Fernando Traverso, creator of an icon and an action, worldwide recognized. His work is the stamping of the missing people's bicycle, Rosario people's bike, those who never came back because somebody made them "disappear"
The bicycles stamped on the walls in Rosario (Santa Fe), on the flags, on any surface that would tell something about those silenced years, are the work of this artist born in Rosario, who found his own way for filling that vacuity and silence with a work of art, with a series of actions/ fittings, meaning that absence. Theirs.
"Many thanks to Claudio Benedetti -a friend brought with the wind- and Fernando Traverso
Last night, we were watching TV when the telephone rang. It was Claudio, calling from Rosario. Another festival? No, just to inform us that he already had the two pieces of cloth painted by Traverso for the kites.
A cold feeling invaded me, and I remembered that all this began before the 2006 Rosario Festival, when Lucas and Roberto traveled to deliver a couple of workshops and Lucas came back with the idea of building a kite with Fernando Traverso's bicycle painted on it, the same bicycle that he painted on many walls in Rosario, paying homage to our 30,000 missing people.
I have only one, a cousin I love very much, like the other 9 who are still left.
He was just 25 years old, it was unfair... none of this was fair.
His name was Ricardo Hugo Rodríguez - Riki- and while I was speaking there with Lucas I realized that that pain had never been healed. Yes... I prayed many times for him, for his parents and brothers, but, of course, there has never been a place for a flower and now, thanks to Claudio's good offices, Fernando Traverso's unlimited kindness and Gustavo, who bought the piece of cloth for me in the last moment, whenever I want to take a flower for him, I'll do so not on the ground but right up there, where he must certainly be.
Thank you Claudio again, for taking the trouble but I can assure you that it has not been in vain.
I can now close a very sad chapter, and it will be looking at the sky, riding a 01.503 kite bicycle... which is quite something.
In memory of my godparents and Riki"
Beatriz Luis de Cassanello
"Walking along a street in Rosario and seeing a bicycle laying against a wall would have nothing strange in it. But as we approached, we see the black outline of a bicycle that had once been right in that place, in some other or, may be, nowhere.
There are many bicycles, many bike shades, they are the memory of an event, to be more precisely, they are the memory of a kidnapping, of somebody missing.
The bike outline is the absence metaphor. As Tao says, "it's not just the outline but the vacuity it leaves as well what makes an ultimate sense in reality".
Fernando Traverso, when printing these bicycles intervened the city with a countless number of stencil engravings that transformed the urban space into a memory ambit, of a fragile memory that needs to be constantly beaten, so that oblivion does not become the repressor's last triumph.
Traverso is a contemporary artist acquainted with the place where he acts, who feels that place as his own; he's been working there all this time, to see that one day, as he wakes up, all the printed bikes are strolling around the city, in search of a dream of justice".
Juan Carlos Romero
Buenos Aires, en julio de 2002
We recommend visiting the following links:
Fernando Traverso: reseña de trabajos realizados.(Work Review)
Fernando Traverso: Entre lo corpóreo y lo intangible.(Between Material and Intangibility)
