Where is my neighbourhood? Who stole my pain from me? My moon, on what little spot, as in times gone by, do you pour down your joyful light? I paint the bodies of my models with red ink. Then, using the same ink, I hand-colour their photos. Blood on blood.The idea is to highlight. To repeat. To exaggerate. Fictive blood in a land of carnivorous, cannibal gauchos who would kill a cow just to eat a steak, then leave the rest to the vultures. My aesthetic is Baroque. Rococo. The colonial painting of Cuzco, mixed with the phosphorescent vibration of the psychedelic frescoes on cabaret walls in Iquitos. Black Light. Amazonia. Blood. Hallucinogenic ayahuasca vine, sweat and tears. I need to speak always of the same thing. Ceaselessly. Like the dummy of a spaced-out ventriloquist. Testing excess with no regrets. Writing and meditating in the same breath. How to find the style, the tone, to paint the portrait of a continent shaped by a mix of Indian women infatuated with obsessed, bloodthirsty conquistador-centaurs?Then the icing on the cake: their daughters intermarry with European immigrants fresh off their ships, disoriented, stubborn, driven. Our Italian and Spanish ancestors who didn’t have the time to hold us in their arms and tell us bedtime stories, because they were too busy building the country. ‘Forging the future’, as it used to be called.They laboured out of love. And to ease the pain and melancholy of their homesickness.That’s the way we are: we repeat and even compound the same mistakes in a digital melting pot of Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Tupac Amaru, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Jorge Luis Borges, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez. That’s the starting point for my account of the history of a country and a continent.From the point of view of my own emotional experiences. I turn the odour of the woman who taught me in first grade into a socio-political chronicle of Argentina and Latin America.I rework history to suit myself. I reorient reality by staging it. Just like Glauber Rocha in the arid sertão of Brazil’s Nordeste, I make myself master of the moist pampas and transform it into a stage. A theatre. I add in the actors to play out my personal anguish. A cardboard Argentina. The fatherland as absence. The wind. The river brown as mother’s milk. Red ink as a simulacrum of pain. When I write and take photos, I turn myself into a shaman. I converse with my dead.

Marcos Lopez, Buenos Aires, March 2010