Mousse | 2010-2011
Conversation between Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg, and Johan Lundh.
This fall, visitors to Portikus in Frankfurt am Main are faced with two halves of the meteorite, El Taco. One half is rough and rusted, the other suave and glossy. They clearly belong together but its origin and sub-sequential division is not obvious. The exhibition and accompanying book, which is produced by the Documenta 13-team, gives the account of how El Taco, a part of a 800-tone mass asteroid fell to earth around 2000 BCE, landing in a crater field called Campo del Cielo – Field of the Sky – in Northern Argentina. Artists Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg have done extensive research on the meteorites’ discoveries in Campo del Cielo.
The history of El Taco begins when a farmer discovers it in 1962 when plowing in his field. The finding instigated a shared expedition between Argentina and the United States of America who transported the meteorite rock to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC in for various tests. Soon thereafter, it was decided that El Taco should be divided, so it was shipped to the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, where it was cut into two main segments. One half was shipped back to Buenos Aires and the other to Washington. The show at Portikus marks the first reunification of El Taco since its division, and the first public presentation of this elaborate artistic endeavor.
Johan Lundh: It would like to begin our conversation by asking about how you became interested in the crater field called Campo del Cielo – Field of the Sky – in Argentina. Why did you start working together, and what drew you to Campo del Cielo?
Nicolás Goldberg: We met in Argentina through a dear friend of ours and bonded very quickly through our interests. We had only known each other for less than year when we started working together on this project. Having a background in visual arts, sharing interest in the cosmos, looking at pictures from NASA’s telescopes…. it really just took off from there. At one point, Guillermo mentioned Campo del Cielo to me, which I had never heard about. He told me that he was interested in going there and seeing this meteorite. As a photographer, I immediately got interested in this site’s history and the specificity of what had happened there. I guess that’s how Campo del Cielo became appealing to me at first.
Attention: What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of issue 26 of Mousse.