The first time I walked by Old Things for a New Age, there was a turquoise psychiatrist’s couch on the sidewalk. The sign said pretty much the same thing, “turquoise psychiatrist’s couch.” It was a long, seemingly solid block with a few round pieces of metal near the floor – the legs that the thing was resting on. At the head of the couch was a slim cushion – also turquoise – stuck to the couch by means of some stitches hidden under flaps of fabric. Turquoise velour is now like a synonym for the sixties and seventies. Seen from a certain distance – like from the corner where the restaurant the 7 Hills of Istanbul is, or from the enormous Stop-and-Shop parking lot across the street – the psychiatrist’s couch might look like a strange, long trunk rendered more extravagant by the vibrancy of its color in the cold half sun. One’s first thought was that someone could hide inside it, if there was a way in, or behind it, without worrying about being seen. A few days later, I learned that Highland Park has its fair share of psychiatrists and psychologists, well above the average. And so I was able to solve the mystery, and I said to myself that the turquoise couch must have belonged to one of these local practitioners.
Highland Park is an uneven spot in the dense weave of suburbs, roads and highways that covers the territory of the state of New Jersey. One travels in any direction and finds an endless series of malls, residential neighborhoods, cities, towns and intersections of highways and roads. The New Jersey road system is feverish and rash; it brings together a mercantilist past, fierce industrialism, the optimism of the automobile and the age of speedy connections. In driving around, whether on an old – now secondary – road, a high-speed freeway or a major road, not thirty minutes go by before you feel invaded by a vague and mortal sense of uneasiness. The repetition of the same road landscapes, traffic signs, store names, residential complexes gives you a mental sensation of going around the same undifferentiated place and not being able to get out. This constant repetition creates an economy of symbols, and soon things are reduced to mere reflex, a tic in perception that overlooks details and only verifies what doesn’t change. The neighborhoods and towns are in keeping with this logic since they all have the same constructions, the same houses, the same colors, the same gardens and the same trees. Only medium-sized and large cities elude this fate, only to suffer others, of course. Yet, it is easy to find an almost metaphysical beauty in this dense universe. The beauty of excess, of obfuscation and of a lack of inspiration; the beauty of the simulacrum of happiness, of comfort at once constructed and unsatisfied.
I have spent hours in a daze, thinking about the shared yet isolated life lived in these places, where connections are individual and social exchange extremely limited. The promise of this so-regulated life, of these condominiums and shopping centers, is that the world is going to leave their inhabitants in peace, with almost nothing to fear or hope for, for as long as they want. But the cost the inhabitants pay is not alienation (that would be a fairly common bargain). No, the price is redundancy. As a result of so much repetition, one of the few ways to stand out is through detail, sometimes ornamentation, coloring, or fake respect for supposedly natural models. Herein lies the excess, the fate that makes people cave in.
Paradoxically, this excess of uniformity leads to emptiness, or making natural symbols into a secondary language, useful only for translating occasional things, like the signals given off by a domesticated nature. The anecdote about the then future sculptor Tony Smith is well known. One night, he was driving around and he found himself by chance on a new highway, one deserted and still devoid of signs. He got out of his car and took a few steps, moved, to use his approximate words, by the pure sense of volume. Due to the darkness of the night, the pavement was both an invisible surface and the material platform that saved him from emptiness while he beheld the distant lights of other roads and town. I guess that the later aesthetic lesson learned from the event doesn’t matter; I mention it only to show that as early as 1967 the New Jersey landscape led the artistic sensibility to clashing experiences of movement and geographical change (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, given that, as I will later suggest, the constructed is quickly normalized thanks to what it takes from and constantly acknowledges taking from what is called nature).
As in few other places, here one takes notice of the cynical behavior of the human landscape as the consummation of cynical behavior towards the natural landscape. The spaces I am briefly describing are a machinery now independent of the individual feelings of those who live in them; these places propose an endless romance with the surroundings that is, nonetheless, built on fleetingness. One can see the fragility of the constructed as the absolute power of the pre-fab; and just as that neighborhood, say, rises up in the middle of what was recently an industrial farm, tomorrow before noon it could be taken down and, thanks to machines working hard under the sun, leave the land as smooth and flat as it was before it was urbanized. The brutality and decisiveness with which man has changed nature in the United States is well known. This has surprised many Latin American and European writers. It is a drive and enterprise that has inspired admiration and mistrust. But, in a way, that project has been completed, or at least its course seems inevitable and, therefore, today what we see is how it is repositioning nature. Constructions of the rural, of the outdoors, of water life or of the world of the past.
