Fernando Traverso was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1951. He was interested in art as a boy and eventually enrolled at the city’s Provincial School of Visual Arts. But after just two years as an art student, he joined the popular resistance against the Argentine military dictatorship of the early 1970s. He lost many of his close friends during the conflict. Most were students and none could afford cars, so the most common sign that someone had been quietly killed or abducted was the sight of their bicycle, chained for days and weeks in the place where they had last left it. The memory haunted Traverso, catching like a fishbone in the throat.
Many years later, when he had at last fulfilled his ambition to become an artist, he decided to put the image of an abandoned bicycle at the centre of his work. At first he simply leaned a real bike against the wall as part of a display or installation. Then he decided to paint its image, like a ghost, on to the houses and shopfronts of the city where his friends had vanished in the first place. “Perhaps it was because I started to see the holes in all the corners of my city that I desired to fill them … So it was that 350 images of abandoned bicycles began to populate the walls of Rosario in memory of those events. I did the first one, I recall, in the early hours of the morning of 24 March 2001 and the last one three years later, on 13 April 2004. The city became a museum of memories…”
350, Urban Intervention, Rosario, is Traverso’s photographic record of his own work. He painted his simple, stencil-like depictions of bicycles on the city walls at...
