Anacronías alemanas

Description

What does a collector’s travel diary look like? Where does the landscape end and the destination begin when the traveler follows not a route but the traces of a possible archive? German Anachronies is precisely that: an object as strange as each of the books, magazines, posters, photographs, prints, and letters that Patricio Binaghi encounters as he moves through—or immerses himself in—fairs, museums, galleries, and bookstores. Cities take the shape of a shelf.

If “bringing old papers to light” is his mission, here the stakes are raised with a record that is as obsessive as it is bon vivant, capturing an adventure that lingers in cafés, chance encounters, trains, conversations of love, and farewells. The collector turned writer proclaims himself the anachronistic custodian of scattered pieces that, under his gaze, come back to life, forming a system, a family. In this way, the book can be read as a logbook of all of Patricio Binaghi’s editorial projects—both those already realized and those still to come.

Earlier we asked about the destination… Buenos Aires? Düsseldorf? Madrid? A ghost answers, breaking the compass: it is the voice of the father who, on the verge of death, said, “Here you will always have a place.” And so that “here” spreads into infinite impossibilities to which one must always return.

Liliana Viola