(Such, shall we say, civilizing uniformity also produced an eloquent and ironic reaction somehow related to the experience of Tony Smith. At around the same time, Robert Smithson discovered, or defined, places in his home county of Passaic, also in New Jersey, that he would later frequent for aesthetic contemplation. In a bus coming from New York, he had been reading the newspaper’s art supplement, which was dedicated, in part, to a 19th-century landscape print that he found somewhat imprecise. Smithson reached a bridge over the Passaic River. To one side they were widening the highway, but it was Saturday: no one was working and the construction machines looked like pre- historic artifacts. On the banks of the river, he saw old pipes, water pumps, half-built bridges, pools of detritus, mounds of stone and sand. He classified major and minor monuments, taking photographs of the main ones. The bridge was the most important of all. Due to the effect of the light on the braces and the platform, while crossing the bridge he felt as if he were walking over an enormous steel and wood photograph. That is, the photograph he took was proof of this monumental experience. At a certain moment, the bridge rotated on a central axis and an inert rectangular shape appeared on the water. One end of the bridge rotated south, while the other end rotated north. But Smithson perceived this mechanical rotation as abstract, even astronomical: he saw it as the imperfect, limited movement of an outmoded physical world.
In Smithson’s chronicle, the working of entropy is the basic human undertaking. At the same time, regardless of the impact his story might have had on art in general or on ideas about land art or the work of artists, it is also an ideological exercise in relation to the environment. Insofar as Smithson takes note of static situations devoid of visible human activity, his vision also entails territory’s somewhat inevitable assimilation of the constructed and the ruinous. Abolished as experience of the present and only effective as an event from an outdated world, the time that predominates in those images and in the spirit in that chronicle is something like the supplement to the normalizing economy and its workings, which in New Jersey always takes great pains to beautify and conceal havoc.)
The local principle of concealment means the landscape has a strange tendency to look temporary, variable and yet stubborn. Anything can strike at any moment: a decision, an error, and everything will move backwards and take on a different form. One walks down these roads which, as I have explained, are always trying to look alike – the same angles, the same green grass, etc. – and one believes that the landscape is grimacing: there is something in the land that gives off intriguing and disorganized signs.
This grimace does not lie in deterioration; it would be easy to find it there. The grimace takes shape in camouflage, in effort, in imposition and in simulacrum. To get to Highland Park by train, one must get off in New Brunswick, the legendary city of the river trade. This is the train line that goes through Washington, Philadelphia and New York. The trip to New Brunswick from New York takes less than one hour. The journey is instructive for many reasons. The most important and obvious one, in my view, is that it shows the fact that the organization of the landscape here is the prerogative of the automobile, an extension of its exclusive presence. In leaving the underground train station in New York, before reaching the tunnel that goes under the Hudson River, the train goes through a small, open-air lot surrounded by gray walls, wires and metal pipes. On this large scale, it is something like a small courtyard. Sometimes I wonder about the meaning of that anteroom to New Jersey (or its remains, when one travels in the other direction), as if it were a simple reminder.
When the train comes to the surface on the other side of the river, now in New Jersey, the passengers finds themselves before a scene of abandonment and desolation. There is a cluster of bridges, elevated and surface-level roads, channels, locks and flooded lands, all dirty or covered in swampy undergrowth. This scene expands for a long stretch as the train moves forward; it encompasses a considerable amount of land, sometimes as far as the eye can see. It is the space that surrounds the Secaucus station, a cold and modern construction made from cement and tile that lies in the midst of hopeless decay. Gustavo, an architect from Cordoba who works in a company in the area, has told me that sometimes he gets lost and ends up on some solitary road, surrounded by industrial buildings and abandoned machines. And so he has to retrace his steps, trying to find the way out in the midst of that rusty and indistinct vastness. The travelers on the train ask themselves why this large surface has been forgotten. Gustavo’s answer is that there is no investment capable of recovering the cost of cleaning up these lots and their depths, which will apparently remain in this putrid state until the end of time. That surface is, of course, what sustains New York: it is a very modest slice of nature that had to decay so that the city could reproduce.
