Lonely Planet Buenos Aires

by Lonely Planet

  In 2007 electronic musicians from Zizek Records, a homegrown BA label, created 'digital cumbia' by fusing various forms of cumbia and Argentine traditional music with reggaeton, dance-hall, hip-hop and electronic beats.

  Latin & Electronica

  Electrónica exploded in Argentina in the 1990s and has taken on various forms in popular music. Heavyweights in DJ-based club and dance music include Aldo Haydar (progressive house), Bad Boy Orange (drum n bass), Diego Ro-K (the 'Maradona' of Argentine DJs) and Gustavo Lamas (blending ambient pop and electro house). Hernán Cattáneo has played with Paul Oakenfold and at Burning Man.

  Buenos Aires’ young clubbers have embraced the música tropical trend that’s swept Latin America in recent years. Many a BA booty is shaken to the lively, Afro-Latin sounds of salsa, merengue and especially cumbia. Originating in Colombia, cumbia combines an infectious dance rhythm with lively melodies, often carried by brass. An offshoot is cumbia experimental or cumbia villera, a fusion of cumbia and gangsta posturing with a punk edge and reggae overtones.

  One of BA’s most interesting music spectacles is La Bomba de Tiempo, a collective of drummers that features some of Argentina’s leading percussionists. Its explosive performances are conducted by Santiago Vázquez, who communicates with the musicians through a language of mysterious signs – the result is an incredible improvisational union that simulates electronic dance music and sounds different every time. During the summer it plays open-air at Ciudad Cultural Konex ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %011-4864-3200; www.ciudadculturalkonex.org; Av Sarmiento 3131; bLínea B Carlos Gardel) every Monday evening; it's also featured at various happenings and parties in BA’s clubs.

  Buenos Aires Playlist

  Estaciones Porteñas (Ástor Piazzolla; 1965–70) Four tango compositions, one for each season in Buenos Aires.

  Mi Buenos Aires Querido (Carlos Gardel; 1934) Once of the tango crooner's most famous songs.

  Sur (Aníbal Troilo and Homero Manzi; 1948) Tango song about the city's southern neighborhoods of Boedo, Parque Patricios and Pompeya.

  Puerto Madero (Kevin Johansen; 2002) Pokes fun at the tourist's view of Buenos Aires.

  Literature & Cinema

  Argentina has a strong literary heritage, with many writers using the country's darkest moments as inspiration for their complex and sometimes disturbing fiction. Leading the pack are writers Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. Buenos Aires is also home to Argentina's vibrant, thriving film industry. The country has won two Oscars for best foreign-language film (in 1985 and 2010) – the only Latin American country to have won the award – and continues to produce excellent directors and movies.

  Literary Classics

  One of Argentina's most influential pieces of classic literature is the epic poem by José Hernández, Martín Fierro (1872). Not only did this story about a gaucho outlaw lay the foundations of the Argentine gauchesco literary tradition but also it inspired the name of the short-lived but important literary magazine of the 1920s that published avant-garde works based on the ‘art for art’s sake’ principle.

  Julio Cortázar (1914–84) is an author well known to readers outside Argentina. He was born in Belgium to Argentine parents, moved to Buenos Aires at age four and died in self-imposed exile in Paris at the age of 70. His stories frequently plunge their characters out of everyday life into surrealistic situations. One such story was adapted into the film Blow-Up by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch takes place simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Paris and requires the reader to first read the book straight through, then read it a second time, ‘hopscotching’ through the chapters in a prescribed but nonlinear pattern for a completely different take on the story.

  Another member of Borges’ literary generation is Ernesto Sábato (1911–2011), whose complex and uncompromising novels have been extremely influential on later Argentine literature. The Tunnel (1948) is Sábato’s engrossing existentialist novella of a porteño painter so obsessed with his art that it distorts his relationship with everything and everyone else.

  Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99) and Borges were close friends and occasional collaborators. Bioy’s sci-fi novella The Invention of Morel (1940) gave Alain Resnais the plot for his classic film Last Year at Marienbad and also introduced the idea of the holodeck decades before Star Trek existed.

