Serenissima Orange

Orange Fiat 600

This color is almost a bit too much. I tend to prefer more muted pastels.

Front Yards: Yellow & Green

Maybe it's in anticipation of spring but I'm started to take a lot more pictures of plants. I actually like the winter for architecture pictures. There's lots of cloudy days and none of the trees have any foliage to block the views.

Ochava Shadow in Late Afternoon

Escuela Moria Casan - Formacion de Vedettes

Moria Casan is an aging movie and TV star who looks like a cross between Cher and a horse. She has her own school where, in all seriousness, it looks like you can learn many different dances and theatrical skills. In big letters at the bottom, however, is formacion de vedettes or roughly, show girl training. Show girl isn't really the word to describe it as Vedettes in Argentina occupy a much larger cultural space. I'll refer you to the wikipedia article on Vedettes as a deep socialogical examination into the role of Vedettes in contemporary Argentine society is really beyond the scope of this blog.

Mudanzas Sbora

Two giant moving trucks on Avenida Diaz Velez near Parque Centenario.

Villa 31 - 5 Stories and Growing

There's an article in today's Clarin about the ongoing construction of 5+ story buildings in Villa 31, the shantytown literally on the wrong side of the tracks, just behind the Retiro bus station. Since January the city government has been trying to restrict the entry of trucks bearing construction materials which has lead the residents to occasionally block the freeway that bisects the neighborhood. The government claims the buildings are unsafe. I've been told that most of the residents work in construction so this claim strikes me as patronizing. I'm not sure these structures would be safe in an earthquake but there aren't any earthquakes here. The real reason for the controls is that this is prime real estate, close to downtown and just across the railroad tracks from the poshest neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Recoleta. The bigger and more established the shantytown gets, the harder it would be to remove it. Villa 31 has been a round for 40+ years and is home to 30,000+ people so I'm not really sure how it could be removed at this point but there's lots of people in Barrio Norte and the mayor's office who'd like to see it happen.

The panorama above I took from the window of a bus as I was leaving Retiro. This is the easiest, safest way to view to neighborhood and really unavoidable if you're entering or leaving by bus. Here below are the same three images a bit larger:

Plotted Plant

This is looking like green week on BsAsPhgphr

Chard on the Ground

I'm not a big acelga fan but I love the way its displayed. You'd certainly want to wash it well, though, to get all the grime and soot from the passing colectivos. See also, acelga delivery

Verdulerias

As the winter is loosening its grip on Buenos Aires I've been drawn to the lush fruit of the city's ubiquitous verdulerias. The selection is hardly exotic but I'm drawn to the infinite variations of display in such a simple palette.

Mitre Line - JL Suarez Branch

There are big differences in the quality of trains on different lines. The trains that run to Tigre are quite nice with air conditioned cars, altho they're starting to show their age. This train is also on the Mitre line but goes to JL Suarez and uses older, non-airconditioned cars. Even this train was in much better shape than the cars on the Roca line out to La Plata, a ride I would not recommend.

Front Yards: White & Burgundy

I don't see this color very much so I was surprised when I came across it twice in the space of a few blocks. Like any city, neighborhoods enjoy trendiness & building booms in certain decades and thus get marked with the prevailing aesthetic of the time.

Gold Stone House

Someday this color will come back into style.

Bad House

Written outside the house above.

Tree Shadow

Black & White Ochava Graffiti in Saavedra

CAP = Club Atletico Platense

Somewhere in Saavedra

Last Saturday I had a couple of models lined up for a portrait project and they both canceled at the last minute. I grabbed my medium format camera and my little digital point-n-shoot and took the train out to Saavedra, one of the outlying neighborhoods just before the city limits. It was a sunny winter day but with a very high level of clouds and lots of haze, both of which softened up the light.

Villa 20 - Amistad o Nada

A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to report on a story for the Argentimes concerning a furniture workshop in Villa 20, an informal slum in the neighborhood of Villa Lugano. The organization is called Amistad o Nada and their concept is to produce furniture, mainly chairs, using recycled wood. The workers are unemployed residents of the villa and the finished product is sold in an art gallery in a posh section of Palermo as well as over the internet. The article recently went up on The Argentimes' website and will be appearing in the print edition that's being distributed this weekend. Also with us that day were reporters from Critica, here's a link to their article about the project [in Spanish].

In this post are some additional photos I took that day. In the photo above, Chamorro, the guy who owns the workshop applies varnish to one of the chairs.




Here's a big stack of the chairs. I wasn't impressed with the quality of the work. I was expecting an artisanal labor of love but actually these chairs are very concept driven. The design was found on the internet by the founders of the organization and had the idea to construct the chairs in a villa.


Chamorro again. He's from Paraguay originally, lived in Brazil for a number of years before ending up in Buenos Aires a couple of decades ago. He was a very gracious host for us and had endless stories to tell.


Here's a view of the Villa. For those who don't know Villa is the local term for an informal settlement or slum, similar to favelas in Brazil, shantytowns in South Africa, pueblos jovenes in Peru, etc. Villa 20 is fairly established as slums go, the houses have electricity and running water. On the periphery of the villa the government has constructed a new sports center, housing and schools. The organizers of the group said they chose Villa 20 due to its relative safety. Relative is key. I would not have entered the place alone. I'm fascinated by villas not so much by their poverty [which in this case wasn't very extreme] but by the alternative structures by which the neighborhood is organized. Hernando De Soto and Robert Neuwirth have written great books on the [self] organization of these settlements worldwide and I'd recommend reading them. Of course "alternative structures" is a fancy way of saying the laws of the outside world often don't apply. Frequently even police won't enter the villas so going in alone, without the sponsor of someone from the neighborhood is not a good idea. In our case we had Martín Roisi, a TV producer who runs an arts organization in the villa and, we found out, is a cumbia singer known as Fantasma X.



They prepared an asado of chorizos for us as well.


The main street in the villa.


Manzana 13, Casa 13, the adress of a random house, very well done.

The Cost of Light

The current controversy in town is all about the recent tripling of gas and electric bills. The rates were largely kept fixed in pesos following the crisis in 2001, this despite the fact that every thing else has increased 300% [in pesos] and petroleum based products even more. These low prices have been supported by Argentina's self-sufficiency in oil & gas as well as large subsidies to the energy industry. The current recession, however, has made this current regime hard to support and the government looking to pack in the pain in a single big increase. According to this graphic in Clarin from a couple of days ago, however, this massive increase [it's being called a tarifazo in Spanish] merely brings the level up to other provinces in Argentina and still way below Chile and Brasil which currently pay 10x the level here.

Today's headline in Clarin is that after much consumer and union outcry, the government has had to go back on their increase so it looks like this Bread & Circus show will go on for a few months longer.