The train goes through another transitional area, then Jersey City and Newark, and in twenty more minutes the travelers find themselves in the lands of what are called the suburbs. To the right of these stretches, one can sometimes make out the eternal Route 27, which runs parallel to the train line. Route 27 is one of the oldest; it connects Philadelphia and New York, and some skirmishes in the War for Independence even took place along it.
Now Route 27 is discontinuous; it gets lost and reappears time and again. It has different local names and, mostly, it looks different at different points along its turbulent route. It’s the street on which I saw the psychiatrist’s couch on the sidewalk in front of Old Things For A New Age. At that point, its name is Raritan Avenue. Raritan and Woodbridge Avenue are the two main streets in Highland Park. Woodbridge is another old state highway. Every day at the very heart of this town, just a hundred yards from Old Things For A New Age, and certainly starting long before that shop ever existed, Woodbridge vanishes obliquely into Route 27.
Highland Park has an enviable riverfront. The Raritan River separates it from New Brunswick. On the other side of the river, Raritan Avenue is called Albany Street. A solid and spacious bridge is the transition between the two cities and the two names. As a result of the railway, long ago Raritan lost the commercial influence that it had enjoyed since the 17th century. When its course was altered to join it to the also important Delaware River, giving rise to a major exchange network, its strategic value obviously soared: at the end of the 18th century, New Brunswick was a city of the first order. The most visible remain of that river system is the strange rising and falling of the water level, as if the river were subject to an unfathomable tide. At around noon, the waters are at their lowest; the banks widen and, in the middle of the river, there are small areas of clayey ground. But as evening falls, the tides grow and the river seems about to overflow, covering the banks and bathing the branches of the low trees – some of them weeping willows – nearby.
Almost the entire riverfront is, shall we say, a city park. That’s not true in New Brunswick. Highland Park has just one factory (a chocolate factory) and one real building, the River Ridge Terrace (it is eight stories high, and the locals call it “The Building”); the rest is just family homes, shops and offices. New Brunswick, on the other hand, is the seat of corporations, universities and important, high-tech hospitals. The population used to be very poor. Marian, a Dominican social worker who works at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, remembers how the lands now occupied by the imposing Hyatt Hotel, by the headquarters of Johnson and Johnson, by office buildings, and even by the hospital where she herself works, once contained neighborhoods of poor people who, in the course of a few years in the 1980s, were literally expelled so that their houses could be demolished. That’s how the decline of New Brunswick began. Starting in the late 19th century and well into the 20th, it housed the largest Hungarian settlement in the United States; all that’s left of that community today are occasional churches, Hungarian bank offices or some forgotten restaurant in a basement. But, according to Marian, it was the Mexicans who saved New Brunswick and kept it from turning into a ghost town, housing only services and office buildings.
The New Brunswick train station is on Albany (that is, Route 27), very near the spot where it changes names again, to be called French Street. “French Street” is the main street for the Mexican community. A few blocks from the station, but in the other direction from French, is the river, and across it is Highland Park. On the (fairly long) first block after the bridge there is, every Saturday morning, an anti-war demonstration. The demonstrators carry signs and banners, and put up large pieces of black fabric with the names of those killed in the invasion of Iraq. Though small, the group of pacifists is very persistent. Any time of year there are fifteen or twenty of them, holding their signs out to the drivers coming into Highland Park. Sometimes they get an encouraging honk, to which they respond by raising their fists. On Saturday, June 25, a woman was holding a sign that said “Killing 1 = murder. Killing 100,000 = Foreign policy?”
Raritan Avenue is a strange mix of local highway and Main Street. Here are the post office, restaurants, gas stations, the supermarket and an assortment of strikingly varied small shops (from palm readers to seamstresses, by way of barbers’ shops, diners and auto mechanics). The shops that sell Jewish ornamental or ritual objects stand out. Highland Park is the city in the United States with the largest per capita Jewish population, and it is largely observant. Boris, a Venezuelan journalist and critic, developed a minute knowledge of the shops on Raritan, which he admired greatly. For years nothing that happened in them escaped him. Indeed, he nostalgically told me his memory of a store that sold only stones, many of them with no apparent use.
