In this way, driven by the acceleration of technology but removed from its instantaneity, Bruzzone’s initiative seems to take its impulse from the very sociability in which he is immersed. His obsession with “preserving what is happening” (preservar lo que está ocurriendo), as he once noted, arose in part from hearing Pablo Suárez talk incessantly about what had happened in the arts in previous decades. However, when Bruzzone inquired about specific works or events, he found that there was nothing, no record. 14  The first recorded video, where the project seems to begin, takes place in the house of artists Pablo Suárez and Miguel Harte, which is, according to Bruzzone, the “most convenient” place, and which he describes as follows: “Suárez’s house, Harte’s house, Suárez’s works, Harte’s works, things all mixed together in Suárez and Harte’s workshop” 15  This initial moment, close and intimate, reveals the aforementioned fundamental affective social environment in the formation of Bruzzone’s collection. However, the audiovisual project expanded, reaching wider circles beyond those in his collection 16  and searching for narrations from artists who had longer careers in the Argentine art scene.

Bruzzone's audiovisual project inevitably entails a form of intervention on the artistic archive and documentation and, as I also mentioned earlier, on time and its perception. The recordings’ vast and varied repertoire of scenes, encounters, and records makes it difficult to find a guiding thread for the audiovisual collection as a whole. At the same time, this variety underscores the eternal impossibility of establishing a single temporal and discursive line for a historical period. Georges Didi-Huberman’s approach to the works of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin places at the center the question of the relationship between history and time imposed by the image. Recovering the perspective of memory implies not reducing the image to a “simple document of history,” that is, to a derivative result of its own context, nor understanding history as fixed knowledge or a simple continuous process. 17  In this reading, memory holds the same place as historical epistemology. Revolution in Benjamin implies shifting from viewing the past as “objective fact” toward seeing it as memory, as “fact in motion” (hecho en movimiento). 18  In Bruzzone’s recordings, the past is in motion, or perhaps, more generally: time in motion is in front of us. One way in which this movement manifests is through the testimonies displayed in the videos, which are filmed as interviews or conversations about the recent past, the early nineties, and/or earlier times. At the same time, part of the very nature of the audiovisual medium as a record gives rise to another issue I will address: the dispersion of the artwork since the expansion of its documentation.

In a recording of about forty minutes from 1998, Argentine artist León Ferrari, in a scene shot like a conversation or interview, answers questions and speaks to the camera about current art issues and discussions related to the nineties and the past. When asked about globalization and what Ferrari terms a sort of “contagion” (contagio) between art and artists, he offers his view on the discussions surrounding the preeminence of the concept in the works of the time. 19  Ferrari warns that there is an encounter between “the art of the non-idea, let’s say, and the art of ideas.” 20  Based on a reading of his own artistic trajectory and forms of production, Ferrari asserts that he creates “both works”: “works that have a purpose of expression and those that do not.”  21  On the one hand, he creates works that have “very precise ideas” (ideas muy precisas), issues that in his case, he says, are “old”—such as his interest in religion and its cruelty—but for which he intensely seeks “new forms”: “For the last thirty years I have been trying to do things with very precise ideas, and I have been racking my brains trying to find new ways to say things that are perhaps old—so as not to use the old common places to say very simple things.” 22  On the other hand, Ferrari creates works without a prior interest in expressing “rational” issues, which he identifies, for example, with his grafismos. 23  The difference that Ferrari expresses about these two types of artistic productions reflects part of the discussions that permeated the Argentine artistic scene during the nineties against the backdrop of the growth of Neoconceptualism as the dominant language in the international art scene. 24  It is clear that in Ferrari’s testimony, a retrospective reflection on his own artistic career overlaps with a perspective from the present and of the recent 1990s. Different moments and historical contexts thus converge in the perspective of Ferrari, who takes up the debate but shifts it away from the art’s discursive situation or the framework of intelligibility of art that was being discussed at the time 25  to rescue the potential value of the idea: the idea reasoned in advance. In this way, Ferrari’s testimony reconfigures the discussion from his own historical experience, offering points to consider the contemporary past and present: it underlines the potential strategic use of both forms in the same historical moment or in the career of the same artist. In this same conversation, Ferrari also warns against excessive recognition: “When they praise you too much, it is dangerous,” he says. 26  With this statement, Ferrari points to the celebrity culture linked to the art world as another issue of the time. As I mentioned previously, many of the recordings reveal the interference and perception of the media, mainly of television, based on the reactions and comments of those being filmed. Additionally, Bruzzone’s camera sometimes records other cameras that appear on the scene, at events like exhibition openings. The camera that records the camera becomes a witness to this expanding media culture and reveals its relationship with the demand for interpretation of artistic works. 27  This was the case with the opening of Alicia Herrero’s solo exhibition at Fundación Banco Patricios in 1997, where the artist appears on camera answering a series of questions about her exhibition to a television reporter. In the recording, Herrero speaks about the exhibition’s organization and the techniques and materials of her displayed series of works. 28  However, when asked about what the works refer to, Herrero—probably in line with discussions about excessive discursiveness in the arts—answers: “I don't interpret anything.” 29 

