Metrovia

Publisher's description

Metrovia by Krass Clement is a book about Buenos Aires, but not in the usual sense as a book about this whole city with its architecture and famous squares. Rather, a description of the feeling evoked by a place, which in the book is reflected in an alternation between the immediately recorded and the subjective interpretation. Understood in the way that the seen is turned and edited throughout the book, so that it gradually dissolves the concrete in order to assume a more abstract form, which encapsulates the mood. Of course, we get a sense of the city's physical character, but most of all, the atmosphere is maintained through a repeated return to the city's subway, Metrovia, with all that it precisely offers of human diversity. There is a wide alternation between recurring themes, i.a. the Natural History Museum, which on a concrete level is an expression of a matter-of-fact scientificity, but which in the book gradually acquires an unreal and fluid meaning. 

The city has an immediate recognizability by its strong European touch, which calls for a recognition that nevertheless remains a stranger. Precisely in the imperceptible dispute between, on the one hand, what seems familiar and, on the other hand, a distant and foreign continent, the book unfolds.

We can immediately find ourselves, but in a society exposed to a creeping but violent pressure that, like an undertone, permeates the mood. After all, we remain strangers to the anonymous stream of people.

In the subway, in tango restaurants, by a closed carousel - places that evoke memories of an old Europe, the experience arises of something static, of something that is no more, however, it is a modern metropolis with a myriad of shifts.