L’Arxiu
An intimate declaration that begins in Rioplatense Spanish.
How difficult it is to start bringing down the ideas that inhabit my head, that grow, intertwine, mutate, and settle in.
This story begins in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a few years ago. I was working in a museum of history and urban archaeology and, far from getting stuck in the anachronistic formats of museographic design, I was looking for different ways to reach people, to infect them with even a little bit of the passion that research unleashes in my soul. Every time we added a new guide to the team, the instruction we gave them was the same: if the visitor is not moved, we have not fulfilled our objective.
In this museum, we explored the history of the country where I was born and the development of the city that hosts it, based on the overlapping lives, years, and functions of a large house made of brick and adobe. And I swear I am not exaggerating: people surfed a sea of emotions during their visit, even gifting us a few tears.
When the idea of migrating became more solid, some of the work I did at this museum was extrapolated into my own story. I will return to this idea. It is not unusual for a person who is about to leave everything they know behind to seek to understand themselves, to rethink themselves. The mental movements involved in migration are even stronger and more significant than the physical ones.
At first, I thought about applying to work in a Barcelona museum. I even sat down to rearrange my CV to present it in a different country: Master in Art History, the header stated. But of course, there the term used is "Máster". So I corrected it. Two years of coursework and two years of thesis research. Wait, there the master's degrees last one year, so how is my degree translated?
Imagine that, if this was overwhelming, now I would have to understand a new worldview… Process a new ID that included my mother's surname and said that, in addition to being Argentine, I was also Spanish; look for a new apartment, which would now be called a "piso"; understand how the local public health system worked, the labor laws, the tax regime, that there are streets where you must park on the left side during the first fifteen days of the month and on the right for the rest… And get used to the fact that the second person plural would now be "vosotros" and not "ustedes", and that this paragraph should have begun with imaginaos and not imagínense.
Behind a wave of uncertainties that was becoming increasingly agitated, doubts and questions grew relentlessly. Who am I? What do I want to do? Starting over can be liberating and overwhelming at the same time.
One thing I was clear about: Catalonia is a country in itself and its people are proud of their heritage. That is why, while I was looking at all the objects I had collected during the 36 years I had been on this earth and choosing which to bring, which to leave behind, which to give away (and to whom) and which to sell, I went to the Casal de Catalunya on Chacabuco Street, in my beloved neighborhood of San Telmo, to find out about Catalan classes. All my friends laughed at my anxiety. I didn't even have plane tickets yet and I already wanted to study another language. But there were no vacancies left. I was going to have to land without knowing how to speak the language of what would be my new home. You are (you all are) beginning to understand that I am a person of strong obsessions.
But I was telling you about the museum, El Zanjón de Granados, and how that experience was projected into the very core of my being. The visits always began the same way, talking about the family that had built the house. The year they had done it. What they did for a living, why they had been able to build such a large house, and the reasons why it had such a particular physiognomy. I would continue by presenting the restoration project, the family that had dedicated more than 20 years to researching, shedding light, and bringing that place back to life. I spoke of Don Jorge, who started as my boss but ended up becoming much more. When I finally and tearfully gathered the courage to tell him I was leaving, he replied, "to see a child grow, you have to let them go." I write it and the lump returns to my throat. I am quite a crybaby, besides… And I continued introducing the migrant families, who had come from many parts of Europe, seeking to leave behind hunger, war, and political persecution, who had inhabited that same house from the end of the 19th century until well into the 70s, during the 20th. There we call them "conventillos": each room of the house was inhabited by one, sometimes even two families, sharing their patios and terraces. In this particular house, up to 100 people had lived together at the same time. You could hear Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Polish being spoken… Neighbors became family even if they didn't speak the same language. All of that could be told from a few bricks that had once been set with adobe, and the word family was repeated constantly, as you have been able to witness just by reading these lines.
And what could my bricks, my scaffolding, my roots say? What was the whole history of this house that is my person amalgamated with? My name is María Eugenia García. Now, María Eugenia García Domínguez. My paternal grandfather had arrived in Buenos Aires from Asturias with his parents when he was very young, to grow up in a "conventillo" on Chacabuco Street, in the San Telmo neighborhood. There we have the first coincidences. There will be many more. During his adolescence, and at the Avellaneda School of Fine Arts, he met Nora and they got married. Art has run through my family for several generations now. I even keep some woodcuts made by my great-great-grandfather, which remind me a bit of those loose, beautiful, and somewhat schematic faces in Egon Schiele's drawings.