  Argentines are pretty well read – their literacy rate is over 97% – and Buenos Aires is home to some fabulous bookstores, including El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Recoleta. Look for bargain titles at the shops on Av Corrientes near Av 9 de Julio, or at the stalls at Parque Rivadavia in the Caballito neighborhood.

  Victoria Ocampo

  In 1931 Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) – a writer, publisher and intellectual – founded Sur, a renowned cultural magazine that introduced Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus and TS Eliot to Argentine readers. Sur also featured writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar.

  Ocampo was an inexhaustible traveler and a pioneering feminist, and was loathed by some for her lack of convention. A ferocious opponent of Peronism, chiefly because of Perón’s interference with intellectual freedom, Ocampo was arrested at her summer chalet, Villa Victoria, at the age of 63. She entertained her fellow inmates by reading aloud and acting out scenes from novels and cinema.

  Ocampo never went to university, but her voracious appetite for knowledge and her love of literature led her to become Argentina’s leading lady of letters. She hosted intellectuals from around the globe at Villa Victoria, in Mar del Plata, creating a formidable literary and artistic salon. (The villa is now a cultural center.)

  Today you can also visit Victoria Ocampo's restored mansion in San Isidro, Villa Ocampo, for a reminder of a bygone era.

  If Victoria is remembered as a lively essayist and a great patroness of writers, her younger sister, Silvina, was the literary talent, writing both short stories and poetry. Silvina won several literary prizes for her work, and in 1940 she married Casares, the famous Argentine writer and friend of Jorge Luis Borges.

  Post-Boom Literature

  The contemporary, post-boom generation of Argentine writers is more reality-based, often reflecting the influence of popular culture and directly confronting the political angles of 1970s authoritarian Argentina. One of the most famous post-boom Argentine writers is Manuel Puig (1932–90), whose first love was cinema. Much of his writing consists solely of dialogue, used to marvellous effect. Puig's novel The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) is a page-turner delving into the relationship between murderer and victim (and artist and critic), presented as a deconstructed crime thriller. His most famous work is Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), a captivating story of a relationship that develops between two men inside an Argentine prison; it was made into the 1985 Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt. Being openly gay and critical of Perón did not help his job prospects in Argentina, and Puig spent many years in exile.

  Another prolific writer was Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934–2010). His The Perón Novel (1988), a fictionalized biography of the controversial populist leader, and its sequel, Santa Evita (1996), which traces the worldwide travels of Evita’s embalmed corpse, were both huge hits.

  Ricardo Piglia (b 1941) is one of Argentina’s most well-known contemporary writers. He pens hard-boiled fiction and is best known for his socially minded crime novels with a noir touch, such as The Absent City (1992), Money to Burn (1997) and Nocturnal Target (2010).

  Osvaldo Soriano (1943–97), perhaps Argentina’s most popular contemporary novelist, wrote Funny Dirty Little War (1986) and Winter Quarters (1989). Juan José Saer (1937–2005) penned short stories and complex crime novels, while Rodrigo Fresán (b 1963), the youngster of the post-boom generation, wrote the international bestseller Argentine History (1991).

  The first novel of Federico Andahazi (b 1963), The Anatomist, caused a stir when it was published in 1997. Its theme revolves around the ‘discovery’ of the clitoris by a 16t
h-century Venetian who is subsequently accused of heresy. Andahazi based his well-written book on historical fact, and manages to have some fun while still broaching serious subjects. His prize-wining El Conquistador (2006) is a historical novel about an Aztec youth who ‘discovers’ Europe before Columbus reaches America, while his latest book, Pecar como Dios manda (To Sin Like You Mean It; 2008), hypothesizes that to understand the essence of a society you have to understand the web of sexual relations on which it's built.

