Small spheres
By Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny
“…las bolitas esparcidas sobre la manta dibujaban un universo de planetas marinos. La materia líquida envolviendo la materia sólida.” Sandra Petrignani, Catálogo de juguetes
Marcela Cabutti grew up in the Los Hornos neighborhood of La Plata, on the diffuse border where the city merges with the countryside. There, in the infinite universe of a dirt patio, he spent entire afternoons playing with friends with balls, tiny crystals that operate in this exhibition like Proustian madeleines of memory and evoke a past that is increasingly distant, perhaps not completely gone.
There are marble balls made of different materials: glass, porcelain, plastic, steel. The milkmaids are white and opaque; the blue and green ones, translucent. Some transparent ones, like the Japanese ones, have colored and shiny helices inside. Although the medium ones prevail, there are larger sized balls, bolones, and other smaller ones, pininas. When Marcela was a girl, her grandparents lived in the province of Santa Fe and in a large safe placed jealously next to the nightstand they kept the most valuable marble balls. In San Jorge, a few kilometers from his grandparents’ town, is Tinka, the last pellet factory that exists in Latin America. It opened its doors in 1953 and currently manufactures 75 million balls a year to supply the domestic market. Cabutti traveled to see it and documented the operation of its machines. Freshly molded and furiously red due to the high temperatures to which they are exposed, the balls look like small meteorites.The marble balls are collected or bet, they are used to pocket the opi, for the game of the quema, the house and the triangle. It doesn’t take much: buy them at some kiosk – they are cheap -, find a 2×2 place – the sidewalk, the patio, the field -, mark a subtle hole in the ground – better if it is hard and dry – and have, of course, leisure. The ball game deploys and constructs the public space, which is sometimes that of war (Petrignani says he has never seen a harmonious or peaceful ball competition).
It is hypnotic to see them advance in elliptical lines or bump them into each other in your hand while your fingers move them circularly. With their orbits, the balls are small celestial spheres within reach of everyone, bright stars that fit in your pants pocket and can be kept in a jar, accessible little pieces of heaven. The analogy between these crystal spheres and the planets is not accidental. Giorgio Agamben remembers how certain children’s games have their origin in sacred ceremonies. The balls, for example, symbolized the sun in some ancient rituals.
In this exhibition there is an interest not only in what the balls summon or indicate – the factory and by extension the Argentine industry, the neighborhood, the cosmos – but in what they are materially, in their mineral agency. Just as the hands of the Paraguayan potters that the artist visited in 2021 think while they make their crafts, so too does the material of the balls make, interact with their environment and shape relationships. Formed by the combination of fourteen minerals – a state of matter in fragile equilibrium – these glass spheres can, for example, with the help of a ray of light, start fires.
The almost five hundred thousand little blue balls invite us here, like a sky or a sea, to participate in the dimension of their volume. Its shiny surface in turn forms a constellation with other celestial bodies, other astral inhabitants of the room: the Big Dipper, the Canis Minor and Vulpecula, the Fox, straight out of the imagination of old illustrated maps. The matter is nomadic: the same calcium that shapes the stars now makes up the glass of beads and sculptures.
What do these little balls summon from a common past of games and dirt streets? What future do the animal constellations that guard them predict? In a double movement, Cabutti’s sample connects the above and the below, while offering clues to think about the present from the material, from the deep blue of these small spheres.