Krass Clement ‘Metrovia Buenos Aires’

Metrovia Buenos Aires is a book about Buenos Aires, but maybe more so the feeling evoked by a place. This feeling is achieved in the book by the alternation between the immediately recorded and the subjective interpretation.  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 offers of human diversity. There is an alternation between recurring themes in the book, for instance the natural history museum, which on one level represents the objectivity of science, but in the book gradually acquires an unreal meaning.

In the subway, in tango restaurants, by a closed carousel – places that evoke memories of an old Europe – the experience arises of something static that is no more, and at the same time a modern metropolis.Much like the anonymous stream of people remain strangers, the city does too despite its strong European touch and sense of familiarity. The book unfolds in this imperceptible dispute between, on the one hand, what seems familiar and, on the other hand, a distant and foreign continent.