Although the Avenue is striking due to its standard nature and predictable diversity, inside the stores strange things happen; it is as if they were the discrete (because only semi – public) channels where collective wackiness were manifest. One attraction for the whole city is the Rite Aid, the famous drugstore chain. The Highland Park Rite Aid is more important than the post office, and from early in the morning to midnight there are always customers. The reason for this is that, unlike almost all the other Rite Aids in the country, it sells alcoholic beverages that are top-notch in various respects. For this placid town of houses with yards, Rite Aid’s shelves of vitamins, of things both necessary and useless, of adornments for special occasions and of objects in dubious taste probably offset the customers’ eternal sense of belonging to New Jersey. Boris was an old fan of this store, where he would go to release his occasional eagerness to consume by buying a knickknack, or a twenty-year-old bottle of bourbon when he had something to celebrate.
The 7 Hills of Istanbul is, naturally, a Turkish restaurant. At first glance, the menu is hybrid, something between Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Eastern European (and, like all restaurants of any imaginable cuisine, they serve salmon). The first time I was there, it so happened that Juan Carlos, who is from the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires – Malabia street near Santa Fe – was waiting tables. We were listening carefully as he explained the menu and, at a certain point, he clarified, parenthetically and in Spanish, that a certain dish was “like milanesas.” Besides Tomás (from Tucuman) and Gabriela (from Buenos Aires), both writers, and Silvia, a swimming coach from Cordoba, I had not found any other Argentines in Highland Park. Every day as evening falls, one can see the Mexicans go by on Raritan Avenue. Tired and lost in thought, they ride their bicycles on the sidewalk, alone or in groups of two or three, certainly going back to their homes in New Brunswick. Sometimes, I find myself far from Highland Park, on Route 27 or 514 (which is the aforementioned Woodbridge); even from that distance, I have seen them pedaling unflaggingly homeward, down the narrow sidewalks. In New Jersey, the cyclist is a nobody, and so he must ride on the sidewalks if he hopes to survive. Recreational riders go down tree-lined, deserted streets, which for all intents and purposes go nowhere at all, or take their bikes in their cars to an outlying park.
Like so many other things, the food in Highland Park is somewhat predictable and limited. Chinese, Thai, Middle Eastern, Mexican, steakhouses, diners, Italian, pizza, kosher. If one takes into account neighboring districts like New Brunswick and Edison, the panorama broadens. In recent weeks there has been an important change. The traditional Penny’s Restaurant was at the corner of Raritan and 3rd. It was a typical city diner, with an unchanging menu of burgers, omelets, sandwiches and coffee. By chance, on one of its last days as a diner I was there with Tomás. We made the mistake of arranging to meet there to have a coffee and talk, but they were constantly bringing us menus and asking us if we wanted anything else. Tomás ended up ordering something, though he barely touched it, and I asked for tea, coffee and then tea again. Who knows, maybe our behavior convinced the Italian owner, who was pleasant and severe at the same time, that she should get rid of Penny’s. One walked in and always saw her husband sitting at a table to the side with two or three invariable friends. Now Penny’s is a kosher food restaurant; it has Israeli dishes and I guess some American dishes, but the religious norms are observed.
The other major city center is Donaldson Park. I believe it is the ignored, but de facto heart of the region. It is on the banks of the river, and for years there has been an ever – growing, permanent settlement – a plague – of Canadian geese who used to arrive each year as part of their migratory cycle. Donaldson Park is about eight blocks from Raritan. There are many ways to get to it, but perhaps the most graphic would be to say that from the corner before Old Things For a New Age, that is at 7 Hills of Istanbul if you are heading towards New Brunswick, you have to turn left and keep going straight. That is South 5th street. These are tree-lined blocks whose gentle slopes end at the banks of the river. You go by the fire station and city hall. Of course, the last block is much steeper. Besides its singular and hidden beauty of which I will speak later, the particularity of this park is that, despite its size, it is hard to see it all from the outside. Because, unless you approach it by the river or look at it from the opposite shore in New Brunswick (a wild bank), you can only have a full view of the park when you are inside it. A cluster of trees, a row of houses or the varying heights of the surrounding land block your view from the outside. In broad terms, Donaldson Park is a rectangle resting on the river. To both sides, the park is flanked by clumps of wild vegetation. If you look to the west, you see the Route 27 Bridge; if you look to the east, you see how the river disappears in a fairly wide curve and beyond, if you can make out the laborious course of the river, you see the large Route 1 Bridge that crosses it.
