Pueblo Fantasma: Magdalena Jitrik

In the work of Magdalena Jitrik, the experience of historical time and creation takes shape in an analogous way to what happens between a vigil and a dream. This is not about a relationship between schematic reflections or daytime remnants but about continuities and mutual infiltrations, through the emergence of symbols with an inexhaustible polyvalent charge. For Magdalena, there is a transitional space between the two spheres that become condensed into the exhibition name. A new world begins to emerge with the finding of the right word. We are in Pueblo Fantasma, the ghost village.  

The mental image that Pueblo Fantasma evokes has the echo of a Western – tumbleweed hovering across the empty, dusty main road – or of a gothic novel – an icy village inhabited by specters. Perhaps it is not distant from the pampas landscape, imprinted on Magdalena’s retina during a recent trip. The plains, which seem to be hiding a precipice beyond, unfurl like a glyphosate-pigmented radioactive green mantle. The desert moves between the sight of harvesters and advertising billboards along the route. Not far away, there are the railways that in the second half of the 20^th century gave shape to a complex structure that connected the whole nation; a system annihilated during the cycle of privatization – and de-industrialization – of the 1990s. This crepuscular horizon is evoked with airs of a funfair in Ferrocarriles Argentinos [Argentinian Railways], a work made of an electric train system that follows a winding path amongst paintings raised like flags and banners. 

The concept of the network permeates Jitrik’s work in many different ways, such as when the artist creates images from interconnected geometric forms; in her word games (like in the use of the word “Red”, which also means network in Spanish); or in the works involving historical episodes, often materialized into the shape of an atlas. The conceptual dimension of the term “Red” can be seen in the flag-painting Red Cloud Army, a monumental portrait dedicated to thirteen Sioux Nation chiefs; in Orquesta Roja [Red Orchestra], her music project, which is also the name of one of her paintings; in the exhibition Red de espionaje [Espionage Network]; or in the recent images made of structures connected by lines and dots in Pueblo Fantasma. 

The notion of the network in this exhibition also appears in Ferrocarriles Argentinos, and it does so as a communication system located in an imaginary territory. The poetic use of an industrial element, born out of a factory and incorporated into the work, is a brand-new procedure. Whereas Jitrik’s previous installations drew on the development of ancestral traditional techniques, adobe or stone architecture closely linked to American cultures, now the artist uses a manufactured, processed material, featuring a sort of mechanical functioning. The recurrent trace in all these procedures is a fascination with the human capacity to transform matter through the use of a labor force. 

While through the pace of the train, Jitrik introduces, in a prismatic way, her meditation on the processes of modernity, specifically those linked to the notion of progress, other machines are also present in the paintings. We see networks and gears with subtle Duchampian echoes: Machines célibataires [Celibate Machines] triggering color rays whilst connecting different points; magnetic strips spinning in Pythagorean landscapes. Ellipsis, dynamos and atoms move and produce some sort of unknown energy. There is an eye – which appeared for the first time in Magdalena’s sketches during the pandemic, crying black tears – reflecting or refracting light. The world that the paintings produce is not the world of a quantifiable Chronos but an often hidden, elastic and silent one. 

— Florencia Qualina