  Two of the younger generation of Argentine writers are Washington Cucurto and Gabriela Bejerman. Cucurto runs Eloísa Cartonera (www.eloisacartonera.com.ar), a small publishing house that releases books by young authors made of recycled cardboard collected by the city’s cartoneros. Bejerman, a multimedia artist who launched a music career as Gaby Bex, released an album in 2007 that incorporates some of her poetry with electro music. Other names to watch out for are Andrés Neuman, Oliverio Coelho and Pedro Mairal.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Many of the greatest lights of Argentine literature called Buenos Aires home, and the one that burned brightest was without doubt Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. A prolific author and an insatiable reader, Borges possessed an intellect that seized on difficult questions and squeezed answers out of them. Though super-erudite in his writing, he was also such a jokester that it’s a challenge to tell when he’s being serious and when he’s pulling your leg (though often it’s a case of both at once). From early on one of his favorite forms was the scholarly analysis of nonexistent texts, and more than once he found himself in trouble for perpetrating literary hoaxes and forgeries. A few of these are contained in his Universal History of Iniquity (1935), a book that some point to as the origin of magic realism in Latin American literature.

  Borges’ dry, ironic wit is paired (in his later work) with a succinct, precise style that is a delight to read. His paradoxical Ficciones (1944) – part parable, part fantasy – blurs the line between myth and truth, underscoring the concept that reality is only a matter of perception and the number of possible realities is infinite. Other themes that fascinated Borges were the nature of memory and dreams, labyrinths, and the relationship between the reader, the writer and the written piece. Collected Fictions (1999) is a complete set of his stories.

  Though he received numerous honors in his lifetime – including the Cervantes Prize, the Legion of Honor and an OBE – Borges was never conferred the Nobel. He joked of this in typical fashion: ‘Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition. Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.’

  Pilgrims can head to his last residence ( GOOGLE MAP ; Maipú 994; bLínea C San Martín) in BA: a private apartment building near the corner of Florida and Santa Fe in Retiro. Look for a plaque on the wall.

  Argentina’s biggest film event is the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film, held in April. Fims are shown at cinemas around the city.

  Cinema

  Buenos Aires is at the center of the Argentine film industry and New Argentine Cinema. While this movement can’t be called a school of cinema, as it includes a hodgepodge of themes and techniques, it's certainly a new wave of film-making that has been attracting international attention.

  The film that’s considered to have spearheaded the New Argentine Cinema is Rapado by Martín Rejtman, a minimalist 1992 feature that for the first time pushed the boundaries in a country where films were generally heavy with bad dialogue. In the late 1990s the government withdrew subsidies pledged to film schools and the movie industry. Despite this, two films ignited ‘the new wave’ – the low-budget Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Cigarettes; 1998) by Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, and Pablo Trapero’s Mundo grúa (Crane World; 1999), a black-and-white portrait of Argentina’s working-class struggles.

  Trapero went on to become one of Argentina’s foremost filmmakers, whose credits include El bonaerense (2000), the ensemble road movie Familia rodante (Rolling Family; 2004), Nacido y criado (Born and Bred; 2006) – a stark story about a Patagonian man’s fall from grace – and the 2010 noir film Carancho, a love story whose protagonist is a sleazy opportunist who frequents emergency rooms and accident scenes to find new clients for his legal firm. Trapero's 2012 film Elefante blanco (White Elephant) was screened at Cannes; his most recent film is El clan (The Clan; 2015).

  One of the brightest stars of the New Argentine Cinema is Daniel Burman, who deals with the theme of identity in the character of a young Jew in modern-day Buenos Aires. His films include Esperando al mesíah (Waiting for the Messiah; 2000), El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace; 2004) and Derecho de familia (Family Law; 2006). Burman’s other claim to fame is his co-production of Walter Salles’ Che Guevara–inspired The Motorcycle Diaries.

  Another director to have made a mark on Argentine cinema is the late Fabián Bielinsky. He left behind a small but powerful body of work that includes his award-winning feature Nueve reinas (Nine Queens; 2000), which inspired a 2004 Hollywood remake, Criminal. His last film, the 2005 neo-noir flick El Aura, screened at Sundance and was the official Argentine entry for the 2006 Oscars.