The surname Domínguez comes to me from my maternal grandfather, the first generation born on Argentine soil to a Galician couple who had met on the ship that was leading them toward their greatest adventure. If I was swimming in uncertainty, I couldn't begin to imagine what they must have felt running through their veins as they boarded an ocean liner, not knowing what awaited them on the other side. But back to my grandfather. He grew up in a country town dreaming of helping people, and grew up to become a nurse. His parents did not know how to read or write. One day, his best friend, madly in love with a young girl, got that long-awaited yes after inviting her for ice cream and, since she was going with a chaperone friend, he asked him as a favor to accompany him. That was how Oscar Domínguez met Elsa Vila, a more well-to-do and capricious Catalan woman and everything he didn't know he needed to be happy until that moment.
Elsa, or Beba, as we all call her, is almost 100 years old. She never spoke much about the circumstances of her life as a child, although she kept some stories that gave us some clues. Every January 5th we had to be good if we wanted the Three Kings from the East to bring us gifts, because the Patge Fumera, who was invisible, had come down the chimney and was watching us. Her house didn't have a chimney, but no one had stopped at that detail. The secret of the success that had suddenly struck our neighbor Pedro, he had surely found in an ear of wheat: it must be the work of the Bocarrot, she would say. Eugenia, tancá the door or the Bufarut will get in (later I would understand that it was the Rioplatense Hispanicization of the Catalan imperative tanca).
Grandmother didn't tell much about her childhood, but we did know that the family was from Barcelona. There was a photograph of my great-grandfather floating around the house, dressed in a suit that always seemed immaculate, unshakeable, pristine to me: as if it had been carved for a sculpture. And a summer hat. L’avi era molt galant. Many years later, skipping a generation, here I am, in that same city that served as the backdrop in that photograph. With my husband, Leandro García Pimentel, an artist. We didn't meet at the art university, but it was he who invited me for a beer to tell me about the degree, and we ended up studying in the same place. It could pass for a coincidence, if you'll allow me. And how could I not tell you that we also came with our senior dog, Don Godard García de la Pelota. The coolest guy inhabiting this planet.
Before migrating, and trying to understand my roots, I began my research on Catalan mythology. It didn't seem very strange to anyone; I've always been interested in understanding the stories that make a people and forge their identity and character. But I needed to get here to deepen it. I processed my Library Network card and dove in. Remember I hadn't found a spot to study at the Casal de Catalunya? All the books were written in Catalan, so I had to learn to read it before I could pronounce it: Softcatalà, AI (several), translators, a lot of intuition. Thus, I discovered as many versions of these stories that had been born from orality as I could. And I visited as many villages as time allowed.
When I worked at the museum, I believed that the particular stories of that large house served as an excuse to talk about the development of Buenos Aires, but I soon understood it was the other way around: it was that generalist history of an entire city that ended up explaining the individuality of each of its parts, with its richness and its misery. People with first and last names, who offered their own experiences for the construction of a collective narrative. And, the more I discovered the stories of these lands, the more I understood that I could see myself reflected in their tales. These mythologies, initially distant, allowed me to understand a little more about myself.
And, finally, the moment was going to arrive when I would start studying Catalan. I realized the importance of using it, of connecting with people by speaking the same language that gives them so much pride. These legends have been passed down from generation to generation with the sounds of a nation full of history and traditions.
Then, I sought help to write my research in Catalan. And I decided to translate it into Spanish and English so that everyone can get to know the characters, the places, and the myths that sustain this culture.
And why a tarot, you might ask… When you write down oral stories, you freeze them. I didn't want to do that. Perhaps, by using the deck, these tales will continue to mutate, enrich themselves, and grow. And because, every time I need it, I call Argentina to ask my 100-year-old grandmother to cure my "evil eye". The magic comes from her hand. Another coincidence.
Now I am Eugènia. Half of my life is in Argentina, and the other half is here, in Barcelona. But I don't feel fragmented, but elastic. My symbolic body grows and Profanus is the heart that unites all my singularities, gives them shape, and invites the creation of community. This is my particular story with which to explain a larger phenomenon, even if that discourse ends up defining me too. Like the stories that once passed through the large house in Buenos Aires, which is now a museum.
If you have made it this far, welcome to the magical world of Profanus. The following entries will focus on my research process, on deepening the stories we have chosen to create the Profanus Tarot, on presenting possibilities for analysis and reading of the deck… And perhaps also, who knows, the occasional personal vent, as this introduction was.
I invite you to network. Profanus was born from a personal process, but it will surely grow around a community.
Let's continue creating our story.