A few weeks ago, on a hot Sunday, June 5, the Highland Park centennial celebrations began. It was a historical fair and it took place in Donaldson Park. When I got there it was coming to an end. Few carriages were crossing the park, most of the stands with games for children were empty, some families were slowly walking away on the uphill streets, etc. The only thing still going strong was the orchestra hired for the celebration, whose music was loud and clear despite everyone’s indifference (except for two people standing by – one of them was me – and another sitting on a chair, his bicycle behind him). We were just a few meters away from the trailer that served as a stage in the middle of one of the largest clearings in the park (it could certainly hold several thousand people). The orchestra playing to the open space was called The Banjo Rascals. Wearing red and white striped vests, one woman and four men played Dixieland jazz and alike. For a newcomer, the contrast between the band’s professionalism and the crowd’s indifference was completely disconcerting, so much so that I could not pay attention to any of the three or four songs that I listened to under the sun.
The first image I had of Donaldson Park was in the winter. One could hardly make out the river since the park was covered in so much snow and white ice. Afterwards, on successive visits, I got to know the park little by little; I saw its broken ground, its neglected land, its somber fixtures worn away by time, the unbelievable number of Canadian-goose droppings scattered about. It was, for me, a true cause for happiness to find something untended to in the good sense of the word, something that had not been conquered by renovation, by the fake copy of nature. To give you an idea, if you walk slowly, it takes about forty-five minutes to go all the way around the park on the longest route (first taking the streets closest to the river and coming back on the ones furthest from it). So it’s not that big. Sometimes I walked through the park with Kathryn, a North American expert in AIDS communication. Together we had walk-talk sessions, never one without the other, so I was able to test how long it took to walk through the park. (On one of our walks, I mentioned to Kathryn the change at Penny’s, since she sometimes plays softball in Donaldson Park with the daughter of the now former owner. Kathryn promised to find out the details, but we never talked about it again.) It goes without saying that cars are allowed to drive through the park (there are even several parking areas in it). There is also an area for dogs, another for children, a picnic area and barbeque grills, which occupy a good stretch of the riverfront; there is a ramp down to the river and a small dock with a tiny security hut. Only once did I see a motorboat, crewed by a man and a boy, on the water. Other than that, the only human activity that I saw on its surface was two rowing teams that came and went every twenty minutes.
When the river rises, the entire ramp can get immersed in water, so part of the street parallel to the bank also floods, and the park’s lake, in whose center there is a hidden fountain that spouts water up in the air, is joined to the river by streams in which small, translucent fish swim. The park also has some basketball and tennis courts, and a softball field; there is a soccer field, but it is more like a multi-use lot. The section furthest from the river, near the streets of Highland Park, slopes slightly or more steeply. When it has snowed enough, you can see children sliding down the slopes on plastic disks. There are basically two noises in Donaldson Park: the honking of the geese, whose settlements occupy different parts of the park depending on the time of day, and the permanent murmur of Route 18, which runs behind the opposite bank of the river, separating the park from New Brunswick. Depending on where, Route 18 is sometimes a highway and sometimes a street. About forty-five minutes to the south, it takes you to the city of Asbury Park, a rundown area that was once a popular beach resort, a Mecca of rockers and motorcycle riders. It’s hard to describe the melancholy beauty of these desolate, semi-destroyed fixtures by the sea. Shells of buildings, access ramps leading nowhere, stores abandoned some time ago with marquees still in good shape... There is a giant theater almost right on the water (the shore is extremely narrow there), whose decaying water decorations and monumentality are reminiscent of solitary hotels on the European and Uruguayan shores. The last time I was there, and it was not long ago, just one of the stores on the beautiful boardwalk that runs by the beach had clean windows and seemed to be in business, although it was closed just then. It was the office of a tarot card reader, Madam Marie, a tiny shop divided by a burgundy velvet curtain, with two wooden chairs in a waiting area.