Another of the recordings in the form of an extended conversation takes place during a visit to Oscar Bony’s house in 1995. In the recording, Bony recounts the well-known action he carried out on the opening day of the exhibition 90-60-90 at Fundación Banco Patricios in 1994, in which his work was not included. For the occasion, Bony created a “pamphlet” as a form of “protest” with the phrase “Oscar Bony artista/Mariano Bilik fascista” (“Oscar Bony is an artist/Mariano Bilik is a fascist.”) 30  on one of its sides, and coordinated for them to be thrown throughout the exhibition space during the opening, an intervention he remembers as “practically a military action.” 31  More than the action itself, I am interested in focusing on Bony’s testimony, wherein he contextualizes the intervention and shares his view on the era. Bony recognizes artists’ need to be seen, to exhibit, but he also warns about conflicts of interests with institutions that often disadvantage artists, and he maintains a critical stance toward them. This position, rooted in Bony’s experience in the sixties,  32  overlaps with the context of a growing institutional art system at the end of the millennium but emphasizes not so much its opportunities but rather what remains outside of it. In this vein, in an extensive conversation from 1995, artist Ana Gallardo also criticizes the institutional system of that time. Gallardo states that she couldn’t easily show her work at that time because it was linked to feminist issues. She also warns that not adapting to technological formats or media such as televisions and projectors could result in exclusion. 33  Gallardo reveals her misgivings with technological formats, not only because of the potential exclusion they could entail but also due to the restricted access to this type of equipment in Argentina and its association with what Ferrari described as a sort of international contagion: “Wanting to be contemporary with elements that we do not know, that don’t serve us us, that don’t belong to us … That language does not belong to me, it is imposed, so what is art then?” 34 

Just as the recordings complicate and stratify time and the artistic discussions of the era through artists’ testimonies and the camera as a witness, they also expand the breadth of the artwork. I would like to conclude by mentioning the value and existence that films provide, as records and witnesses of what is said but also of the ephemeral, to different stages of an artistic work. From the outset, Bruzzone, as an art collector, was often interested in artists’ “early works,” which he says to have rescued “from the trash,” found broken or to be discarded, works that Roberto Jacoby describes as “before the pattern”.  35  To a certain extent, the audiovisual project continues and reformulates this quest by incorporating various nuances. Recorded testimonies give life to works narrated by artists, some of which never materialized, such as the television interview program Marcelo Pombo desired to create. Other times, the camera witnesses the events surrounding a piece, as in the case of Claudia Fontes’s wax sculpture catching fire. A recording of just over forty minutes from December 1995 documents the burning of a wax sculpture depicting a human face that is crumbling, revealing its internal structure as it completely melts and falls apart. The scene resembles a rehearsal, an experiment, yet it also opens up a space for contemplation and slow movement. Amid the narration of some artworks and the destruction of others emerges part of Ana Gallardo’s story about a group of her works that had accidentally burned some years earlier in Mexico. In the recording, Gallardo shows a photograph of a “setting” (ambientación) and thus gives voice to a “Mexican wake” (velorio mexicano) that she created to bid farewell to her artworks. 36 

This essay began with the question of the relationship between history and time as imposed by the image, later delving into how this audiovisual collection introduces a series of contradictions and conflicts that unfold discussions and discourses of the era, thus setting the past in motion. Through the camera lens, the concatenation of disparate scenes and characters, and oral testimony as history, neither time nor artworks are fixed or univocal. Time reveals its strata and overlaps, while artworks disperse within the record, oscillating between desires and dissipations.