LEVY’S CRASHES Patricia Gola
One possible way of evaluating the blows one suffers in one’s life might be to document each of the accidents that take place on a daily basis—some of them spectacular, some not, involving major or minor losses, injuries or mere scratches. On a day like any other, when one least expects it, the brakes fail, and the brand-new car, the taxicab, the truck, the bus or even the ambulance—meant to provide help in these cases—runs into some unavoidable hazard. Whether it is in a posh Buenos Aires neighborhood or at some random crossroads, on the main drag downtown or out in the middle of nowhere, in the black of night or in the bright glare of midday, an accident is waiting to happen. After the physical impact, after the screams of pain and the bloody wounds or bruises, what we are dealing with here is also the simple observation of an event. If something grabs our attention while we flip through the pages of this book it is the utter lack of blood that we might expect to see at accidents. Employing a square format (as unchanging and systematic as the document he sets out to make), and although he shoots in color (a choice that undoubtedly clashes with the anonymous character of this type of record), Diego Levy performs an examination or “survey” of an event that upsets the daily sequence of our lives. The author of Choques (Crashes) leaves us alone, completely alone, before the picture of an object that, de facto and by contagion, becomes twice as solitary and silent. Subsequent to the uncontrolled beating of the heart and the unstoppable gush of blood, there lies the lifeless, imperturbable heap of twisted metal. Levy shows us the world literally upside-down, reality subverted. A disorder imbues the precarious order of things.