the Argentine embassy offered me a humanitarian flight thanks to a letter that reached the right hands. I hesitated for a moment, I had just bought a large jug of water, but I finally returned to Argentina with that series, which had become for me the most honest and visceral record of that suspended time.