#5 - MG - A Peso A Piece

Algunas figuras de la collección Waldemar Julsrud.
Museo Waldemar Julsrud, Acámbaro, Guanajuato.

Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant and amateur archaeologist. In 1944, he excavated some pre-hispanic artefacts at the foot of a mountain in Acámbaro. Unable to dig for more, he offered a peso a piece for every object that was found here and brought back to him intact. This resulted in a vast collection of more than 30.000 ceramic objects, some of which - due to the 'economy' of this archaeological enterprise - inevitably turned out to be awkward anachronisms, like a digital watch on a knight's wrist. A substantial part of Julsrud's collection comprises dinosaurs (two-feet; three-feet; four-feet; three-clawed; two-clawed; mostly friendly in appearance), sparking the imagination of Waldemar Julsrud who concluded that here, in Mexico, people and dinosaurs had once coexisted. For Julsrud, the anachronism turned into a plot.

With Monterroso's short story still in mind, which part is most astonishing: that the dinosaur is still there, or that the human is already there?

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#4 - MG

When she woke up the dinosaur was still there.

In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.

There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.

Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?

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#3 - MG - Formal Sequences

"Every work of art can be regarded both as a historical event and as a hard-won solution to some problem. It is irrelevant now whether the event was original or conventional, accidental or willed, awkward or skillful. The important clue is that any solution points to the existence of some problem to which there have been other solutions, and that other solutions to this same problem will most likely be invented to follow the one now in view. As the solutions accumulate, the problem alters. The chain of solutions nevertheless discloses the problem."

(in: George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things)

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#2 - MG

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
Augusto Monterroso

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#1 - MG - In Medias Res

nec gemino bellum Troianum orditor ab ovo: semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res [nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg, but always he hurries to the action into the middle of things.] (Horace, Ars Poetica, ca. 13 BC)

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#0 - UQ

Is it possible for a narrative to exist without its primary source? Or is this the very nature of storytelling - a bodiless narrative that travels, and continues to travel, as an independent stream through time, regardless of its author?

Uqbar will be working at Casa Vecina in Mexico City, from August 2011 - February 2012. Project members include Moosje Goosen, Leticia El Halli Obeid, Ricardo Cuevas, Jon Mikel Euba, Amalia Pica, Jorge Satorre, Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman.

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