The Studio d’Enregistrement, assembled on July 12 at TECNÓPOLIS, marks the initial phase of Project Boltanski Buenos Aires, and is designed to expand the artist’s records of human heartbeats for his Archives du Coeur piece. This work-in-progress is intended to be in a state of perpetual growth. The Archives du Coeur are a world reservoir of the heartbeats of people from different geographies, ages, and social and cultural conditions, and they are stored in an ad-hoc space in an island in Japan. There, year after year, Boltanski adds a plethora of records taken from the various venues where his Studio d’Enregistrement has been installed. The two countries where this installation has been assembled so far are France and Japan. Today Buenos Aires – specifically TECNÓPOLIS followed by MUNTREF – has become the new venue for this endeavor, which marks the first stage of Project Boltanski Buenos Aires.

As a large audience is expected, Boltanski has planned a Studio including a waiting room and a cubicle fitted with a device that will serve to record the volunteers’ heartbeats, which will then be saved to the Archives du Coeur in Japan. For Buenos Aires, Boltanski has added a complimentary CD that donors will receive bearing a picture identifying the piece and a sound file of their own heartbeats.

The idea of Boltanski’s project is to store heartbeats as the indicative, initial and final footprint of each individual’s existence. Heartbeats are symbols of both the uniqueness of each individual and his/her similarities to his/her fellow human beings. Through this effort, the artist lays an emphasis on the human condition from the basic standpoint of life itself, regardless of cultural or social differences.

Here again, Boltanski revisits the memory-archive association, and takes on the challenge of constructing a memory of mankind through the sum of the heartbeats of all human beings.