  Lucrecia Martel has left an indelible trace on Argentina’s contemporary cinema. Her 2001 debut, La ciénaga (The Swamp), and the 2004 follow-up, La niña santa (The Holy Girl), both set in Martel’s native Salta province, deal with themes of social decay, the Argentine bourgeois and sexuality in the face of Catholic guilt. Another acclaimed director, Carlos Sorín, takes us to the deep south of Argentina in two of his neorealist flicks, the 2002 Historias mínimas (Minimal Stories) and the 2004 Bombón el perro (Bombón the Dog).

  Juan José Campanella’s El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride) received an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film in 2001. His 2004 film Luna de avellaneda (Moon of Avellaneda) is a masterful story about a social club and those who try to save it. And in 2010 Campanella won the Oscar for best foreign-language film with his El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes).

  An up-and-coming director is Lucía Puenzo (daughter of Luis Puenzo). Her XXY (2007) won multiple awards at Cannes that year; it follows the travails of a 15-year-old hermaphrodite. In 2013 Puenzo directed Wakolda (The German Doctor), a true story about the family who unknowingly lived with Josef Mengele during his exile in South America. Finally, Damián Szifron's black comedy Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales; 2014) was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

  Art & Architecture

  Over the years, Argentina has produced some fine artists, notably Antonio Berni, Benito Quinquela Martín and Marta Minujín, each with their own style and ability to break the mold in the art world. The buildings of Buenos Aires reflect many styles that were in vogue at various times throughout the city’s life. You’ll find old and new juxtaposed in sometimes jarring and often enchanting ways.

  Visual Arts

  Eduardo Sívori (1847–1918) was one of Argentina's first notable artists and celebrated realist painters. He depicted pampas landscapes, painted portraits and helped found one of Argentina's first artist guilds. Other early artists included Cándido López (1840–1902) – a soldier who learned to paint with his left hand after losing his right arm in war – and Ernesto de la Cárcova, who depicted social issues such as poverty.

  Lino Enea Spilimbergo (1896–1964) was a diverse painter and engraver whose subjects ranged from classical to post-impressionism to stark and surreal human figures. His contemporary, Antonio Berni (1905–81), would sometimes visit shantytowns and collect materials to use in his works. Various versions of his theme Juanito Laguna bañándose (Juanito Laguna Bathing) – a protest against social and economic inequality – have commanded wallet-busting prices at auctions. You can see both artists' work in the restored ceiling murals of the Galerías Pacífico shopping center.

  Other famous Argentine artists of this era are Juan Carlos Castagnino, a realist and figurative painter; Jorge de la Vega, who dabbled not only in various styles of visual
art but also became a popular singer and songwriter; and Emilio Pettoruti, who affronted Buenos Aires with his 1924 cubist exhibition. Roberto Aizenberg was one of Argentina's top surrealists.

  One of the more interesting contemporary artists is Roberto Jacoby (b 1944), who has been active in diverse fields since the 1960s, from organizing socially flavored multimedia shows to setting up audiovisual installations. His most famous work, Darkroom, is a video performance piece with infrared technology meant for a single spectator.

  Guillermo Kuitca (b 1961) is known for his imaginative techniques that include the use of digital technology to alter photographs, maps and other images and integrate them into larger-themed works. His work is on display at major international collections and he's had solo and group shows at key art expos around the world.

  Other internationally recognized artists who experiment with various media are Buenos Aires–born, New York–based Liliana Porter, who imaginatively plays with video, paintings, 3D prints, photos and an eclectic collection of knickknacks; Graciela Sacco, whose politically and socially engaging installations often use public space as their setting; and the photographer Arturo Aguiar, known for playing with light and shadow in his mysterious works. Also watch out for highly eclectic Argentine pop artist Marta Minujín.

  Buenos Aires has also seen a rise in urban art interventions, a movement of diverse activist artists whose work calls attention to social and urban issues in the city’s public spaces. The most prominent figure is Marino Santa María, whose award-winning Proyecto Calle Lanín is a series of colorful murals along the narrow Calle Lanín in the southern neighborhood of Barracas.