Together with Iris Goris, the author of this installment, professor of Fine Arts, researcher and photographer, over nineteen years they carried out a survey of the National Heritage in five provinces: Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, Salta and Tucumán. Monumental task carried out for the National Academy of Fine Arts. More than three decades after that work, he shares a review with the most notable findings.

In 1899, the Afro-Argentine Jorge Miguel Ford published a book in La Plata in which he reviewed, with an elegant pen, fourteen men of what he believed to be the finest in his community, hence the title, Beneméritos de mi estirpe. Being a private edition and limited edition, it became a rarity and in 2002 the Ministry of Culture of the Nation reissued it, under the care of Eduardo Luis Duhalde, although without the portraits. At the beginning of the Prologue he says that he only knows three copies, one of his own, one from the National Library and another from an American university, so “Surely there must be some other copies in the hands of collectors and bibliophiles.” In 2010 the fourth appeared, [...]

Libraries, admirable places where I enjoy and learn, are great. The content always catches my attention as a book lover and bibliophile. The spaces that those books keep often surprise me. I visit them every chance I can (confidence: I prefer to go alone, so that no one disturbs “our” contact). Since they fascinate me, I also read about them as much as I can.

Thus, I have discovered that on the path that leads to them I am accompanied, well accompanied by distinguished [...]

The CIDAP Documentation Center, located in the city of Cuenca in Ecuador, keeps in its corners the purest knowledge of culture, popular art and crafts, created to gather, preserve and share the knowledge that preserves the cultural memory of the villages. We present its history, content and evolution until it became one of the most important specialized centers in Latin America.

Everyone, this week of October seems to confirm it, is nothing more than a collection of ruins from yesterday and an excuse to produce those of tomorrow. Mute, changed places, crooked, lame, sore, useless as nightstand decorations, we humans get used to living with them, stepping on them, jumping on them, chopping them, crushing them or ignoring them without talking to them or seeing them. Layers and layers, sediments of other lives, that the wells, the excavations, the plows, the constructions and the pumps bring to light to throw them into the work and days of each other. It is also true: this abundance has generated innumerable professions and customs, as well as knowledge and the certainty of the weight of the centuries that, from the basement or the roof, mockingly contemplate us while they wait for our turn.

Of American parents, John Singer Sargent (Florence, January 1856-London, April 1925) studied in Paris and settled permanently in the capital of the United Kingdom, although his life took place in numerous places on the Old Continent. . His mother, Mary Singer, a painting enthusiast, was his main support in the choice and direction of his artistic career, constantly stimulating him. It was she who immediately recognized his talent for drawing, and his father Fitz William Sargent, a surgeon and also a skilled draftsman, recognized that his son was “quite an observer of nature.”