In a way, the noises heard in Donaldson Park sum up the basic noises of this country: the sounds of an off-course nature that has been twisted by intention or omission, and the noises of machines, as the unambiguous expression of human work. Sometimes I get chills when I imagine that the noises in Highland Park are like those heard in every last corner of this endless terrain, with almost no room for alteration or surprise. In winter, the neighbors have to clear the snow off the sidewalk. So after a snowstorm, or early the next morning, you start to hear the thundering sound of the snow removal machines crushing the snow and throwing it to the sides like white sand. The neighbors push the machines, and in their wake they leave an open path about 50 centimeters wide. Most houses have a dazzling array of machines to deal with the seasons. In fall, you hear the leaf vacuums that voraciously suck up anything in their paths and toss it into the enormous, thick canvas sacks attached to them; in summer, there are lawnmowers, chainsaws, the blowers, automatic hedge clippers, home tractors, etc. In my experience, these noises tend to spread on their own. I have had the experience of hearing a machine in the distance and noticed how, little by little, the symphony of lawn machines spreads, as if each one woke up when it heard the noise of another one close-by. Where I was living, if a neighbor turned on a machine, you could be sure that as soon as she or he turned it off, the next one would start up. It made me dizzy to think that that trail of noise spread every day in the same, uniform way, from the east coast to deep within the continent and beyond, depending on the time and the power of each machine’s call. And, on the other hand, I felt an ineffable peace when, on rare occasions, I heard the sound of direct human work: a snow shovel scrapping the ground, a broom sweeping, a hammer pounding, or hand clippers cutting. Once we were at the Siete Colinas, as we call the 7 Hills of Istanbul, and we tested out how every seven minutes on the dot for a period of an hour and a half, some sort of siren came down Raritan. But it must have been for even longer than that, because we only started to measure when we had begun to sense the regular pace. Six minutes after the last ambulance, police car or fire engine went by, one could hear in the distance the excruciating approach of the next emergency. This made me think that this family of noises also had its own call.
I have saved for last the only nighttime situation that I want to mention: the airplanes that go over Donaldson Park. If you are in the park on a clear night, you can see a strange line to the east, heading towards the Newark airport, which is about 35 kilometers to the north. It looks like a concert of floating lights, unsure in their twinkling, each one with its own degree of sharpness and height as they silently stay in the same relative positions. Every so often you can just barely make out a new plane joining the end of the line, while the one in first place has disappeared on its way to the airport. At this hour, the murmuring of Route 18 has reached a minimum, and you can only hear the involuntary and stifled noises or forced breathing of the geese. This is when an additional nature, one that usually goes unnoticed in Donaldson Park, can be felt. It is like a murmuring space, a space of watchful shadows and expectant bodies, of still waters brought together only to serve as a stage for this mechanical version of moving, artificial stars, small clusters of life that bring to the surface the ambiguous sense of vastness.
It might seem like a strange thought, but at these moments in Donaldson Park I often think that the human labor of producing a constructed world and separating it from nature is refuted by perception. The ordered, downward moving row of planes against the sky look like the lit up cars of a vast and almost unmoving funicular system. We know that each one is a ravenous machine, but against the night sky, somehow alone, defying gravity in the midst of that enormous number of stars, each one looks like a life capsule that acts, unsure and exposed, as if it were the last. I don’t know why, on the first warm night last spring, those planes looked, to me, more natural than the fireflies flying just over the ground. As I said, the murmuring of Route 18 was almost unheard, just a remnant, a residue stuck to things after so much activity. I also thought that the clumps of darkness formed by the trees were another sort of object, that is, that they meant something more than just the signal of themselves at the edges of the park and along some of its streets. But, of course, I didn’t know what they meant. When I remember that, it – like all controlled life – seems like endless toil with no certain outcome.
Sergio Chejfec is an Argentine writer of narrative and essays who lives in New York City. He teaches at NYU in the Creative Writing in Spanish MFA Program. He has published several books, including novels, essays, and short stories. Some of them have been translated Into English: Notes toward a Pamphlet, Ugly Duckling Presse, New York, 2020; The Incompletes, Open Letter, Rochester, 2019; Baroni, A Journey, Almost Island, New Delhi, 2017; The Dark, Open Letter, 2013; The Planets, 2012; My Two Worlds, Open Letter, 2011.
Jane Brodie is a visual artist and translator specialising in the visual arts. She moved to Buenos Aires after graduating from college in 1990. It was not until she had lived in that city for almost fifteen years that she understood what kept her there: the combination of elegance and decay so particular to that city. That combination is also, to a large extent, what her art investigates. Her translation clients include Art Forum, Malba, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Hammer Museum, and other institutions, publications, and individuals (mostly artists and critics) based in the Americas.