Secret Archeometries 

In a beautiful minute book the Argentinian poet Arturo Carrera speaks about poetic texts and visual imaginaries and refers to what he defines as imperfect twins: mystery and secret. These apparently identical phenomena are, however, very different in essence. Mystery would be anything that we don´t know and never will, something that has to be accepted without discussion. Secret is something also unknown, but that under certain circumstances may be revealed.

A poem, an artistic image, may have patches of mystery, but cannot fall under the domain of mystery, for they would be offish, hermetic products. However, a poem or an artwork may form a cartography full of secrets.

Eloísa Ibarra’s proposal falls within this second category. The writer of this text has decided not to help the spectator by offering him keys or ways of access. He prefers to offer questions that may -by transitivity- lead to these keys, these possible codes. 

A small tablet of Sumerian reminiscences, for example, is presented as foreword. Instead of the well-known cuneiform signs a QR code appears on it. Is this tablet a particular hint, an expression of Carrollian nonsense or a playful anachronism escaped from the fiction of Borges? 

Is the absence of colors, the absolute predominance of black and white, a hint or merely a formal event? Do the forms growing in space and the plan that appears on the posterior wall conjugate with the tablet to form a meaningful ensemble or are they just elements enjoying the liberty of their divested beauty? 

Perhaps, the possibility has to be taken into account that this is a silent mise en scène about the secret cartographies of the omnipotent myth. Or perhaps, it founds a scenography of archeometric signs, that is to say, of signs belonging to a discipline that establishes connections between archeology and the physical and natural sciences and their almost ungraspable secrets. 

Alfredo Torres
Curator of the exhibition