The hitmens’ leader
word by Zaira Nofalart by La Delmas
hace click aquí para leer en castellano
When I was around five or six years old, my grandfather Dante brought a baby goat to live in his house. My cousin and I called him Vivi. It was in honor of a girl he liked. I only picked up on the irony while writing this text.
Vivi was as white and radiant as a bride, Santiagueño like my grandfather, and appeared at the house as a gift from his family in Pozo Hondo. As soon as I arrived each Sunday, I would get right up to the fence and call him, and he would run up the side of the house clumsily making his way down to meet me. Vivi and I became friends. My ears never registered the soundtrack of catastrophe the adults heard each time they watched us play together.
On the day of my grandfather's birthday, some relatives from Santiago del Estero came to eat. The house was full of people I didn’t know. Vivi did not come to greet me that day and I headed towards the patio where the family gathered. I don't remember if anyone tried to stop me — probably not. I was the youngest and I guess everyone assumed the lessons they gave to my siblings and cousins would trickle down to me like a cascading fountain.
No one saw me. They had their backs to me while they skinned an unrecognizable animal hanging from the mango tree; the hitmens’ leader was my grandfather. Later, we sat at the table and they served our plates with a lump of pale meat. Vivi was gone and I was no fool. I asked what we were eating, and with the dread of a horror film’s big reveal, my mother replied: "Chicken".
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The first work I saw by Nicola Costantino was "Cochon sur canapé''. I caught it on a segment about her on public television. It replayed a fragment of a 1992 performance in which she exhibited different meats arranged on a water bed dressed in a pink bed sheet or satin tablecloth. The spectators quickly became diners: they tore meat apart with their hands in the presence of a stuffed piglet’s head and vacuum-packed chickens with spread wings. They didn’t seem to be bothered by being ripped from a contemplative state and quickly destroyed the piece, drunk in the bacchanalian atmosphere. Costantino commented that she had to stop the crowd from eating the stuffed head.
Nicola cooked the meat, bled the piglet, and packed the chickens in a flying position, but unlike my grandfather or my mother, she bore witness to the massacre.
In Cochon Sur Canapé, Costantino manages to materialize the duality that exists in each scene and character that participates in the performance. Not only does one see the savage faces of the public trying to devour a stuffed head, but we also see the monstrous cog in the machinery of consumption working on the shiny, satin-finished Menemist* furniture.
I don’t mean to be militant in my choice of words. The performance wasn’t anti-speciesist or anti-capitalist — even though it could be read that way. The exposure of the double is presented as an inseparable part of life. There’s no judgment. There’s only a montage of the invisible, of the sinister.
There would be more of this in her subsequent works: a mechanical dress holding up a sick Evita on her feet, garments of human skin, a paradise where the abundance of delicious fruits is the underbelly of greed. How we carry out the exercise of consumption is always in plain view in her work. And everything is consumable: a person becoming a character (Rapsodia inconclusa), an animal (Cochon sur Canapé/ Chancho bola), human objectification (Pelletería), an artist becoming a work or object (Savon du Corps).
Costantino claims that she does not aim to shock with her work, and perhaps this is true. Rather she exposes the side of things that are otherwise hidden. The dirt that no one wants to acknowledge under the fingernail is a freedom that can be given to someone who, at the very least, overlooks the pursuit of pleasure. A privilege that the artistic influence can offer — perhaps in exchange for a little piece of well-cooked meat — or take away at will.
I wonder what would have happened if instead of saying "Pollo" my mom said: We are eating Vivi's corpse, recently murdered by your grandfather. I suspect that without the shield of aesthetics, she could not afford to risk displeasing her audience in the middle of a birthday party.
Novalis says: "In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.”It took me fifteen years to eat a plate of goat again.
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*This is an adjective that comes from the surname Menem, alluding specifically to the president of Argentina in 1992, the year in which Costantino's performance took place for the first time. The adjective is generally used by Argentines to illustrate an excess in luxury. Google his image, when you see a man with copious sideburns in a red Ferrari — that's it.
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Zaira Nofal is a poet and art critic. She has written two books of poetry: Mildoscientos kilómetros (Elemento disruptivo, 2014) y Merecemos como mínimo que un portal se abra (Hexágono editoras, 2020). You can find her on Instagram.
La Delmas Illustrator and NFT artist. She was born and raised in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She is 100% inspired by her family origins and customs and a lover of homemade food and good meals. Find her on Instagram.
Paul Holzman is a North American translator and musician living in Buenos Aires. He runs a poetry zine called Palometa and he can be read or heard on his blog, Lepersquint.